how long was the crying when CIO first used?

1

1stimemum

Registered User
To all mums who have used CIO/ Extinction methods, what was the longest your bubb cried on the 1st night?

I'm about to start CIO in a few weeks and would like to prepare myself mentally. I've tried letting him cry by himself once 2 nights ago and he cried for 1.5hrs and I gave up at that point and rocked him to sleep. I stopped after the 1st night and will try again but this time I need to see it through or else its not fair to him.

Was there any baby that cried for longer than 2 hrs?

My son is 4 mths now and I feel I will have a bigger problem down the road if I dont take action now. He's being carried/ rocked to sleep with a pacifier and yes I will have to go cold turkey with the pacifier as well.

He sleeps well through the night right now from 8ish - 6 but it can be 1 hour/more of holding before he's finally asleep. really settled.
 
we didn't do CIO until our son was around 7 months. We personally felt before 6 months was too early. The longest my son cried for then was about 45 mins to 1 hour before putting himself to sleep. It took about 4-5 days. The 2nd night was 45 minutes and the 3rd night was 30 minutes etc...

We've recently had do use it again with our now 2 yr old in his big bed and he cried for about 1.5 hours before returning to his bed. I was tempted to go in after an hour, but then what's the pt - i would still be perpetuating the cycle. After an hour, what's another half hr? After the first night, he then only cried for 45 minutes, the 3rd night was 20 mins and the 4th night was nothing.
 
i think that 4 months is just too young for crying it out.

i would not use that until 8-10 months, myself.

4 months is still too new.... BUT by 8-10 months, baby understands that just because they can't see you doesn't mean you aren't there. at 4 months they don't understand this concept yet.

the other thing is: once the baby is older, if you decide to do it you MUST stick with it... if you let baby/child cry for 1.5 hrs, then go in and cuddle... you have just successfully taught baby that he just needs to cry LONGER and you will come.
 
While it may be too young to CIO I don't think it is too young to teach your baby to self settle. There are lots of methods to do this that still allow you to comfort your baby without leaving them to cry it out. The key for me was learning to understand my baby's different cries. I never left her to cry if she was crying a really consistent "wet" cry but if it was just a "I don't want to go to sleep" protesting cry then I could leave her and inevitably it never took longer than 15 mins for her to go to sleep.
But I do think you need your baby to be on some kind of routine before trying this so that you know that she is well fed and not overtired. I used Save Our Sleep by Tizzie Hall as a guide, but I didn't follow it to the letter, and it worked for me. My daughter was 10 weeks old when I started and it took two days and not much crying at all to have her self settling.
 
when my second son turned 4 months, i couldn't WAIT to start using CIO to get him to sleep better (with our first son we waited til he was 8 months and it worked well - it only took a few days and i think he only ever cried for an hour at the most). but with #2, once i did let him CIO at about 4 months, i realized that he was too young and i also realized what 'too young to CIO' means. when they are 4 months old , they aren't fully capable of rolling over both ways very easily so when they cry for an hour (or more!), it becomes very uncomfortable for them because their sinuses clog up and they literally get worked up to a point where they cannot breathe - it is really uncomfortable because they are too small to know how to maneuver and arrange themselves in a more comfy way when they cry - they physically can't get into the right positions easily. when they are 6+ months, they become much more mobile and when they CIO it is not as torturous for them. i suddenly realized after watching my then 4 month old cry for over 20 minutes that i had to wait - he was just too young and it was painful for both of us. so i only let him cry for 10 minutes at a time. after each 10 minute interval, i'd cuddle him, calm him down so that he never got to a hysterical stage. that worked for a while but then he relapsed again. so he's still not a great sleeper (he's 5.5 months old now) but i am more and more confident that were i to let him cry cold turkey he'd be much more able to handle it. so if things don't improve in the next month or too i'd probably try CIO cold turkey on the little guy.
 
like the above posters mentioned, we did not do CIO until 8/9 months. at 4 months, we were still figuring out everything and I felt my son wasn't strong enough and like carang mentioned, didn't understand that just b/c you didn't see mommy, doesn't mean she's not there. I definitely would not begin it before 6 months.

it's key that you stick with it for at least 10 days to see any results. Letting your baby cry for an hour, then going in to hold them defeats the purpose of CIO and just leaves you even more tired and drained. you are then left to start from scratch the next day since nothing was accomplished the night before.
 
starebear, he's currently on a rough 4hr feed routine, play and then i try to let him know its naptime by making the room slightly darker, singing calming lullabies cuddle and put him in bed.....doesnt work, he just starts crying and i know it has nothing to do with pain/ hunger/ discomfort.

so i'm stuck lugging all 7kgs of him for 30-90mins...
if I dont start now, will i be re-enforcing the bad habits?

southside, i will definitely have to see it through when i do start again. Yes i know, it was a horrible night for us all.
Have to steel myself for it.

I might push it to 5 mths and start then.
 
do you mean 4 hours awake or 4 hours between feeds? At that age, my daughter would do 2 hours awake and then 2 hours asleep for most the day with a longer awake period (3-7) in the afternoon before a 7pm bedtime. If I had her awake for more than 2 hours it was very hard to get her to self settle as she was overtired by then.
 
i meant 4 hrs between feeds and i try have him take a 1hr morning nap and then an afternoon nap (he catnaps, so maybe 3X 30mins naps if i'm lucky) and one more btw 6-730pm.

But all this needs carrying so i sometimes can spend the whole entire afternoon from 12-4pm carrying him just so that he naps 3 times of maybe 30mins ....
 
I can understand why you are trying CIO then! That just does not sounds sustainable. It also doesn't sound like enough sleep for your baby which is probably why he fights sleep so much. Why don't you try a controlled comforting methods which would at least allow you to be in the room with the baby. Agree with the other posters though that whatever you choose you must be strong and stick to it. Also make sure you have the support of your husband (and helper) as consistency is the key - every one who puts him to bed must follow the same approach.
 
Started at 8 months, 1st night was the longest cry for 20+ minutes. Routine all in place now.

1sttimemum. Your sleeping routine sounds right and your baby is sleeping well from 8.30 - 6 so i won't be too worried. My guess is that one of the reasons your extinction method did not work well could be because when you put him down to sleep, he was not tired as he just woke up not too long ago from his evening nap at 7.30pm. You should have ~3 hr gap between last nap and sleeping time.

It's very impt to manage the time between last nap and sleeping time. When we started the sleep training, we were advised to have a slightly 'later' sleeping time to take advantage of the fact that the baby was actually tired when we put her to sleep. All have worked very well for us.

Good luck!!
 
instead of going cold turkey why don't you try going in every 5/10/15/20 minutes or so and giving him some cuddles/reassurance, so that he doesn't get too overwrought? i think that before they reach 6-7 months of age, they simply cannot "handle" cold turkey CIO, psychologically, or physically.
 
i am going to do it in 2 or 3 wks and will let everyone know how it goes.... hoping that its not as bad as I imagine.
 
to be perfectly honest, i could NEVER do CIO with a baby under the age of 1-ish. to me, it's just too young.

at least by the age of 1 or so, you know your baby better, your baby knows you and understands that you will be back.

i have no problem doing it with my older kids 3&5 yrs, as i know that they are crying purely out of anger/frustration at not getting what they want.

to me, crying is a baby's only form of communication. whenever i left a baby to CIO, i felt like i wasn't listening to what the baby was trying to tell me. i believe that to a baby so young, cuddles and closeness are as important, if not more important, than the clean nappy/hunger etc.
 
carang, while i do understand and respect your point, i think it really depends on the individual situation. perhaps you were one of the lucky ones - a parent blessed with kids who didn't have big sleep issues when they were infants. but for parents whose babies have issues, who keep themselves and their parents up all night, i do believe CIO is necessary - it is important to teach your little ones how to fall asleep on their own IF they have problems. i think any age under 6 months is too young, that said.
 
of course every piece of advice given in these forums is subjective and is based on invidiviual needs. we can only share our own opinion and speak from personal experience with our own child/children.

babies are all unique and everyone parents differently. what's nice about these forums is that you can ask a question and get a wide range of answers and experiences.

CIO is always a personal choice and people will always have both positive and negative feedback on it. In the end the parent makes the final decision on what course of action to take as they know their child best.
 
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zac, i agree with you. that's why i said, "to me" and "for me" and things like that....

it is a VERY personal decision. and YES, i did have issues with kids waking up. only in the past 4 months have i been able to sleep through the night and as i said, my kids are 3 & 5 YEARS, not months, old.

the way i looked at it was that it was a short (ish) period of time in my life and FOR ME, i did not want small babies to CIO. FOR ME, anything younger than 1 year was too young.
 
I started when my baby was 3/4 months but focused on the daytime nap first before nighttime. I followed the Gina Ford method, and her view is that a good daytime sleep pattern usually improves nighttime sleep. My baby's lunchtime nap was 2.5 hours, and I let him cry for as long as 1.5 hour for a few days. After 1.5 hour, instead of trying to put him to sleep, I just opened the curtain and keep the day going. Then I let him take a quick nap in the afternoon so that he wouldn't get overtired by bedtime.

Within less than one week, my baby slept very well during both lunchtime nap and nighttime. He can fall asleep by himself and resettle himself back to sleep easily without any help. He did wake up in the middle of night twice when he was 7M but I just let him cry on and off for one hour as I was sure that he wasn't sick or hungry. He's 8M now and sleeping 12+ hours straight in the evening and 2-3 hours during the day all by himself and is a very healthy baby!

CIO is a very personal decision but you definitely have to make sure that your baby isn't hungry or sick when you try to implement it. It was hard for me to hear him cry but I do believe that teaching my baby to learn to fall asleep by himself and resettle is something good for him and the whole family!
 
My almost 12 month old is a better sleeper now. It's partly thanks to CIO and partly because he is older and can sleep for a longer stretch.

We did CIO when he was 7 month. We were prepared that he would cry for one hour at the most. But in the first two nights, he cried for about twenty minutes and went to sleep. Checking on him did not work for us. He would just get more upset when he saw me.

He was a terrible sleeper before he was 5 month old. We would have to rock him for close to an hour just to get a 30 to 40 minutes nap from him. It was worse when he tried to fight sleep. He would arch and fuss when we try to rock him to sleep. He woke 3 to 4 times for feed in the night and he sometimes would not go back to sleep after feeding and just played by himself or looked around. When he played enough, he sometimes needed assistance like rocking and dummy to go back to sleep.

I think the best thing we've done for him is sleep training. He is still not a very good sleeper but he has improved a lot.

I was very apprehensive about starting CIO. I got lots support from Mums in this forum and I found this thread from baby center very useful.
How to SUCCESSFULLY teach a baby to sleep - 3rd ed. - Teaching Your Baby & Toddler To Sleep - BabyCenter.

Good luck.
 
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