How to sleep train an 8-week-old who sleeps through the day and is active at night?

Question

We have an 8-week-old daughter. Our baby goes full eyes open at 10:30-11 PM and needs be walked around to calm down. She gets restless and cries the moment she is on the co-sleeper. Holding and walking her is the only way to calm her down. My wife breastfeeds her once at probably 1:30-2 AM and when she is too restless. Following that, I burp her and walk for a while. She falls asleep, and I put her on the co-sleeper. But the peace is over in 20-30 minutes. By 5:30-6:00 in the morning she falls asleep like me on a Friday night.

How do we sleep train her? Some folks have suggested gripe water, but I am not sure. We tried keep her awake during day time but she does not get engaged with any stimuli, yet.

Answer 1

In order to flop my kids around I just promoted sleep all the time any time they were willing to. So if it's all day so be it. I found that trying to move it myself wasn't helping, so allowing them to sleep well shifted it on it's own. I know it sounds counter intuitive, but it helped us. I was loosing my head on my 1st because I had to be at work at 6weeks & had no idea what to do, so I gave up...and when I did he sorted out. Go figure. So on the next kids I did that too. I just rode it out & they sorted. It's not easy. OMG it's not.

The other thing that is always useful to me that whole first year, any time I feel like the sleeping seems unpredictable, is to start writing it all down. If I write down all the sleep times as best as I can (I know that is hard when you are deathly tired) what I would find about 3-5days in, was that there was a pattern. If I looked at how long they were awake & how long they slept. It felt random, because the times on the clock were changing, but in reality it was quite predictable. So it might look something like : Bay is awake for 60-90mins, then sleeps for 20-30 mins, then is awake 45-60 mins, then sleeps for 1-2hours, then is awake for 60-90mins, etc etc. What I saw was sanity in that chart. It won't change that you are tired, but it helps you feel a little less like your entire day is entirely random.

And the best news I can give you is that it passes. It does. They do sleep, at night, and so do you. Hugs to you both. Sleep deprivation is the devil.

Answer 2

At our antenatal class we were told that getting sunlight during the day helps - something to do with melatonin levels in the brain. Taking them for a walk each day might be worth trying. It seemed to work for us, but I understand that that's a very small sample size!

Answer 3

I had similar experience with my daughter at that age. She used to fall asleep in the morning right after we give her a bath and stay awake whole night. Many people suggested establishing a night time routine but that didn't help us much.

What finally worked was that we reversed her daily routine. That is, we kept the curtains closed and her room dark, reduce the noise level in the morning hours. We started giving her a light massage and bath in the evening hours and then we'll keep the lights switched on or try to play with her at night. We had to do this for a week or so before she started sleeping at night.

Even then, she was a very light sleeper till she was an year old, woke up 2 or 3 times for feeding in the night but dozed off quickly so it was okay for us.

Please try the same and check if it helps.