Usenet Writings

Sleep Disruptions

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

My son was 14 months old when I wrote this.  It was about some unusual sleep patterns he was starting to have, and how we handled them.

We've had two unusual sleep situations with Jordan:

   1) waking screaming at 5:15 (instead of 6:15) 3 days in a row

   2) waking screaming last night at 11:00 pm

Jordan sleeps with a pacifier, and in the last couple of weeks, he's started waking in the middle of the night crying because he can't find one.  One of us would go in there, give him back his pacifier, and he'd conk right back down and be asleep before we shut the door.  By last weekend, it was happening a couple of times a night.  And then it got worse.

By worse, I mean that Jordan started waking screaming at 5:15, and giving him his pacifier wouldn't be enough to get him to back to sleep.  It wasn't a "I'm awake and want to start the day--come get me" cry; it was an out and out scream.   Last Sunday, his dad got up with him at 5:15 and they played.  Monday morning, his dad had already gone to work when Jordan started screaming at 5:15, so I brought him into bed with me, and he slept another hour until it was time for us to get up.

That was better than getting up at 5:15, but not by much, so I kept trying to figure out what was causing him to wake early--and clearly willing to go back to sleep. 

I noticed his arms were cold, so I thought perhaps his room was too cold, so I turned off the ceiling fan before I went to bed that night. (It's still in the 80s at his bedtime, usually)  The same thing happened--up at 5:15, willing to go to sleep with me.   He was happy during the day, so I didn't think he was sick.    He did it both when he took two 2-hour naps and when he took only one nap, so I didn't think it was because he was napping too much.  Just in case, one night
we kept him up until 8:30 (instead of his usual 7:30-8:00), and it didn't change anything.

The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that Jordan had developed a new sleep association.  It wasn't enough to have his pacifier--he needed to have one of his parents give him his pacifier. At 2 am, he fell back asleep very quickly, and our in-and-out presence was enough.  At 5:15, he wasn't quite as deeply asleep, and so he'd calm down when we'd give him the pacifier, but as soon as we left the room, he'd be upset: we hadn't stayed long enough for him to get back to sleep.  That also seemed to explain why he would go back to sleep in bed with me.

So, the next night we tried something different.  We put him to bed with his normal two pacifiers.  Before we went to bed, we turned off the ceiling fan, and put four additional pacifiers in his crib, so he wouldn't have any trouble finding one, and they wouldn't all end up on the floor.  He didn't wake at all until 5;20, so that was clearly progress. 

At 5:20, I heard him screaming, looked at the clock, and marked the time, so I'd know to go in to him in 5 minutes.  He screamed for 3 minutes, and then stopped.  "Wow, that was easy", I thought, trying to drift back to sleep.  After 3 minutes of silence, he started up again--about 2 minutes.  And then silence.  And then 1 minute of crying.  And then silence until after 6.

And that was it--he's slept until 6:15 (or later) every morning since.  I needed to have him return to "just pacifier" sleep associations, instead of "parent and pacifier".  And it worked.   I think the reason one night was enough was because it was a short-lived association, and because he really was tired, and because he had put himself back to sleep during the night "for practice".

The other scenario was different, though, and didn't have anything to do with Ferber.   Last night, about 11:00, I was answering some e-mail when I heard Jordan start to scream.  It was "I'm in pain" scream and I raced to his room.  His dad got there first and had already lifted him out of his crib, and he was screaming inconsolably.  I took Jordan and rocked him and sang softly to him, and tried to figure out what hurt.  He passed a lot of gas (I think that was the culprit) and seemed to feel a bit better.  We changed his diaper, and started to leave the room--more crying.  So I stayed, held him, gave him a small bottle, and then put him in his crib.  He whimpered a bit, "I'm tired" and was quiet by the time I shut the bedroom door.

I wanted to write both of these up in detail because there has been a lot of discussion about how to handle difficult sleep issues, and Jordan's two recent night-wakings have been of such different origin.  The 5:15 wakeup was a habit that was because he was forming a sleep association based on having one of us there--and that we wanted to stop.  The other was because he was uncomfortable and he needed us, and we both raced in there.  (His dad only got there first because he was closer)

I don't know if I'd have recognized the 5:15 wakings as an inappropriate sleep association if I hadn't read Dr Richard Ferber's book How To Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems.  But I'm glad I did--5:15 is much too early.  But we had to think about several other possibilities first: discomfort, illness, too much daytime sleep--and if any of those had been the case, we certainly wouldn't have used Ferber's technique.