Sleep Training A One Year Old Baby....

Tweet

My wife and I have been discussing sleep training of our 1 year old daughter. Her normal pattern, right now, is...when it's my wife's turn to get her to bed, she has the lights low, on her lap (on pillow), with her favorite bear, "Mr.Blue". It usually takes anywhere between 10-40 min. to get her to fall asleep this way. Me...I don't have the patience for that and have found that I can get her to sleep in about 10-20 min (sometimes less if Farrah is really tired), by rocking her in my arms in her room (dark with a little night light). Although these methods are working for us, as she is a good sleeper and will usually sleep from 7pm - 7am, sometimes waking at around 11:30pm for a few minutes of crying, at which point, if it's my "turn" I just rock her for few minutes and set her back into the crib, but my wife will bring her out to the living room and allow her to fall asleep on her lap again. She does this because she doesn't have the arm strength to rock her back to sleep like I do. Now, like I said, our routine is working for us, but we know that we're at the point where we should try to correct this pattern. So, we tried the sleep method of putting her in her crib and sitting on the floor to let her know we're still there so they don't feel abandoned. Lucky me...I was the first to try it. After 15 minutes of Farrah standing, laughing, screaming for joy, and tossing everything out of her crib, she then began to start crying. Not her normal cry, but of "bloody murder" type cry. I lasted about 15 more minutes with that and decided that I couldn't do that to her. Call me a softy...whatever. I just felt like I was torturing her, not to mention the torture for me...sitting on the floor with my back to my child with my thumbs plugging my ears. It felt wrong. I went with my instinct and reverted back to rocking her, but tried to put her down earlier than normal. This worked. Not that I was shocked, but my wife was a little disappointed that I didn't try to last longer. I told her that she should try it just to understand the different feelings that you go through. I don't thinks she's going to try it, as I only had extremely negative things to say about this method. This is why I'm turning to the mylot community. This is our first child and we want to make sure we raise her properly, so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.