How I learned to stop worrying and love Dr. Ferber
Last night was possibly the third of Mallory’s almost 18 month life where she didn’t guzzle half a litre or so of breast milk. Yes indeed – we’re doing sleep training.
Thinking about it, though, in our case it’s really the parents who are getting trained. The method is straight from Richard Ferber’s Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems but despite what I’d come to believe about Ferber’s methods – notorious among the co-sleeping and attachment parenting crowd – it doesn’t seem at all cruel.
A little manipulative perhaps, but cruel? No.
Here’s how it works:
- Keep track of her normal night feeding interval (two hours, three hours, etc)
- Do you usual ‘back to sleep’ ritual when she wakes up, but…
- Only nurse (or offer bottle) if baby wakes up after or on the regular interval
- Extend that interval by one half hour per night until it gets to five hours
- At five hours, just stop doing the feedings and only do the back-to-sleep ritual.
Ferber also suggests that bottle feeders can dilute or reduce the bottle contents gradually so that the breast milk or formula is less attractive each time. We didn’t do that. Too complicated.
I think it’s actually much worse for me than for Mallory.
Mallory falls asleep without a bottle during the day every day at nap time. All we’re really doing is applying the same rule at night.
I started at two hours, but only had to invoke “the rule” once. Two nights later I got my first taste of “the rule” when she woke two hours after her last waking when “the rule” said feed after three hours only.
I walked her and rocked her for the full hour, with her drifting in and out of sleep but never sleeping deeply enough to put her back in bed.
At the appointed time I fed her the bottle and she was asleep in a few minutes.
The next night I upped the interval to three and a half hours and overall spent three hours awake, walking and rocking Mallory, singing to her, rubbing her back, begging and beseeching her softly to go the fuck back to sleep, to no avail.
But the next night, ten minutes before she was due for a bottle, she fell asleep. And she stayed asleep. For four hours.
The night after that involved a lot of walk n’ rock, but again she fell asleep once or twice without having a bottle.
But the clincher came when she fell asleep sans bottle before her first night waking. She woke up 20 minutes later and technically I could have given her a bottle, but I decided not to. She went back to sleep again and woke four hours later.
At 4:00 she woke, but again went back to sleep without a bottle. She woke an hour later, but (is this becoming predictable) went back to sleep sans-bottle.
This time I gave her water on a couple of occasions and that seemed to relax her and help her back to sleep.
So am I headed for full nights of uninterrupted sleep? Yes, I believe so. Am I out of the woods? No. Last night was harder on me than a typical, two or three feeding night, because the waking periods are longer, there are more of them and to keep her from crying I have to walk with her in my arms (as opposed to just lying in the rocking chair half asleep).
We decided not to take on the carrying sleep association or the co-sleeping at the same time because we thought anything else would be too harsh and according to Ferber, once they know they’re not getting fed at night, they’re less likely to wake up.
I hope that’s true. Or at the very least that she gets used to going to sleep without being fed and does it a bit faster.
June 19th, 2007 at 12:00 am
Feel no guilt. Both our kids were Ferberized. At 9 and 6, they are now as mentally balanced as….well, as 9 and 6 year olds ever are.