Sleeping training - a must?

I did a couple weeks of gentle sleep training first to stop my LO feeding to sleep. We would go to bed feed, burp, change clothes read book and down in the cot. And pick up to reassure and after 3 weeks of that we made progress but she was still waking in the night so that's when we swapped to ferber and 2nd night in she didn't even make a noise before going to bed

honestly, i don’t recommend any form of cry it out method. there’s been lots of research into it and of course there are always pros and cons but from what i’ve read the cons for me personally outweigh the pros. if you want to you can message me as i’ve screenshotted some research another lady asked me to find for her. of course i try not to mum shame! you should always try not to do that but i always advocate for gentler methods on here and for mums to do full research into it so they know the decision that they’re making if they choose to make it. i say this as a mum of an 18 month old currently having to sleep on a mattress on the floor of her daughters room to support her sleeping and honestly she’s doing so well! so the other methods may not be as quick as CIO, but they are much gentler and less stressful on both parent and baby in the long run xxx

I would personally do it in chunks. Work on removing the breastfeeding association first, then next step say cuddle to sleep, then put in cot and pat bum for example. And so on over a few days/couple of weeks. I used a version of the ferber method much further down the line on my eldest which took inly 3 returns to the room for her to lie down and go to sleep. I just did one minute at a time x

We fed to sleep until 13 months when she was too big to put down asleep. So we switched up the routine, she had her bottle or boob downstairs before the bedtime routine. We put her down awake, added an extra story when she was in bed, and she put herself to sleep. Didn't cry, bit of moving around and chattering but that's it. I understand how people resort to sleep training when they're in a sleep deprived state and absolutely feel like there's no other option. But it's developmentally normal for babies to wake through the night up to 1 year old and often beyond. It sounds like you're just trying to break the sleep association rather than deal with a lot of night wake-ups? In which case I'd stop the feeding to sleep if that's what you want to do but I wouldn't use cry it out, I'd look for whatever else may support them to get to sleep with you there, shushing rocking singing reading etc.