Sleep training for babies- yay or nay?

There is a lot of talk these days around sleep training techniques. These are designed to make the baby sleep through the night and own their own. The idea is to eliminate the baby's dependency on the parents to sleep. Lot of people adopt these techniques and even I was toying with the idea of adopting it. Even I saw a couple of videos as my baby would not go to sleep without me and it used to take some time to put her to sleep. I am not sure if there are other methods but the ones that I came across are based on cry-it-out, where you follow a routine and then allow baby to sleep on his/her own, if he/she cries let him/her, in order to make them understand that they need to settle and sleep on their own.

There are mixed arguments about whether this is the right approach or this is not.  I am sure those who do it, it must be very difficult for them but I simply could not bring myself to follow this approach. I found this very traumatic for both the mother and the baby who has just arrived in this world and is adjusting to the ways of it. I feel eventually the babies will learn to sleep through the night and will learn to sleep on their own. You can definitely set a routine for the baby to make it easier for them to identify what comes next and ease the transitioning to the next activity. You can even try out the below mentioned tricks -

·         As already mentioned follow a set routine so that the baby identifies with the sleep time.

·         Massage and give a warm bath to the baby

·         Swaddle the baby- swaddling works wonders in most of the cases

·         Feed and try not letting the baby sleep while feeding so that he/she completes the feed. If the baby is full he/she will sleep longer

·         Dim the lights and Play some soft calming music while putting to sleep

·         Keep the sleeping area clean and remove all the distractions like toys, clothes etc

These tricks work in lot of cases; you never know you might be the lucky mom. Even if these do not work for you, enjoy putting them to sleep before they grow old enough(which they do real soon) to do things on their own.