Quotes from Richard Ferber

Also, don't allow naps to run so late (past 4:00 P.M., perhaps) that they will interfere with falling asleep at night.

At any point, if she stopped crying or subsided to mild whimpering between checks, they were not to go back in:

If later in the night Betsy woke up and began crying hard again, they would restart the same pattern as at bedtime, waiting for three minutes, then five minutes, and working back up to ten minutes.

If Betsy was still asleep at 7:00 A.M., they would get her up no matter how much she'd been awake during the night.

At nap times, Betsy's parents would use the same routine. But if after half an hour Betsy had either cried the whole time or had fallen asleep and wakened again, they would end that nap period.

It is not practice in crying but practice in falling asleep under new conditions that a child needs to learn. If you are going to rock your baby to sleep in the end, you would do better to rock him at once and skip the crying altogether.

Eventually he will simply find it preferable to go back to sleep than to cry for fifteen or twenty minutes knowing he won't be rewarded with rocking, holding, or nursing. At the same time, he is learning to fall asleep, and feel comfortable, alone in the crib or bed.

A newborn enters REM sleep immediately after falling asleep. By about three months of age she will enter non-REM first, a pattern that will continue for the rest of her life.

Thus, in children, the first three or four hours of the night are spent mainly in very deep sleep from which the child is not easily roused. Parents are often aware of this fact, because the period of lighter sleep that follows, with more frequent wakings, may well begin at about the time they are going to sleep themselves.

When the baby is around three months old, daytime sleep settles into a three-nap pattern, with the main naps in the midmorning and midafternoon and, generally, a brief nap in the early evening.

The term circadian rhythms refers to biological cycles that repeat about every twenty-four hours.

But by about three months of age most full-term healthy infants are able to sleep through most of the night. If your baby still has more than one or two nightly wakings at that age, or if he still hasn't "settled" (started sleeping through the entire night) by five or six months, then you should take a close look at his bedtime routines.

But failing to take the children's individual needs into account does not do them justice. There is no reason the child with the shorter sleep requirement should stay in bed longer than he needs to, for example, just because his brother sleeps later.

By three or four months of age they will be getting most of their sleep at night, usually including an unbroken stretch of five to nine hours.

If instead you allow the times of your child's feedings, playtimes, baths, and other activities to change constantly, chances are his sleep will become irregular as well.

It is equally important to help our children maintain consistent schedules through infancy, childhood, and adolescence.

By age two, your child should still sleep about nine to ten hours at night, with a one- to two-hour nap after lunch—about eleven and a half hours total.

So don't let your two- or three-year-old decide what time he should go to bed—many would wait until they were so sleepy they could not stay awake any longer. Before long his schedule would be disrupted, becoming inconsistent and unpredictable

So if you are beginning to address a sleep problem in your child, be sure to set up a firm schedule and stick to it rigorously for several weeks after your child has begun sleeping well again.

If you can figure out why your child is sleeping poorly and make the necessary changes, he should be sleeping well much sooner—usually within a few days, two weeks at the most.

In particular, there should be no sneaking about. Sneaking away from a child at night does not foster trust, and a sense of trust is important for good sleep.

Each time you go to your child, spend no more than one or two minutes with him. Remember, your job is to reassure him (and yourself), not necessarily to help him stop crying, and certainly not to help him fall asleep: the goal is for him to learn to fall asleep on his own.

If your child wakes during the night, restart the schedule with the minimum waiting time for that night and work up to the maximum again from there.

Use the same waiting schedule for naps, but if your child has not fallen asleep after half an hour, or if he is awake again and calling or crying vigorously after even a short period of sleep, end that nap time.