Any sleep-training that doesn’t begin with teaching the baby to self-soothe is bound to be a lot of work for the parents. If you perform this task for your child then you will inevitably end up repeating it whenever they stir during their sleep time. Babies can learn structure and routine and follow predictable sleep/wake patterns if they’re taught to, and they are capable of soothing themselves. So long as you’ve taken care of all their other physical needs (fed, dry diaper, secure swaddle if they’re still in that stage) then any intrusion into their sleep time teaches your child that you will come in and be with them if they stir. Even infants will pick up on this very simple cause/effect relationship and abuse it to their advantage. I have adopted 4 special needs kids, and my wife (who knows much more than I do on the subject) has successfully managed to have them all sleeping soundly relatively early, often through the night after 3 months, and never in our bed.
This approach does require some patience and letting the child “cry it out”, but this is how they learn to be the master of their own sleep.
self-soothing FTW. Although, funny story: sleep training went great with our first kid - maybe one hour of "cry it out" and then everything was fine for the rest of the night and all following nights. So when the second one came along, and we had managed to forget everything about the care of newborns because we formed few permanent memories during the haze of sleep deprivation, we thought to let him cry it out _on the very first night home_. Literally a 3 day old baby. Fortunately when we came fully awake we stopped mumbling "cry it out" to each other and remembered, right, newborns need food in the middle of the night. For months. "Cry it out" has to wait a bit...
It does, but you can still establish “this is night” and feed the baby in a very low-stimulus (dark, no talking, keep them swaddled, etc.) environment for those night feeds. That “dream-feed” is basically just eating, checking the diaper and putting them back down for the next 4 hours. Obviously if they cry for more than 15 minutes or so you go check on them (e.g. make sure the diaper is still dry), but by keeping the intervention to a bare minimum you keep them in a state of more or less teaching themselves to do the actual sleeping part :)
Oops, I meant "Cry it out" *had* to wait a bit. He's nine now =)
Sadly his night feeds went somewhat long because he was a reluctant burper, and that big burp was definitely necessary for him to fall back asleep. I read most of "Quantum Computing Since Democritus" during those night feeds (on a very-low-light-setting kindle, in a dark room, etc). There are probably more conducive environments for reading that book...
This approach does require some patience and letting the child “cry it out”, but this is how they learn to be the master of their own sleep.