CIO - send help!
We’ve just started CIO with our 5-month-old and I am… lost.
He was a decent sleeper until about 3.5 months, but over the last 7–8 weeks his sleep has progressively worsened. He now wakes roughly every hour and usually won’t go back to sleep unless he’s held or rocked.
Bedtime itself is actually okay - he goes down drowsy but awake around 19:30 and falls asleep within 10 minutes. We briefly tried Ferber before some travel interrupted it, and now he’ll sometimes do a 3-hour stretch at the start of the night. But after about 22:00/23:00, everything unravels.
For a while I was feeding him to sleep from around 2am onward and doing some cosleeping just so any of us could sleep. I stopped that about a week ago. He still feeds 2–3 times overnight, every three hours or so.
For non-feeding wakeups, before CIO, during the night he’d 2–3 attempts to settle back into the crib, and even then usually only sleeps 15–50 minutes.
We’ve now started CIO. I can handle the crying if it’s helping him learn a skill, but I genuinely don’t know if we’re doing this right despite spending hours researching.
The biggest issue is that he wakes so frequently that if we let him CIO for every wake, he barely sleeps at all. If he’s up every hour and takes an hour to fall back asleep, he’s getting maybe half his normal sleep.
Putting him down awake works at bedtime, but for night wakes it feels impossible. If I put him down anything less than fully asleep, he immediately screams and will continue for a very long time (last night it was an hour before I finally picked him up). Usually I end up lightly rocking him until he’s asleep enough to transfer, often after 2–3 attempts.
Another issue: by the time we intervene, he’s fully awake and escalated.
I know every baby is different, but I’d really appreciate hearing other people’s experiences because this all feels very counterintuitive and I’m flailing a bit.
For context:
- 23 weeks old tomorrow, healthy, growing well, generally not fussy
- Combo fed (low supply prevents EBF)
- We’ve tried increasing intake and recently started tiny amounts of purées
- Structured bedtime routine: feed, bath, song, etc.
- Sleeps in a crib in our room; we also tried a larger cot for a few nights (didn’t help)
- Takes 3 naps/day (recently dropped from 4 to see if it helped — it didn’t). Total nap time around 3 hours.
- Wake windows around 2.5 hours
- Last nap ends by 17:00
- Naps are difficult — usually only happen in the pram or as contact naps after rocking
- Crib naps usually fail completely
- First tooth is coming through, but sleep issues started long before teething
- He’s clearly going through big developmental changes lately
Before the regression he would usually do a 5–7 hour stretch at the start of the night, then wake every 1–2 hours afterward.
Part of why we moved from Ferber to CIO is that the check-ins seemed to make him more upset and prolong the wakeups. But now I’m wondering if we’re somehow doing CIO “wrong” because his sleep doesn’t seem to match what most people describe.
We’re probably also just exhausted after nearly two months of this. Help.
Edited for clarity.