Son is 9 months old and is having a hard time soothing himself to sleep and back to sleep. We’re still rocking to sleep or laying down with mommy drinking a bottle. Even when I lay him down super sleepy he’s crying/gets up and crawls in his crib banging on the crib. I feel like we’re a bit behind on this milestone, he was doing great with this around 5.5months but then he started waking in the middle of the night again. He wakes in the night to eat once, then if he wakes up again it’s just to be rocked back to sleep. Are night time feeds necessary at this age? He’s growing great, not underweight at all (18.5lbs) but I mean I feel like if he’s hungry he should be fed I just don’t know if he’s eating to go back to sleep; maybe that’s his way of soothing himself back to sleep? He doesn’t take a soother, we tried so many times to see if that would help him and he does not like them. We have a pretty solid bed time routine for the most part. Usually it’s dinner, some play time, bath, bottle and rocking. Or laying down with mommy then I put him in his crib when he falls asleep. I love the time spent with him while he goes down for a nap/bed, I love watching him fall asleep I just know he needs to master the skill of soothing himself to sleep and I feel like I’m hindering this with babying him “too much”. Of course there’s going to be bad nights but for a majority of the time I would like for him to be able to soothe himself.

At 5.5 months we did the Ferber method, he was 100% fine. Didn’t cry, he’d only whine and he’d go right to sleep. Same after night time feeding, he’d finish his bottle and I put him back down right away.

We have a white noise machine that also plays music and usually it’s music to fall asleep too while we rock or lay there and then once his asleep and in his crib I turn on the white noise to help drown out the tv etc.