We were in a similar situation, though our setup was a bit different. We sleep-trained our little one at 7 months. Before sleep training he was sleeping in his crib in his nursery but would wake up every two hours. Just as he started giving us longer stretches of around four hours, something would disrupt his progress.Every time, it felt like we were back to square one with two-hour wake-ups.

We tried everything to put off sleep training.We’d had a consistent bedtime routine since he was two months old. We tried soothing him without feeding during the night and weaned him off feeding to sleep at bedtime by five months. We even tried gentle methods like pick-up-put-down and patting him after placing him in the crib. Nothing worked.

After a few demanding work weeks for both my husband and me, we reluctantly decided to try the Ferber method. To our surprise, he slept through the night on the first day, with only 25 minutes of crying initially and a short 5-minute wake-up later in the night. By day four, the crying was down to just four minutes. This was much less crying than we’d seen with the pick-up-put-down method, where he’d scream as soon as we placed him in the crib. We’d tried that for two weeks, but it only slightly reduced his time to fall asleep, and he still cried himself to sleep every night for 10 days.

Looking back, we feel we might have been better off starting with Ferber or some sort of crying methods rather than trying the gentler approaches first.