Our son has never been easy to settle to sleep, so when he was tiny we rocked, fed, walked, bounced etc etc, but mostly fed to sleep. He would always sleep well once asleep though, until 4 months, when teeth and sleep regression started. At this point he was waking more often, and would be almost impossible to settle back into his cot in the night, so we started co-sleeping from 5am then 4am, then 3, then from his first wake up! This was fine, but he would wake 2hrly for resettling, which was easy as I could just breast feed him, but also meant that because he was in our bed, I was concerned about his noises waking my husband, and so never tried to settle him without breast, the wake ups gradually became more frequent, until at 7.5mths, he was waking every 45mins.

When he wakes at night he is almost impossible to comfort. He doesn’t want to be held, or put down, or rocked or sung to. He has become more difficult to get to sleep as he has got older and I have really struggled for the past month to get him off to sleep, but have kept with it, not resorting to breast or pram or car journeys. The overall objective is to stop the night wakefulness. If he needs a feed that’s fine, I appreciate that with BF its impossible to monitor what they have so if he wakes for a feed, that’s fine, I just want him to go back to sleep and not be so furious! Ideally we would also like to be able to get our son to self settle, to stop this sleep regression with future developmental changes, and to make sleep times less of a battle!

I just wanted to express my thanks to your straightforward and sensible advice. Despite asking several health visitors and my GP for sleep advice I was no further forward, but following our conversation, within 2 weeks our son’s sleep had significantly improved and within 1 month it was normal for him to sleep though the night without waking. I tell everyone I know who has baby sleep problems about you, and can only recommend your advice. It really was the best money I have ever spent getting sleep advice – I will be contacting you again for further advice if I have any more problems with this baby or the next one!! Thank you (Zoe from Kent)