My daughter was around 8-9 months when we did sleep training. Here's what we did (with a disclaimer that it was a year ago & the sleep deprivation in early motherhood makes me forget), starting around ? 6-7 months:
- I read pretty much EVERY post on the Precious Little Sleep website
- I read The No-Cry Sleep Solution by Elizabeth Pantley
- Nursing her to sleep, and then me putting her in her crib; shushing & patting as required, which sometimes took awhile.
- Nursing her to sleep, and then transferring to Daddy for the crib put-down; shushing and patting as required.
- Nursing until drowsy, then rocking/bouncing to sleep, then crib put-down; shushing & patting as required
- Nursing until drowsy, then Daddy rocking/bounding to sleep, then crib put-down; shushing & patting as required.
AND THEN I LOST PATIENCE FOR THAT.
I found that I didn't have the mental fortitude to do Cry It Out (CIO) in the evenings - I was tried already & couldn't handle the extended efforts to shush, or the crying. So I started during naps instead, and found success pretty quickly. New plan was as follows:
- Nurse, then a few stories in the rocking chair, then baby in crib, fan on, lights out & leave the room (I chose to do "extinction method", rather than "Ferber-izing", which recommends gradually increasing the length of time before you go back into your kid's room). She would cry, not gonna lie, but the first few days would be 15-20 minutes of crying (not screaming, just crying), then 10 minutes, then 5 minutes, and then pretty much napping as soon as I left the room.
- Once she'd gotten the hang of the daytime napping we did the same for bedtime - alternating with both me & my husband reading stories so she wouldn't get "set" with just one parent doing the bedtime routine. Again, the first few nights there was some crying, but she figured it out after a few days & it was AMAZING because we suddenly felt like we had so much more time in the evenings!
It sounds mean, and while I personally wouldn't attempt this with a younger baby, it worked GREAT with our kid. She was old enough that I didn't feel like I was "damaging" her by letting her cry, but young enough that she wasn't really able to "push back" too much.