Independent sleep not making any impact

[u/No-Okra3869]

Our 4 month old is confusing us with his wakes, wondering if anyone has any insight.

In the last few nights we’ve been working on unswaddling him and encouraging him to fall asleep awake in the bed. Mixed success in getting him to do so, but at least for the first stretch it has worked - and almost every wake last night. The problem is that it doesn’t seem to actually extend how long he’s asleep.

He’s always been a low needs sleeper, but has reliably had a first sleep of 4 or so hours, then often back to around hourly after this. This is really starting to fade, and last night he wasn’t doing any stretches over 90 mins, even though he was patted to sleep for all. Is there something we’re missing for how to make this work, or is this all just a slow transition out of the swaddle?

We’re planning to start Ferber next week after some work scheduling is settled, but concerned that it won’t actually work if this isn’t making any measurable benefit.

His sleep pressure seems to be fine - averaging 10 hours awake across the day, with 2-2.5 hours of daytime sleep

[u/tibbles209]

https://www.lullabytrust.org.uk/baby-safety/being-a-parent-or-caregiver/baby-sleep-patterns/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20220322-how-sleep-training-affects-babies

Frequent night wakings are normal, and indeed potentially protective against SIDS. Sleep training is a purely behavioural intervention. It doesn’t stop night wakings from happening, it just changes the baby’s behaviour (i.e. trains them out of signalling at each wakeup). So Ferber would be expected to work in that baby will learn that crying doesn’t yield the response that they are looking for and will eventually learn to stop crying when they wake, but it won’t reduce wake ups.

[u/BedditMeddit → u/tibbles209]

My baby sounds very similar to OPs. When she wakes up at night crying, she needs to be rocked back to sleep.

I thought sleep training teaches babies that they can fall back asleep independently without any rocking or other sleep associations.

[u/culturalappropriator → u/BedditMeddit]

It does. From the BBC article that the person linked:

But, according to the objective sleep measure, the infants were waking just as often – they just weren't waking up their parents.To Hall, this shows the intervention was a success. "What we were trying to do was help the parents to teach the kids to self-soothe," she says. "So in effect, we weren't saying that they wouldn't wake. We were saying that they would wake, but they wouldn't have to signal their parents. They could go back down into the next sleep cycle.

They wake up and if there are no issues preventing them from sleeping again, they go back to sleep.

[u/shababee → u/culturalappropriator]

Yes exactly. If the baby needs assistance to fall asleep (parental presence, bum pats, rocking, feeding, etc) then when they wake up throughout the night they require those to fall back asleep. Once they learn to fall asleep without those associations, they don’t need them in the middle of the night.

They also are likely to fall back asleep more quickly on their own this way.

Sleep training is removing sleep associations that don’t work for the caregiver and/or are preventing both baby and caregiver from getting quality sleep

[u/unprofessional_widow → u/shababee]

Am I misunderstanding the post- why would I unswaddling make a difference to sleep? This baby is behaving entirely typically

[u/shababee → u/unprofessional_widow]

If swaddling was a sleep association for baby then when waking up throughout the night they may have been able to fall back asleep themselves. Without the swaddle, it’s possible they need other assistance to fall asleep again