This post highlights the techniques I put together in my gentle sleep training at 10 months plan for babies who still aren’t sleeping through the night!
The amount of differing opinions around baby sleep and how to approach it is absolute astounding. When I became a mom, I knew that advice would be coming from a hundred different doors, but I didn’t expect the vast polarization of that advice.
To be a mom is to be judged. Every single mom is going to have different ideas of what healthy sleep looks like, what qualifies as unhealthy attachment, and everything else under the sun.
Baby sleep seems to be the topic that comes up most often, though. This makes sense because the lack of sleep, in my experience, has truly been the HARDEST part of motherhood. I know a lot of other moms would share this feeling.
When your baby isn’t a good sleeper, it CONSUMES your life. Every moment of the day is spent thinking about wake windows, nap schedules, bed times, and bedtime routines.
Since day one, my son has been a terrible sleeper. When I say it has affected every area of my life, I truly mean every single area!
Here’s a look into what my son’s sleep typically looked like:
A Look Into My 10 Month Old’s Sleep Patterns
- Waking up an average of 3-4 times a night (if not more!)
- Needing to be nursed to sleep at bedtime and each wake up
- Refusing to sleep in crib after around 3 AM
- Co-Sleeping for the second half of the night EVERY NIGHT
- Only napping longer than 30 minutes if contact napping
- Never falling asleep on his own without significant crying and screaming
- Never being able to “self soothe” back to sleep throughout the night
- Fighting naps until we resorted to car rides
Does any of this sound familiar to you? If so, then I’m sorry. We both were cursed with a bad sleeper.
I haven’t received a full 8 hours of sleep since the day he was born. So it has been almost a year of severe sleep deprivation.
Truly, I was at my wit’s end.
We found absolutely no success in improving his sleep until I decided to ditch all of the methods and books, and roll with what was already working and not working for my son.
Coming up with my own game plan for how to approach gentle sleep training at 10 months is what ultimately made a difference.
I’ll get into this game plan and go through it step by step, but before I do that I want to break down all of the ways I attempted to fix his sleep before this.
Related to Gentle Sleep Training at 10 Months:
Techniques I Applied Since Day 1 (That Ultimately Didn’t Make a Difference)
Before having my son, I was convinced that I was going to absolutely nail his sleep. I had watched all the tiktoks, read all the blog posts, and heard all the advice. From day one, I was convinced that I was going to have a great sleeper on my hands and not be in the position of needing gentle sleep training at 10 MONTHS OLD!
But like everything else with pregnancy and motherhood, NOTHING went according to plan. Let’s talk about the plans I had made pre-birth and how I eventually ended up executing them.
1. Wake Windows and Nap Schedules
Source: Taking Cara Babies
When my son arrived, I had a multitude of wake window charts and nap schedules saved to my phone that I referred to constantly.
I stuck to them religiously from the first day which ended up not improving his nighttime sleep at all, but definitely harming my day to day experience as a mom.
The amount of stress I put on myself to always have the perfect wake windows was ridiculous. Not only that, but I would get frustrated with my son when he wouldn’t nap as long as these schedules predicted! That sounds ridiculous, I know, but when you’re trying to follow an exact schedule (I highly DON’T recommend this for a newborn) any wrench in the plan feels monumental.
I feel I was robbed of so much joy in the early days by trying to stick to (and trying to get my son to stick to) rigid nap schedules and wake windows.
2. Laying Baby Down “Drowsy but Awake”
“Drowsy but awake” is a buzzword in the baby sleep discussions of today. It means as it sounds, you’re supposed to lay baby down for a nap or for bed while they’re still awake but close to sleep. The idea is that they’re so tired that sleep is inevitable, but awake enough that they’re learning to put themselves to sleep on their own.
In the newborn days, I thought I was nailing this one. For every nap I was laying him down drowsy but awake. Little did I know that newborns are essentially always drowsy and can fall asleep with hardly any assistance.
The moment my son was one month, this technique went out the window. The startle reflex ruined any plans of setting him down without him fully awakening and screaming to be held once more.
On the RARE occasion this technique still worked, his naps would never last longer than 30 minutes.
I don’t remember when it happened, but gradually we contact napped more and more to avoid short naps until every nap was a contact nap.
3. A Consistent 30 Minute Bed Time Routine
TikTok really had me fooled with this one. I watched SO many videos of new moms promising that their incredibly consistent bed time routines were the reason they had 3 month olds sleeping 12 hour stretches.
Now I’m not going to claim whether they were being absolutely truthful or not about their magical sleep babies, but all I know is, I followed their routines to a T and never had the same results.
My bedtime routine with my son has gone in this exact order every single night since he was 1 month old.
- Begin routine 30 minutes before bedtime
- Remove diaper and day clothes, then wrap in a towel to bring to bath
- A nice warm bath, only using soap every other day or so
- After bath bring to nursery with lights low and sound machine already on
- Lotion and massage before putting on fresh diaper and jammies
- Read a book together
- Sing a lullaby while rocking
Though I love this routine and still stick to it religiously amidst gentle sleep training at 10 months, I do not believe it has made a positive impact on my son’s sleep.
4. Cry It Out
YEP. We even tried cry it out. And before anyone says that we just didn’t do it correctly, I followed the guide in the book Precious Little Sleep word for word and for a whole month.
We started at 4 months and were incredibly consistent with avoiding bottle or nursing for 30 minutes before bed. Every night I would set him down after our routine in his crib totally awake, and every night he would cry for at least 15 minutes, but usually closer to 30 minutes.
The whole month, there were only two times he ever fell asleep without crying. Lord knows what was different about those nights, but it never happened again that way.
After reading everything about sleep training and how the crying is supposed to subside after a week and it’s supposed to improve the middle of the night wake-ups (cry it out NEVER stopped his middle of night wake ups, even the two times he put himself to sleep without crying), I was so discouraged that this wasn’t working for us.
After a month of listening to my son cry every night, and not seeing improvements with his night sleep anyway, I decided this was absolutely not the right path for us to continue down. I would have to find a form of GENTLE sleep training at 10 months.
5. Nurse Before Sleep, but Laying Down Awake
This method worked pretty well for us for a solid two months. After giving up on cry it out, I decided to return to nursing before bed, but I would always lay him down awake.
He would still wiggle around and move for about 15 minutes, but he got very good at putting himself to sleep alone in his crib.
During this time his night wakings decreased to once or twice a night, and even when he did wake up, he was incredibly easy to get back to sleep.
This stage felt like a DREAM. 1-2 night wakings may not sound ideal to most, but after 6 months of 4-5 night wakings and struggling for 45 minutes to an hour to get him back to sleep after said wakings, this truly was a breath of fresh air.
I felt like I had finally cracked a code or really figured something out until…
HE STARTED STANDING.
On my 27th birthday, and the day he turned 8 months, he started standing in his crib. He seemingly lost all ability to put himself back to sleep and would jump and scream and cry because he could not lay back down.
Even once he learned how to lay back down after a couple weeks, he WOULD NOT.
Happy birthday to me.
So we struggled from months 8 to 10 while this continued and he lost all ability to put himself to sleep. In this time he became very sick twice which only made the sleep worse. By the time he was 9.5 months old, he was back to waking up 4-5 times a night, and it was so hard and took so long to get him back into his crib after those wake ups.
I considered trying cry it out again so many times, but just couldn’t stand the thought of putting our family through that once more when it didn’t even work as promised the first time.
But I absolutely could not live like this for even another week, so I decided to throw out all the advice I had read and received, and make a plan that I thought would best suit me and my baby. This is when I came up with my gentle sleep training at 10 months plan.
My Gentle Sleep Training Approach
I want to start with a disclaimer because I am by no means an infant sleep specialist. The only expertise I have on the topic comes from the list of trial and error mentioned above. If I was a sleep specialist, I probably wouldn’t be struggling this much in the first place.
In putting together my gentle sleep training at 10 months plan, I outlined the goals I had for myself and my son.
Goals for Gentle Sleep Training at 10 Months
- Wean from all night feedings
- Be able to place baby in crib awake at beginning of the sleep period
- Minimize night wake ups
- Removed the need to co-sleep for the second half of the night
After just one week of applying my own gentle sleep training techniques, we have achieved 3/4 of these goals! We still co-sleep for a bit in the early mornings most days, but it has decreased a TON. I’m excited to see how this continues to improve.
So what were the steps I took to achieving these results?
1. Nudge the Feeding Back a Slot Every Night
Like I mentioned earlier, my son and I have always had a pretty consistent 30 minute bedtime routine with multiple steps that go in the same order.
For most of his life (except when we were trying cry it out), I would end this routine with nursing my son to sleep. I knew this had created a sleep dependency for him because even at 10 months when he had no nutritional need for night feedings, he was still waking and demanding them.
So in order to achieve the goal of removing nursing as a sleep crutch, I knew I couldn’t do it right before sleep. I also knew that it wouldn’t end without tears if I took nursing out of the routine cold turkey.
My plan was to slowly nudge nursing back a slot in the routine every night until it was happening at the beginning of the routine. If you’re bottle feeding and your baby has the same dependency on the bottle, then just replace the word nurse with bottle in the schedule below.
Beginning of the Night Gentle Weaning Schedule
Night 1: Bath, Lotion/Massage, Jammies, Book, Nurse, Lullaby and rock, Place in crib.
Night 2: Bath, Lotion/Massage, Jammies, Nurse, Book, Lullaby and rock, Place in crib.
Night 3: Bath, Lotion/Massage, Nurse, Jammies, Book, Lullaby and rock, Place in crib.
Night 4: Bath, Nurse, Lotion/Massage, Jammies, Book, Lullaby and rock, Place in crib.
Night 5: Nurse, Bath, Lotion/Massage, Jammies, Book, Lullaby and rock, Place in crib.
Now this looks simple on paper, but my son did not always easily comply with this new schedule. For the first three nights or so when I was attempting to sing and rock him before bed, he was trying VERY hard to nurse. He definitely was getting frustrated, but I held strong and told myself that this was still better than hearing him cry every night.
I found when he was waking up in the night, he was already demanding to nurse less. If I was able to get him back to sleep just by rocking him or snuggling, I wouldn’t even try to nurse.
If he was crying and refusing to sleep without nursing, I would let him, but only for a very short time before replacing with a pacifier. This normally would still do the trick of getting him back to sleep.
2. Shorten Lullaby and Rock Time Each Night
This was less of an exact science, but the goal was to eventually be able to lay him down awake and have him put himself to sleep.
I would sing a lullaby and rock/bounce him until he was almost asleep, then lay him down. Once he put himself to sleep once, I would shorten the time singing and bouncing him each night. It looked a bit like this:
Schedule to Remove Rocking/Bouncing Dependency
Night 1: Sing as many lullabies and bounce for as long as it takes for him to get drowsy and place in crib.
Night 2: Limit to 4 minutes of lullabies and bouncing before placing in crib.
Night 3: Limit to 3 minutes of lullabies and bouncing before crib.
Night 4: Limit to 2 minutes.
Night 5: One lullaby and place in crib awake.
Now obviously you can follow this pattern until you remove singing and bouncing entirely, but I quite enjoy a quick song and snuggle before bed so it wasn’t my goal to remove it, just shorten it.
These days, he knows the moment I start singing to him that bedtime is right around the corner. He gets instantly drowsy and has stopped fighting being put down, stopped motioning to nurse, and puts himself to sleep in his crib without standing or crying.
3. Cease Co-Sleeping in Early Morning
As I mentioned earlier, this is the one goal of the four I set for this plan that we haven’t quite met yet. My son will still wake up around 3 in the morning and become very tricky to place back in his crib.
I think achieving this goal will take a little extra will power from me. At the moment, he wakes up and is fighting being put back in his crib by being asleep as I hold him, then waking up the moment I set him down and crying.
Because it’s usually around 3 in the morning and my will is at its weakest, I tend to just give in to cosleeping just so I can go back to bed. I know, though, that if I continue to allow this to happen, then the habit will not go away for many months if not years to come.
Simply put, I will have to be more stern and consistent about not letting him join us in bed, but fighting the sleep fight every night to get him back in his crib until morning, as many times as this takes.
I look forward to writing an 11 month update for you all to hopefully say that all of our sleep goals have been achieved with this gentle sleep training in method.
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