The other night, my wife, Jean, stood at the entrance to our bedroom with an unhappy look on her face—unhappy, but also helpless. From behind the nearly closed door to our daughter Sasha’s room came an unearthly wail, the sound of a 14-month-old baby who absolutely did not want to be in bed.
Of course, she had already been in bed, and sound asleep, for more than two hours, and was merely waking up as she occasionally does, for a few minutes at a time before dropping off again. Still, that noise! It’s almost impossible to ignore it; it penetrates straight to a parent’s heart; it is at the center of an ongoing debate about sleep-training—a debate that we here at Dadwagon are taking up this week.
Frankly, Jean, Sasha, and I have had it easy. Sasha is a cheerful, acquiescent character, and getting her to go to sleep—and stay asleep—has not proven much of a challenge. We did this in a very structured way:
- • At 7 months, we moved her crib from our bedroom to her own room.
- • We put her to bed at the same time every night, around 7:30, hewing to a set routine: we read her a book, brush her teeth, and tuck her in.
- • We decided only to give her a pacifier when she was going to sleep, both to keep her quiet and, à la Pavlov, to get her to associate the pacifier with slumber.
It all worked very well, and ever since, Sasha has slept 11 hours a night, generally getting up the next morning between 5:45 and 7 a.m. We’ve even weaned her off the pacifier, and she’ll often go down to sleep without a fight or a peep. Lucky us! Lucky Sasha!
And yet… There are still those cries, those moments when the sound of misery rings out in our home, and we feel compelled to rush to her and hold her in our arms and comfort her. But we don’t. (This is easier for me than for Jean.) Instead, we keep watching TV or reading or cooking or whatever, and let Sasha bawl for a few minutes, until eventually she stops.
Is this cruel?
No. Sasha has no memories yet, and though she can say a few words and understand many more, she’s not fully a thinking person.
But at the same time, she IS a person. I recognize that sleep training works for us precisely because it works for Sasha. She is one of the happier and better-adjusted babies I’ve met, and her writhing-on-the-floor moments come rarely and evaporate quickly. Were she a different child, a more nervous one affected longer and more deeply by nightly abandonment, we might have chosen a different tack.
But who knows? Maybe somewhere down the line, this harsh sleep-training will bear sour fruit, and Sasha will turn out to be a thief, a serial killer, or worse. And then we’ll have something to keep us up all night.
You are definitely lucky. My first was the kind of child that had to be nursed, rocked, sung, read to…until she was COMPLETELY asleep. Then and only then could we creep out of her room. If I tried to put her to bed remotely awake she would scream.
My second is more like Sasha. She can be put down awake or drowsy and if she doesn’t settle off to sleep right then she chats to her toys before going to sleep. However, if she does wake in the middle of the night more often than not I need to go in and comfort her. I’m hoping as she gets older she will learn to settle herself.
Just last night (after I’d put the 1yo to bed) I commented to my wife that sleep training was the best thing we’ve ever done.
Until about 3 weeks ago we’d managed to get in to a pattern whereby Elise would not go to sleep unless we were holding her. We’d have to be gentle when we placed her in her crib so as not to wake her. From about 6 months old this worked pretty well, taking about 15 mins each evening. She still woke in the night a couple of times, but all it took was a 10 minute visit to rock her back to sleep.
It slowly got worse, 10 minutes at bedtime became an hour, then the nighttime visits turned in to an hour, or we’d move her to our bed. My wife didn’t want to begin sleep training because of one thing or another, (mostly the trepidation I think, but there was always an external reason too,) but it was obvious to me that this was unsustainable.
One evening when I was home alone with Elise I decided to just put her down after reading her her story. She cried, loudly, pulling herself up on the side of the crib. I went in every 5 mins and laid her back down. About 90 minutes later she was asleep. It was a very rough evening, but I was able to get the laundry done, make and eat my dinner and even catch up on some blogs whilst doing the training. I figured it was preferable to an hour of rocking her whilst thinking about all those things that needed doing.
She slept through that first night. The second evening was much easier, though still 45 minutes. After a week she was going down without a peep and sleeping through for 11 hours. She still wakes at night on occasion but gets herself back to sleep quickly. I can tell she’s much happier, as are we. She’s getting more sleep, and better sleep.
I think it’s just an early parenting test. Short term pain for long term gain.
I disagree with teh statement that she has no memories yet. thay do have memories and at time we do not know how out actions/reaction impact them. yet reality is that this is VERY DIFFICULT to deal with a child that will not go to sleep. so at one point or the other i broke too and let my kid cry when he wakes up… still if i am asked if this is the right thing to do, i am not so sure…
who doesn’t like to cry themselves to sleep every now and then? and yet . . . basic biology makes it impossible for kids to cry without parents getting upset. (sleep training saved me and #1 from going crazy at 8 months–about to attempt it with #2 and dreading it.) my brother just spent two years in the high plains of peru and says everyone there just sleeps together–probably the way it was done for millennia before we had separate bedrooms with (sort of) thick walls between them. but here in our corner of the world, we have electricity, plumbing, bedrooms, and sleep training–genes seem to be still catching up to modern comforts.
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We were desperate at 7 months for some sleep for all of us so tried sleep training. Our son was waking every hour on the hour wanting something from us to help him get back to sleep. What we found was that he needed to ‘learn’ to be able to put himself to sleep when he woke in the night. We all are able to do this as adults, and it is a learned behavior. It was excruciatingly hard for the first few nights (and we comforted in increasingly incremental doses) but after that he learned how to put himself to sleep when waking and things have been fantastic ever since.
I know this won’t necessarily work for everyone, but the lightbulb for us to not to think of this as curelty to our child was to understand the long-term benefit of our little guy knowing how to self sooth and put himself to sleep. Especially at an age where the proper amount of sleep is so curcial to brain development.
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