I highly, highly recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/Sleepeasy-Solution-Exhausted-Parents-...

You can probably borrow it for free at your local library, you certainly don’t need to own it.

It’s easy to follow, both of our kids were well sleep trained at 5 months. I’ve foisted it on three different friends who were struggling and they all turned it around within a week.

YMMV, all kids are different, but empirically this method seems to work best of the approaches I’ve seen tried.

This is #2 and our 3 year old sleeps through the night almost every night now!

We’ve been disruptive to the little one’s sleep so far due to some home renovations causing a lack of consistency for just about her whole life. I’m confident we will figure it out eventually.

“Or maybe I just think this because my 6 month old woke up four times last night and I’m losing my mind”

It gets better, of course - but I also lost my mind.

I had to return to work after three weeks, and I distinctly remember a moment where I thought, “I really should not be driving right now”.

I experienced something like this for a short time just trying to take care of some very young motherless kittens who needed feeding every 4 hours. I quickly got to the point where I was engaging in reckless self medicating to get through it. It really cemented my long-ago decision not to have children, while increasing my respect for those who do.

It’s self inflicted by weird British notions of how children should be reared. We had no difficulties whatsoever or sleep lost, my wife would just lay next to our baby with her shirt off and if the baby got hungry she’d eat. My wife wouldn’t even wake up. Westerners bring these tortures upon themselves.

It's probably the onset of modernism - they decided everything in life had to be lived according to logical rules they made up in their heads, rather than just doing whatever folk knowledge your parents passed on that had no rationale. The advantage is this often does work, but the disadvantage is you end up with Victorian parenting, doctors who wouldn't wash their hands because you can't explain why they should, having to eat corn flakes, world wars, etc.

We coslept and as long as you aren’t drinking alcohol or taking ambien or anything that’d impair your ability to respond to your child you won’t wake up and will feed ad libitum. We slept great with our first. Our second has a physical disability and wakes up screaming a few times a night for unknown reasons that at three she can’t elucidate but at least the first was easy. Then the hard part is getting them out of your bed when they’re older.