DR. FERBER WAS A FUCKING SADIST!

i am not a parent but i can imagine how hard that must be to do this.

xpost

Oh right. Well I suppose you want to get some sleep and all, yeah?

Best of luck to you, Alex.

sure we're soft-hearted
but we're just not HARDCORE TYPES,
much more fun this way

That all said, this particular method involves an awful lot of screaming and crying and perceived heartlessness. To be fair, a baby's only means of expressing discontent is through crying, but a cry can vary from "I'm moderaly bored, come entertain me" to "I'm in genuine pain and distress!" The trick is knowing when it's legit and when it's just no big deal.

In any case, tonight -- though still rife with some wailing -- went much smoother than last night (so far, at least). We'll see if she continues to wake up overnight (which is a real problem). She normally doesn't, but after all the running around and excitement of the holidays, her little routine is all out of whack.

Stay tuned.

I hope it all works out well in the end!

Not sure if I explained it upthread, but basically, you go in and do your best to comfort the child (WITHOUT picking her up) in increments of five minutes, extending the period by five after each (i.e. let her cry for five minutes -- go in and reassure her -- let her cry for ten minutes -- go back in and reassure her, etc. etc.) The first night, we'd gotten as far as the thirty minute increment by the time she tuckered her little self out and gave up and fell asleep. Last night (the second night of the process), she was out and quiet and asleep before we even got to the fifteen minute increment. Moreover, she slept like a little adorable rock until about 6am. So, that was promising. Maybe it's working, but it still isn't a lot of fun. She's her normal, happy, chirpy self in the mornings, and doesn't seem to remember/hold a grudge/wish swift death on her parents, but it's still rough.

I haven't seen "Meet the Fockers" (or any recent movie, really, apart from "Sideways"), but I just heard Dr.Ferber's treacherous sorcery is invoked therein. Might have to go see it now.

ihttp://homepage.mac.com/alexinnyc/.Pictures/Photo%20Album%20Pictures/2005-01-11%2016.10.48%20-0800/Image-DFAB0234642C11D9.jpg

we tried this for about ten minutes before we gave in. has anyone on ilx ever actually got this to work?

Our son is still too young for this, he's only just now six weeks, but we have friends who've done this with all three of their kids and they swear its worked great for each. So, I don't know, seems like its going to be really really hard to do.

well, so we put her down and left the room and of course she instantly started crying. so 3 minutes later i went in and tried to calm her down (which you do before leaving again) but i couldn't actually calm her down without picking her up so i'm not sure we're really cut out for this method.

maybe it works better for slightly less high maintenance babies

I had a parent advise me to Ferberize the other night, but we're not going to do it. I don't doubt that it works, but I do doubt Ferber's claims that it has no ill effects on the child. "It works" isn't an end-all in my opinion.

btw jon I don't think I'd heard, fucking huge congrats!!!

aero, i'm glad to hear you say that ^

we've been doing it with our daughter but 1) we pick her up (for no more than two minutes) and 2) she's almost 16 months, so older than kids usually are when they're sleep-trained. basically as far as i can tell there's no gentle (ie no crying) sleep training method that's effective, some crying seems necessary.

anyways it's been effective for us but she was really ready to sleep on her own so there hasn't been a ton of crying involved - she usually falls asleep for the night within 5 minutes, we've had a couple of nights where's she's slept through the night and the others she's slept until 4 or 5, then been off and on until she's ready to wake up. i'm not really worried about long-term "ill effects."

Thanks aero!!

I think its going to be a trick to get our guy to sleep, he already gets overtired and gets himself all worked up before he'll calm down enough to fall asleep. On the other hand, when he's calm, he's really good at the self-soothing. We'll see.

I will say that whatever our friends did, it really seemed to work. Their oldest is now three and she actually tells them she's ready to go to bed about 10 minutes before her bedtime and falls asleep near instantly.

we did this, more or less, because after seven months we were going insane. the first day was horrific, it got rapidly better after that, maybe took four days? I can't remember now.

yeah don't get me wrong our baby is like the worst sleeper of all time and it's going to be a years-long process getting him to a good place. I think though that a consistent schedule is the most important thing; like, period; I worked with children for years and there is nothing like a schedule to get good happy results.

however since we're in the feed-every-two-hours-and-on-demand stage it's very hard for us to have a consistent schedule so basically it's chaos lol

yeah, i wouldn't even start thinking about this until 4-6 months and by then you'll be so burnt out on the sleep stuff that you might be willing to try Ferber even w/ whatever potential psychic traumas there may be.

on a related note, i keep wondering what parents in other cultures, particularly in non-first world nations, do to get their kids to sleep. there's gotta be some ancient wisdom somewhere right? or have we been dealing with sleepless babies since we've been having babies?

"we tried this for about ten minutes before we gave in. has anyone on ilx ever actually got this to work?"

Yup.

"on a related note, i keep wondering what parents in other cultures, particularly in non-first world nations, do to get their kids to sleep."

They sleep with their babies and offer them boob when they wake up crying for the most part, I think. But I think even then they deal with sleepless nights.

alex, what do u think about our experience re not being able to calm her?

You really aren't supposed to be calming her, she's either learning to a) calm herself or b) to not bother protesting about going to sleep (depending on which baby person you listen to.)

ok. bc ferber says to go in to the bedroom in intervals to calm her (w/out picking her up), but when i tried that she cried the entire time i was in the room with her

Yeah but he also says to not really worry if you can't calm her down, doesn't he? That the process of going in is more for the parent than it is for the kid.

Sleep-training things they don't really tell you:

1) Teething pain is really real and anyone who sez otherwise is full of shit. When your kid is teething be really liberal with the baby pain meds.
2) No matter how good a sleeper your kid is, shit happens and they'll have bad nights. Those nights don't worry about a book and spend as much time comforting your kid as you need to. Even bring them into bed. If it happens the two nights in row, then you'll probably have to start the sleep training again, but...
3) ...this is okay because no matter how good a sleeper your kid is, you'll go on vacation or have to stay out late or whatever and you'll have to re-start the process again.

But restarting is really no big deal because generally kids fall back into it pretty quickly.

I should also say that in the end even though we did Ferber to ease into him getting himself to sleep, when we "re-start" we just full CIO/extinction. Because like everyone else we found that going in wasn't really helping him sleep. It was just upsetting him more and keeping him up longer.

Alex, how long do you leave them crying before you decide it's a bad night? Like half an hour? An hour? Two hours?

the entire process for us was crazy and maddening and I doubt there is a perfect or right way to do it. it's also completely dependent on the baby. I know people who were vehemently opposed to this on the grounds that it was cruel to the baby and taught them that if they were afraid their parents would not be there to help them; I don't put that much faith in that, unless you are trying to do cry it out at 3 or 4. It did seem important that our son learned to calm himself, otherwise he was going to be nursing to sleep and every hour and a half for a very long time and that was having detrimental affects on my wife's ability to function, and having a non-functioning mother was the worse option, for us.

also, at what age did you start ferberizing charlotte? dalia is at five months so we feel like she's ready, but she's also very high maintenance (we have the exact same situation you describe above -- she sleeps through the night but we have to do a lot of work to get her to fall asleep). xp

xp to akm, i think that's otm and surely having sniping exhausted sleep-deprived upset parents is more detrimental to the child than having to cry in bed

"Alex, how long do you leave them crying before you decide it's a bad night?"

It's not so much the duration of the wake-ups as the frequency. My wife and I would just talk and say "okay he sounds really upset... why don't you go in" or "he's not going back to sleep, he's been feeling off today just bring him in with us for the night".

We've had maybe four or five bad nights though.

More info/discussion here: Sleep training