Weaning w/o crying?

Factual Questions
1

…too much, at least. Well, not weaning per se. My wife and I want to get our soon-to-be-1-year-old daughter out of our bed at night. She never falls asleep in her crib…we either put her to sleep on our shoulders, or on my wife’s breasts and transfer her. When she wakes up in the middle of the night, she gets nursed and stays in our bed, b/c we’re too tired (usually we’re actually asleep) to put her back, although we’re sure she’s not really hungry.

We need to put a stop to this. I hate to do this, but I think the only way is going to be to make her cry herself to sleep until she gets the idea that her crib is where she sleeps and stays. My wife says she won’t make the baby cry like that (the kid’ll cry for an hour or more; it’s not just going to be a ten-minute thing) and insists there must be a less painful way.

I turn to you, my friends. Is there any alternative, or are we going to have to make the little girl cry her lungs out to get the message?

Chaim Mattis Keller
ckeller@kozmo.com

“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective

2

She won’t cry for an hour or more very many times as long as you stick to your guns. (I’m not suggesting the actual use of firearms.)

If she cries and you give in you are just reinforcing that behaviour. (i.e. crying gets me what I want.) A child will quickly learn that crying gets them nothing if and only if crying actually gets them nothing.

Am I supposed to believe that all this rain was suspended in mid-air until moments ago?

3

Here’s a thread about the same thing, sort of: http://boards.straightdope.com/ubb/Forum4/HTML/007719.html

4

My mother tells me that her method was to let us cry. Of course, she’s from a generation where children were expected to be polite and deferential toward their elders.

Not that those views are necessarily wrong, but nowadays isn’t the common view that affection is more important than discipline?

5

If you don’t get your child out of your bed now, it will only be harder in the future. Allowing them to cry themselves to sleep will bother you for a night or two ( the first night is the longest, with shorter spells each night until they get the drift) but the kids *will not remember * the crying. (What do you remember from when you are one?)

6

If you’re going to Ferberize, do yourself a favor and read the actual book: <I>Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems.</I>
Here is an approximately remembered excerpt from the book: During your sleep, you periodically check your environment for change, sort of sweeping for danger. If you’re used to sleeping with a pillow and the pillow falls off the bed in the night, you’ll probably retrieve it from the floor without really waking up. You won’t remember this. If someone comes and takes the pillow away, at some point in your sleep you’ll realize the pillow is missing and you can’t find it, and you’ll wake up all the way. You won’t be able to get back to sleep easily without it. (You’ll probably be very irritated at the person who changed your environment while you were asleep.) If, on the other hand, you decide that you need to sleep without a pillow, it’ll be rough the first few nights, but then you’ll get used to it and you’ll no longer have trouble falling asleep or waking up to look for it.

The kid is used to falling asleep while she’s being cuddled. If she wakes up in her crib, the environment has changed, and she doesn’t know how to fall back asleep like that. In fact, she’s more likely to be wakeful in the night because even asleep she’ll sense something is wrong. The first step involves having her learn to fall asleep on her own. You go through the whole bedtime routine, rocking, singing, nursing, whatever, but the trick is that she goes into her crib while awake. We did this and it worked. There were no hours of crying, either. If you get her sleepy enough before you put her down, she can’t stay awake to cry for hours. It only takes a few nights for this process to be complete.

Anyway, I suggest you read the book.

7

Ditto, ditto, ditto. My brother and his wife decided to close the door to the baby’s room and sit outside on the steps with a clock. They baby was washed, fed, changed, pooped, changed, cuddled and then set into the crib. The crying time got shorter and shorter over a few days and then stopped.

Same for having the baby sleep in your bed, move that duckie out of there.

Sister-in-law says you have to imagine that you have three children ages 3, 2, and 1 and THEN what would you do–says that always made things clearer in her mind!

8

I’m going to offer a different opinion. Being a new poster on this board, I’ll be brief. If anything I offer is of interest, let me know and I’ll be glad to go into more detail.

My opinion is that leaving a baby to “cry it out” only serves to teach the child that, if she cries for you, you will not respond. A 12mo child has absolutely no idea what you are trying to do. She only knows that you will not go to her.

Some children learn early on to get to sleep on their own and to get back to sleep if they awaken in the night. Other children have a much harder time of it. I believe this has much more to do with each child’s particular temperment than anything the parents do or don’t do.

A question: you say “this has to stop.” Why? Is it because you don’t think she “should” be there or because no one is getting any sleep? If you are all sleeping happily with her in the crib for half the night and with you the rest, be assured that you are doing quite well. Many parents of more difficult children would be very jealous of your situation. On the other hand, if you (or she, or your wife) is not sleeping well, there is no reason you shouldn’t try to persuade her to stay in her crib.

My opinion, though, is that there are kinder, more respectful ways to do so. If she is generally waking to nurse (and, at 12mo, probably for comfort rather than hunger), it will probably be helpful if you are the one to go to her. If you can sing/rock/walk her back to sleep, rub her back, (whatever works) for a week or so, she may well decide that waking up isn’t as much fun and stay asleep. My husband and I recently used this technique to night wean our 20mo. (For the week that we did this, I slept in another room. She still sleeps with us, but no longer nurses at night. Now, if she wakes at night and asks to nurse, I tell her “in the morning” and she rolls over and goes back to sleep.)

I will also point out that our daughter, who has always been held while going to sleep, has recently started practicing going to sleep on her own. The other night she was lying beside me in our bed while I read. Several times she said “bye bye” and turned away, finally drifting off. She is learning to let go on her own, at her own pace, and without jeapordizing her trust in us.

One last thought: you say that you are sure that she would cry for a least an hour, which sounds very familiar to me. Have you read “Raising Your Fussy Baby and Difficult Toddler” by William and Martha Sears? It may be helpful if you indeed are blessed with the type of difficult child that they describe.

And, yes, for me that was brief!

9

Most of this was composed before the board went down for the great conversion, but I didn’t manage to get it posted then. All I’d add is a second of robinh’s recommendation of Bill and Martha Sears’ book on high-need kids, as well as another for Bill Sears’ Nighttime Parenting.

Of course if you ignore a child’s crying, they will eventually stop doing it. However, ask yourself whether you really want to send the message to your child that you will not respond to their cries.

Breastfed children particularly are susceptible to getting hungry during the night, though by age one I assume you’re daughter is getting a fair amount of baby food or table food as well. So don’t assume that it’s not hunger. And even if it is (just) fright or loneliness, do you really want to make nighttime and sleeping a source of anxiety for her?

As I recently mentioned in another thread, my three-year-old son now goes to sleep by himself with scarcely a word, and rarely wakes up during the night (maybe once every couple of months). For the first year, he slept with my wife and I, for the second year, my wife spent much of each evening in his room in his bed (a full-size futon, not a crib or toddler bed, though very low to the ground), and for most of the third I stayed with him in his bed most nights at least until he dropped off to sleep (which in a lot of cases was after I had). Our ten-month-old daughter now occupies our bed. All along, we’ve tried to find the best solution for all of us, and to watch for signs of readiness to move to the next step, and each step has typically gone off with little or no crying or other problems.

I’m not saying our approach is for everyone, but I do think you should consider your reasons for wanting to move your daughter. You might find some intermediate solution that suits everyone if you can figure what’s really at issue – keeping the crib close enough that she can be put back in it after nursing, using one of the sidecar-type “cosleeper” cribs that is enclosed on three sides and open on the fourth, which is designed to overlap onto your bed, putting him on a mattress, or a futon, or something similar on the floor in your room, etc.

Above all, don’t let anyone sell you the idea that you have to make your children sleep by themselves early on or they never will. You need to find a modus vivendi (or should I say modus dormendi?) that works for you. And if you consider that for most of the time that humans have existed as a species, infants and toddlers have generally slept in very close proximity to one or both parents, and have only been relegated to separate beds and rooms in the last hundred and fifty years or so, and that most humans raised this way have in fact grown up to be able to go to sleep and stay asleep on their own, the notion that you must “break the habit” early seems particularly absurd.

10

As you can see from the previous posts, there are a lot of different ways to raise children. IMHO, most kids raise up okay in the long run whether you go with the kinda-strict method or the touchy-feely method. You’ve just got to decide which way you want to go – and be sure that you and your wife are in agreement. My husband and I are on the kinda-strict side: among other things we didn’t have a family bed. Our kids started sleeping in their own beds exclusively as soon as they were weaned off the breast (age 9 months for my son, and from the start with my daughter – she wasn’t breast-fed). Dori never cried much when we put her down (she wasn’t used to sleeping with us anyway, and even though she didn’t sleep through the night consistantly until age 3, she always settled down quickly enough when I put her in her crib). Nick cried for close to 45 minutes the first night, 20 or so the second, 5 or so for the next few nights and within the week went to sleep with minimal fussing thereafter. However, if you decide to use the kinda-strict method in this (and all other instances) it WILL NOT WORK unless you and your wife are united in it. If you put the kid in the crib and let her cry for a few minutes and your wife breaks and lets her up, then you’ll never get the baby trained AND you’ll end up with problems between you and your wife. Decide on the policy together and agree to help each other stick to whatever it is. Good luck – those early years are both precious and exhausting!

11

Jois:

I don’t have to imagine it! For one day (today) I do have that! (Today is the little one’s first birthday, and tomorrow is her oldest brother’s fourth.

robinh:

The latter. It was tolerable when she was smaller, but I’ve actually fallen out of the bed a few times now, and my neck and back are killing me.

rackensack (and others):

That’s what’s kept us doing what we do until now. But she’s just gotten too darned big for this…the bed will no longer hold three with reasonable comfort (see above), and she certainly ain’t gonna stay there forever, whereas I plan to.

To all who recommended books:

Thanks. I will definitely be looking these up.

Chaim Mattis Keller