Sleepy-time Stress

Reviewing Sleep Strategies

By Laurie Dove

, believes putting Baby to bed while still awake is crucial to learning self-comforting skills. However, Dr. Ferber cautions, before parents "Ferberize" their babies, they should make sure hunger, pain, stress or medications are not causing sleep problems.

Kendeyl Johansen knew Ferber's method worked. The Park City, Utah mother's 4-year-old son had been "Ferberized" to sleep through the night. When her twin sons were born three years later, she was desperate for the method to work again.

"My twins needed to eat every one and a half hours round the clock," Johansen says. "I was so sleep deprived, I did dumb things like putting the ice cream away in the microwave."

By the third night of using the Ferber method, one of her twins was sleeping through the night. A few weeks later, the second twin was too from a slightly-modified Ferber method, Johansen says.

"It just goes to show that every child is different," she says. "But when my second twin slept through the night, I resumed my sanity."

For others, it wasn't as simple. Lisa Babick, a Chicago mother, tried without success to Ferberize her 6-month-old son.

"I tried to let him cry five minutes, then go in and reassure him," she says. "It didn't work. Five minutes became 50 minutes of screaming. He cried so hard, he had a bloody nose. It's much easier just letting him sleep with us."

Like many parents, the Babicks have taken their child to the "family bed." It's a term coined by Dr. William Sears, who discovered the benefits of co-sleeping in 1978 when his fourth child was born.

After she refused to sleep in her crib, the Searses brought their daughter, Hayden, to bed with them. For the first time in weeks, Dr. Sears recalls, they all slept well. That was all it took for Dr. Sears to go against the medical community's mainstream advice that discouraged infants sleeping with parents.

Want to see more?

• The Crying Game: Soothing Your Newborn
• Crying Baby, Sleepless Nights: Why Your Baby is Crying and What You Can Do About It
• The First Year: Birth to 3 Months
• Talk about it!