11 Month Old Waking up Often

Crying it out is almost never a good option. It is harsh & cruel. What I did when I knew that she was old enough that she didn't need milk that often was to offer water. At first she will get mad & try to throw the bottle back, but if you consistently offer it then she will begin to take it. After a few days she will no longer wake up as often. I did this with both of my youngest daughters & it worked!

Wait for the weekend and then let your husband respond to her when she cries in the night. Anytime you respond she is going to request to nurse since she knows that is the most soothing thing to her. My kids were much more responsive to daddy just reassuring them at nighttime (patting their backs, making a hushing sound) than me. If I went in to comfort, they pretty much demanded to be picked up and then to nurse, but if daddy went in, they settled down much quicker. We used this tactic to break nighttime nursing with my son and it only took a couple of nights for him to stop waking. If she isn't getting what she wants when she wakes, she will stop waking up since there is no "reward" for waking up. Good luck. You just need to resist the urge to go in and "rescue" her. If you do that, you will have to start all over. There may be a few tears (yours included) but if you stay strong and don't give in you can break this habit and get back to sleeping well.

Your baby is totally normal! What she's doing doesn't fall under the definition of a "sleep problem" at all, even though it's tough on you. The surveys about sleep at http://www.kellymom.com say that only about 50% of normal infants at one year sleep through.
Our culture puts painfully difficult, unrealistic expectations on us!

http://www.kellymom.com/parenting/sleep/sleep.html

Research shows that the central nervous system naturally matures enough for baby to get to sleep and back to sleep after waking, without a parent's help, at the age of around two years. See "The Sleep Patterns of Normal Children", Armstrong KL, Quinn RA & Dadds MR. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retriev...
Medical Journal of Australia 1994 Aug 1;161(3):202-6.
“It is not until after 24 months that regular night waking (requiring attention) becomes much less common.”

Why on earth do they wake up so much, why doesn't the nervous system mature earlier so they (and we) can get some decent sleep? James McKenna at the University of Notre Dame's Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory has been studying infant sleep for many years.http://www.nd.edu/~jmckenn1/lab/ He has found that it is completely normal for babies to wake easily and frequently. It is probably a protective mechanism designed to help the baby wake and alert for help for the simple reason that for the tiniest things, a baby cannot help himself and can get into a bad situation quickly. If they were deep, long sleepers, they'd be unable to rouse and alert for help.

His reasearch has found that sleeping near your baby can help the little one regulate their breathing, temperature and sleep - all the systems that are still maturing seem to respond to close contact with mom during the night by becoming more stable. So babies are hard-wired, in a way, to request mom's close and frequent contact at night, as a deeply instinctive mechanism that developed to help increase a newborn's chances of survival.

It is appropriate to respond to her cries for you when she needs help. She cannot tell you any other way if she is hungry, cold, has a cramp, a tummy ache, growing pains etc. If you do use CIO, none of those things will go away. She will just have learned to not bother asking for help because it won't come. Katherine Dettwyler, an anthropologist who studies infants, has a great article that explains some of the needs of human babies. http://www.kathydettwyler.org/detsleepthrough.html

As if that's not enough, the Australian Association for Infant Mental Health has a position paper on the CIO method that explains exactly why it isn't good for babies:
http://www.aaimhi.org/documents/position%20papers/control...

another helpful article about sleeping through the night:
http://www.drjen4kids.com/soap%20box/sleep%20stuff.htm

and for what it's worth, she may truly be hungry. I wake hungry in the night all the time, so I know it is even more likely for a baby.

I have to say we did the same thing as Teresa recommended. We just started sending daddy in at night. Although we didn't wait for a weekend. I figured I had been getting up for months at that point and he could jolly well get up a few nights to help break the habit! :0) Anyway it worked like a charm, when she made the milk sign daddy just said 'daddy doesn't have milk silly goose!' and after about 3 nights she was back to sleeping all night.

Good luck!

Hi M.,

My son is now almost 18 months old, but was similar. He never slept through the night and when he woke up I would feed him back to sleep. Unfortunately (and I realize this is not encouraging news) he did not sleep through the night until I stopped breastfeeding a couple of months ago and then like magic, within a couple of days he started sleeping straight through. I think once he wasn't getting the milky cuddle, waking up was just less appealing.

All this said, I would never recommend stopping breastfeeding before you're both ready. What I can recommend is something I read, unfortunately only about 2 weeks before I decided to wean my son.

The issue may be that she is waking up genuinely hungry. Don't let people tell you that after a certain age they don't need night time feeding, because if she is eating every 3 hours throughout the night, she will be getting a good number of her daily calories during those feeds, making her less hungry during the day and therefore not eating the amount of solids she needs, which could ultimately sustain her through the night.

The advice I was given was to make the nighttime feeds as short as possible. Take her off the breast as soon as she's finished. If she will take a bottle, maybe offer her some water or well diluted juice at one of the night feeds. I found that my son would take a bottle better from my husband.

The other thing is to fill her full of as many solid calories as possible during the day. That means: no juice or milk, only water and only a small amount at the end of the meal so that she doesn't fill up on it. The exception to this is if you can get her to take some well diluted juice rather than milk at her afternoon feed that would be great. That way she will be hungrier and eat more solids at dinner and hopefully that will sustain her better through the night. Also, and I'm sure you do this, but make sure that the food she is eating is hearty: meat, pulses, potatoes, fruit and veg. Absolutely no empty calories: cookies, etc

I got all of this information from Gina Ford's 'Contented Little Sleep Guide' if you want to read it from the horses mouth.

Take care and good luck, D.

She is just waking up out of habit(nursing and rocking). You have to be willing to give these things up or she will not be a good sleeper. I agree that she does need to learn to put herself back to sleep and she will not be a good sleeper until she knows how. It is really late to start setting habits because it will be a lot harder, but not impossible. She is at the age where she knows what is going on and she knows that crying will get a response from mom. The only thing that I think will work is the CIO method, but it may take a week for your daughter to realize she is not going to get her way (nursing or rocking). She will probably cry and scream her head off, which sounds horrible I know, but she will eventually fall asleep without any help from you. You can still check on her at certain intervals, but don't pick her up. You can go in an rub her back and tell her it's night night. This will work if you are consistent and can handle the crying.

Hi M.!

One of my kids was a great sleeper, and other was not and needed to be rocked more. The rocking can get VERY routine, and needed when they are 2-3 years old sometimes, so if you don't want to get in "any deeper" with rocking, it might be worth a few tears to break the habit now. I chose to rock (just so you know), and it made mt life eaiser. My "problem sleeper" is now 5 almost 6, in 1st grade, and puts himself to sleep, although he still sneaks in bed with me 3-4 nights a week. I figure that went with the habit of "rocking", so we're now working on that :o) Anyway, that's my rocking experience to hopefully help you make a good decision for what may work best for you and your daughter :o)

The nursing is a whole other situation, and you've already received great adivce on that!

:o) N.

I know alot of women nurse past one year. But I had the same experience with my youngest son at about 11 or 12 months, wanting to nurse every two hours. On the one hand, I hear this is normal, that they go through this sometimes. But in my case, I was working full time then, exhausted by this "newborn" sleep schedule at 11months, and decided to stop nursing. My son weaned very easily and we were all sleeping a lot better.

Hi M.,

We were in the exact same situation (and still are to some degree!) I have always nursed & rocked my son, now 15 months, to sleep, and he's been teething on and off for the last few months and it causes him to wake a lot. He also signs milk if I try to go in there and not nurse him. For us the only thing that works is to have my husband be the one to go and rock him back to sleep. This resulted in lots of crying the first few times but now he knows that if daddy comes in when he wakes at night, he's not getting milk so he goes right back to sleep. We're still in the process of getting him to sleep longer, but so far it seems that he sleeps better the next night after a "daddy duty" night. We only do it on weekend nights, and when I know our son isn't in lots of teething pain. I'd give it a try if your husband is up for it! As a nice side bonus, it has really helped them bond. Good luck!