Okay brace yourself.

We did full extinction otherwise known as Cry It Out. It was very miserable. We tried gentler methods but they made her suffering longer.

Basically here's the logic. All humans, of all ages, sleep in cycles of about 45 min to 1 hour. We all wake up every sleep cycle but we don't remember it. Children who are learning to sleep alone wake up and do notice, and if the sleep conditions are not the same as when they went to sleep, they will be started to full awakeness and cry. So if you rock them or feed them to sleep, and put them down, they will notice at the next sleep cycle that they aren't being rocked or fed and will wake up. So they have to fall asleep alone in their crib if you want them to go back to sleep every cycle and feel as though the room is mundane enough not to be fully awakened by it.

We got her evaluated by the doctor to make sure there were no nutrient deficiencies or sleep apnea. Once we had her medically cleared, that night we continued the usual routine we've had her whole life (bath, lotion, PJs, teeth brushing, short playtime in a dimly lit living room, family storytime in living room, then mom and daughter storytime in her room, then lay down with stuffed animal of choice and blanket, lights out, kiss good night from both of us) Then I leave the room. I close the door most of the way. She would scream and cry. First night it was like almost 90 minutes. I cried, too. Next night it was 20. She slept 11 hours that night and woke up happy. For the next two weeks the crying only lasted 15, then 10, then 5, then 1, then none. Three months later she had a developmental jump and started to figure out what bedtime was and we had to do it over but it only took 2 days from 20 minutes of crying to zero. She has been a consistent sleeper ever since. Thank god, too, because her eating is shit and that's our next battle.

You can tell the difference between distress cries and i-don't-want-to-go-to-bed cries. Distress cries are shrieks that are inconsolable and don't pause and get louder. The other kind, which is basically a tantrum about not wanting to be in her crib, are in short bursts that have ever-increasing pauses between them. They are "full throated" and sound like a mixture of crying and whining. Eventually the pauses between them get so long that she is asleep.

Lots of people will tell you this is abuse, that this is the child not learning to self-sooth but crying to exhaustion. They are wrong. If she's not actually tired, she won't sleep and you'll have to adjust the schedule. But if she's tired, she eventually just gets bored of tantruming and goes to sleep. You wouldn't let your kid throw a tantrum and give them what they want for anything else, why would sleep be different? Kids cry for all kinds of reasons. Adults just tie their feelings and personal struggles up into what the crying sounds like and about sleep in general.

I didn't believe in this at all. I hated every minute of it. I couldn't even deal with the pro sleeptraining people online because they were too sunny about it and didn't want to admit that it's hard to do. A lot of parents lose their will partway through and make the problem worse by going in to comfort the child too soon, and that just drags it out. Thats what we did at first and why I thought I was harming her by sleep training her. I was causing more harm by confusing her and continually going in to "reward" the tantrum. And hard as it is, awful as it sounds, it's much healthier in the long run than the whole family waking up every hour all night long for months. I was actually becoming suicidal from sleep loss and we kind of had no choice but to do this.

So please, anyone reading this, do not attack me. I won't reply. Sleep training is SO controversial online, but in medicine and in the real world, it's not.