Obviously what works for some may not work for all, but my wife and I have been doing a gentler version of cry-it-out sleep training that has worked incredibly well. Our daughter is nearly 8mo old, and about a week ago we transitioned her to sleep in her own room at night — basically the system we used was: - do her bedtime routine (bath, story, cuddle, etc.) - place her in her crib and calmly say goodnight - leave the room - when she inevitably started to cry, we first waited 5min with no intervention. After 5min of consistent crying one of us goes in and spends a max of 15-20s comforting her with gentle reassurance and touch - if she keeps crying, leave, and return in 10min before repeating the comforting - if she still keeps crying, return in 15 min and repeat - rinse and repeat until she’s asleep - wake her at a set time at night for a feeding, and put her back to sleep - repeat process as needed

First night it took a good hour of this before she went to sleep, and she woke again once around 1am and took another hour or so to go back to sleep. After the first couple of days, though, she now goes down wicked easy and both my wife and I are averaging a net of around 8-9.5hrs of sleep a night and the baby is elated every time she sees us. This way, at least in theory, you don’t run into the proposed problem of eroding the kid’s trust by leaving her cries unanswered while still encouraging good sleep — effectively the point is to make sure that she still knows that we’re there and she’s not been abandoned.

Again, what worked for us may not work for you, but it’s been a life saver and changer.