What to do when a method stops working
It worked beautifully for two weeks and now it does not. Before you change approach - and changing approach is the expensive option - check the four things that are much more likely to be responsible.
3 min read
Settling methods do not usually stop working. What changes is the conditions they were working in. A method is a way of handling the transition into sleep; it can only do that if the transition is being attempted at a moment when sleep is actually available.
Babies change fast. A wake window that fitted perfectly a fortnight ago can be twenty minutes short today, and twenty minutes is enough to turn a five-minute bedtime into a forty-minute one.
Check these four first
The wake window. Almost always the answer. Add fifteen minutes to the last one and hold it four nights. If that is wrong, take twenty off instead.
Total daytime sleep. A nap that has lengthened, or a nap transition beginning, changes what bedtime has to work with.
Development. A new skill, a leap, separation anxiety, a tooth. If you can name something new, the method is fine and the fortnight is not.
The environment. Heating on, lighter mornings, a warmer sleeping bag, a room that has been rearranged. These are invisible until you look.
And check yourselves
Consistency drifts. Two weeks in, the routine has quietly shortened, one parent is doing it differently, bedtime has slipped fifteen minutes later, and a step that was being held is being skipped. None of this is deliberate and all of it accumulates.
Writing down what you are actually doing for three nights is usually more revealing than anyone expects.
Methods rarely stop working. The conditions around them change, and the method takes the blame.
When to actually change method
When the timing is confirmed right, nothing developmental is in progress, you have been consistent for two weeks, and there is still no trend in any measure. That is a genuine mismatch, and it is worth changing.
The commonest genuine mismatch is age. Pick up put down on a ten-month-old overstimulates. Timed checks during peak separation anxiety work against the developmental grain. Both are better replaced with a method that keeps a parent in the room.
Rechecking your own consistency
Two weeks into anything, the plan quietly changes. Bedtime slips fifteen minutes. One parent skips a step. The routine shortens on busy nights. A check-in that was every five minutes becomes whenever it sounds bad. None of it is deliberate and all of it accumulates into a different method than the one you are evaluating.
Write down what you actually did for three nights - not what you intended to do - and compare it with the plan. Most people find at least one drift, and correcting it is considerably cheaper than starting something new. If both parents are running slightly different versions, that alone is enough to stall any approach.
The two-week rule
Before changing anything, give the current approach two weeks of genuinely consistent application with the timing confirmed correct. Most apparent failures do not survive that test - they turn out to be a drifted bedtime, a lengthened wake window, or a fortnight where both parents were doing slightly different things.
If two weeks of confirmed consistency produce no trend in settling time, wake duration or wake count, then the mismatch is real and changing method is reasonable. That is a much higher bar than most people apply, and applying it is what stops a year disappearing into a sequence of half-tried approaches.
When to stop troubleshooting
A sudden loss of established sleep with no identifiable cause, lasting more than a few weeks and getting worse rather than fluctuating, warrants a GP or health visitor appointment - particularly alongside snoring, mouth breathing, pauses in breathing or poor weight gain.
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