Thank You, Ferber, Wherever You Are

On the November 3-4th long weekend, Marli and I employed the Ferber Method to train Kenshin to sleep through the night without requiring a feeding every three to four hours. For those too rushed to follow the link, you basically let the baby cry for increasingly longer periods of time, until the kid figures out that although he will eventually be comforted, the screaming and the fussing has little to do with it. You go in every 5, then 10, then 20 then 40 minutes (and so on, doubling each time) to comfort the child, but do not pick him up. Eventually the child settles down and sleeps through the night.

It has been astoundingly successful with both our children. We employed the method on Daigoro at eight months and decided that we should have done it months earlier. So, this time, we tried it on Daigoro at just under seven months (for a variety of reasons, including a number of successive mild illnesses, it was ill-timed on his sixth month mark) and it worked even better, in two nights instead of three, as was the case with Daigoro. Kenshin woke up twice in the first night, (once for a prolonged fifty-minute stretch) and only three times (the longest stretch was thirty, the other two times were brief) and has slept through the night since.

It's a little hard on the parents and seems cruel to the child, but the dividends are many, not only for us, but for the grandparents who occasionally have to provide child care. After enjoying uninterrupted sleep several nights in a row for the first time in months, Marli must be feeling much better.

Thank you, Dr. Richard Ferber. I can't recommend this technique enough to other parents who have children who aren't sleeping through the night.