Sleep · 4 min read
Do we have to sleep train?
The choice is usually presented as two doors. Leave them to cry, and be the kind of parent who does that. Or change nothing, and keep feeding, patting or holding them to sleep for as long as it takes — which by now feels like forever.
Most of the researched approaches are neither of those. They are slow, and you stay in the room.
Last updated August 19, 2026
First, the age line
Camping out is for babies over 6 months. Raising Children Network states that limit plainly, and it is not a formality.
Below it, a baby who wakes and needs you is doing exactly what a baby that age does. There is no settling problem to solve, and no strategy should be run at them. If you are under six months and drowning, the thing to change is the amount of support you have, not the baby.
What camping out actually is
You stay in the room. That is the part that gets lost when this is filed under sleep training: the whole approach is built on you being present and withdrawing gradually.
Put a bed, mattress or chair next to where they sleep. Lie or sit there and pat or stroke them to sleep, then leave once they are asleep. When that is familiar — usually about three nights — reduce how much you pat or touch until they fall asleep without it. After roughly another three nights of that, move your chair a short distance away, 30-40cm. Then keep moving it, over days, towards the doorway and out.
If they wake overnight, you go back to the chair at whatever step you are on, and stay until they are asleep. You do not skip forward because it is 3am.
The whole thing takes 1-3 weeks. That timescale is the honest part, and it is why this approach loses to methods that promise three nights: it asks for a fortnight of consistency at the exact point you have the least to give.
What it is trying to change
The goal is specific and worth naming: moving away from needing you to feed, pat or cuddle them to sleep, or to be there while they fall asleep.
Not away from needing you. Away from needing that particular thing to cross the threshold into sleep — which matters because a baby who can only get there one way has to be got there that way every time they surface in the night, and they surface several times, as everyone does.
Raising Children Network also notes it works for older children who cannot get to sleep, particularly when they are anxious or frightened — the presence is doing the work, and that is a different problem from an infant sleep association.
Before you start, and the honest caveats
Fed, well and comfortable comes first — it is step zero in their instructions. A settling strategy applied to a baby who is unwell, teething badly or genuinely hungry will not work, and the failure will read as your failure rather than as a wrong diagnosis.
Raising Children Network is direct that all the strategies it publishes are thoroughly researched and that the evidence says they are safe. That statement is worth having on hand, because this is a subject people are made to feel guilty about from both directions.
They also recommend something rarely said out loud: working with a qualified child health professional increases the chances of any sleep approach working. If sleep is the thing breaking your household, that is a reasonable thing to ask for and not an admission of anything.
Common questions
- Is this just cry it out with extra steps?
- No — the defining feature is that you are in the room, next to them, and you withdraw over one to three weeks rather than leaving. There is crying in most approaches, including this one. What differs is whether anyone is there for it.
- My baby is 4 months old. Can I start?
- No. Camping out is specified for babies over 6 months. Below that, waking and needing you is normal and there is nothing to train.
- How long before it works?
- 1-3 weeks. Roughly three nights per stage — patting to sleep, then reducing touch, then moving the chair further away each time. It is slower than the popular methods and that is the trade being made.
- Do we have to do anything at all?
- No. Sleep associations are only a problem if they are a problem for your family. Plenty of people feed or cuddle to sleep for a long time by choice. This is worth doing when the current arrangement has stopped being sustainable — not because a certain age has passed.
If it's this, not that
Still not sure
This page is the general answer. Yours is a specific child.
The advisor can be. It has read everything here, and it knows how old your children actually are — which is the whole difference wherever guidance changes with age. Ask it anything.
- She's got a temperature of 100. Is that something to worry about?
- He's obsessed with space and galaxies — what toys are worth getting him?
Free. It comes with the note.
It answers from the same cited pages you are reading, and when the question is where to go, from the real clinician, hospital and childcare records behind this site — not a link to go search them yourself. It says so when we have not written about something, and it is not a doctor; for anything urgent it gives you the threshold and tells you to call.
Where this comes from
- Camping out — the step-by-step, the 1-3 week timescale, and the over-6-months limitRaising Children Network
Every claim on this page traces to one of these. See every source we use →
Written from the sources named above, and it is not a substitute for your own doctor. If something feels wrong to you, that instinct is a good enough reason to call — you know yourself and this family better than any page does.