Usenet Writings

Teaching a Baby to Sleep!

My experiences teaching my son to fall back asleep on his own

©1993 Beth Weiss, Posted to misc.kids Usenet newsgroup, January 6, 1993

I wrote this after we used a technique in Richard Ferber's bool Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems to teach our 6 month old to sleep through the night.

I bought Ferber's book last week, read it, and implemented the procedure (although we couldn't handle the 5/10/15/15 minute intervals, and went more like 3/5/5/10/10 and then didn't need another one)

I'd read a lot about Ferber's technique, both on the net and elsewhere, but this was the first time I'd read the actual book.  He points out a couple of things which I think are very important:

1. What you are doing to "help" your child cope with waking up is actually causing the waking.
2. When you use his method what you are teaching your child to do is to fall asleep without your help.  He makes an analogy to an adult using a pillow, and how the adult would feel if the pillow disappeared in the night, and that's how I managed to think of it.
3. When a child over 6 months is hungry in the night, it does mean he's hungry, but it's because he's used to being hungry in the night, not because he needs nutrition.  There's a big difference here.  If I refuse to feed my son as much as he would eat at 3 am, I am not being cruel.  I am helping him learn that there are appropriate times for eating--and the middle of the night isn't one of them.  He needs to learn not be hungry at that time.
   This isn't that different from what would happen if you were used to an 11:00 am lunch, and a schedule change required you change to noon.  For a week or two you would be hungry at 11, and then you would be used to the noon time instead and wouldn't be hungry at 11 anymore.
4. A child with a regular sleep pattern, and a full-night's sleep each night sleeps better than one who wakes up and needs intervention.  A child who gets enough sleep is happier and more alert than one who doesn't. 

I was personally interested because I just experienced how easily a sleep disorder can develop.  (Yes, Ferber considers waking in the night to nurse a disorder) [note: we are only discussing healthy normal weight babies over 5-6 months]

We just took a two-week trip, staying with relatives.  Everywhere we went, Jordan slept in our room in a playpen or portacrib.  When he cried in the night, we went to him quickly to quiet him before he woke the rest of the house.  By the time we can home, he was used to nursing back to sleep in the middle of the night, and he was waking 3 or 4 times a night, which he hadn't even done as a newborn.  He would wake and cry if I tried to put him back in the crib, so I ended up nursing him in bed and keeping him there.  (He takes up more room in a twin bed than his dad, who is 6'6" :-)

I bought Ferber's book while still gone and read it before coming back.  The first night, it took about 40 minutes for him to go back to sleep after his 12:30 waking.  He woke again about 4, and fell asleep nursing (which I was trying to avoid, but he didn't nurse long).  The next night, he cried intermittently about 10 minutes before falling asleep, and woke a couple of times, cried a couple of minutes (less than 5), and fell back asleep.  The third night, he cried intermittently about 5 minutes, and didn't wake at all (at least that we heard) until 7 in the morning.

I would say 40 minutes of hell (which was rougher on the parents than the child) was worth it for all three of us.

Jordan is learning to fall asleep without nursing (we're working on naps now too), and that makes him less dependent on me, as well as letting him sleep better--he doesn't have to come fully awake in the night anymore.

His dad and I are getting more sleep, allowing us to function better, and be better company in the evenings.

For me, there is an additional benefit besides getting more sleep.  My son has been dependent on me for food since birth (we just started cereal).  It's a lot of stress and pressure for me to also be the one solely responsible for helping him to sleep as well.  I feel much better about time spent playing with him if I get a full night's sleep and don't have to nurse him every 2 hours (half nutrition, half help to sleep).  That much nursing was making me resent  his demands, rather than enjoy him.

There are going to be lots of times in my life as a parent where I feel I can't give Jordan his short-term want because it's not in his long-term best interest.  I think this one was one of them, and that's why we used Ferber's technique.  That's hard for a parent to do, but I think it's much worse to fulfill a child's short-term desires, at the expense of his long-term needs.