From: bweiss@cs.arizona.edu (Beth Weiss)
Newsgroups: misc.kids
Subject: Re: Sleep Question/Ferberizing
Date: 7 Jan 93 03:26:19 GMT
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson

> dmac@julia.math.ucla.edu (saki) writes:

>I personally made the choice that progressively teaching
>the child to sleep on its own by letting it cry was not for me. Nor for
>my son, who is now 13 months.

If I recall your original post, your child didn't sleep through the
night until he was 10 months old, long past the point where he needed
night nutrition, even if he was hungry.

Diane Lin asked if you'd read Ferber's book.  I bought it 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 sleep 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 11am 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 Jordan
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 my husband, 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 me and Dean than
on Jordan) 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.

Dean is getting more sleep, allowing him to function better, and be
better company in the evenings.

For me, there is an additional benefit besides getting more sleep.
Jordan 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.

When I read your post originally, I felt you were somehow implying
that parents who used Ferber didn't have the best interests of their
child at heart, and were being cruel.  (That may not have been what
you were saying, but it's what I felt)

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.  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.




--
--Beth Weiss
bweiss@cs.arizona.edu
Organization: Administrative Computing & Info Services, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA