Ferber plateau after one week

We are sleep training using Ferber/gradual CIO. First night 3 hours before falling asleep. Second night 1.5 hours. Then 20 minutes. Then its been about 30 for the last four nights. The daytime naps are improving with little crying (well Ted yesterday put up a fight).

We go in after the amount of time (27 minutes last night), tell them they are ok, that we love them, that they should go to sleep. Rub their tummies. Try a paci but theyre not into it.

Anyone go through this?

(Please dont post articles that CIO/ferber is harming our children. Its not helpful.)

 

The only thing I can think to try is extinction CIO where you don't go in at all. Since you have them down to 30 min. We always just did extinction since I found it resulted in less crying overall, although either method works. If that doesn't sound good, give it a few more days with Ferber and see if it clicks.

 

We are going thru this right now too - I had them napping wonderfully (they fall asleep BF'ing at night, so most nights we don't need to CIO) but the past couple weeks they've cried alot more than 5-10 minutes at nap time.

Have you tried putting them down earlier - like before they are tired? I tried that this morning and they are now at 1.5 hours of sleep and counting. For the past couple weeks we've been putting them down at 10:30 but today I put them down at 10:15.

Good luck

 

I agree with Rachael.. I would try extinction. We tried to go in at regular intervals but found that our kids were persistent enough to know that no matter how long they cried we were going to come in and get them eventually. So we sucked it up and stopped going in. The first night they carried on forever and the second night maybe 1/2 hr, then it was down to nothing within a week or two. It's painful, but for us there was just no other way.

 

We did extinction CIO at about 5 months, and we also plateaued at about 15-30 minutes of crying each night. And, this may not be what you want to hear, but it pretty much stayed there until they were toddlers.

They weren't wailing hysterically, but they just seemed to need to fuss while they settled down. If we tried to rock them till they were really on the brink of sleep, they would just be too stimulated. And every time we went in to soothe, it got them all wide-awake again. So we had to just do the routine and walk away.

But the fussing got a lot easier to bear (for us, at least -- I don't know how they felt about it) once it was predictable. We just knew that in half an hour at the most, they'd be out cold for the duration. (And if they cried longer than that, we knew they were teething or sick or something, and adjusted our response accordingly.)