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No Sleep
My son won’t sleep.
He is eight months old and he has slept through the night exactly once!
Of course that was the night I was up all night with my older son with the Croup.
I’m getting to the end of my rope.
I have had much unasked for advice, so much in fact that I have stopped talking about Ian's sleeping, or unsleeping habits, with everyone but my close
friends.
I have been told to feed him just before bed, not to feed him before bed, let him cry, pick him up, keep his room warm, make his room cooler; everything in fact, except what I’m doing.
I’ll admit it – I bring him into my bed and nurse him.
Then he stays in my bed the rest of the night.
My mother-in-law would take great pleasure in reading this column if she had a computer.
Her prophecy that I would never get my son out of my bed seems to be coming true.
Of course, she said that with my first son, and he sleeps just fine in his own room, in his own bed.
That is one reason why I didn’t really hesitate to have a family bed and nurse Ian ‘on demand’ at night.
Alex slept six hours a night from the first night we brought him home.
He has a very different personality from Ian, who nursed every hour and a half around the clock when we first came home with him.
I have read and heard much of “Ferberizing.”
Dr. Ferber, as the director of the Center for Pediatric Sleep Disorders at the Children’s Hospital in Boston, wrote the book, literally, Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems.
A controversial method that includes letting your child cry for ever increasing time periods, Ferber is both revered and reviled.
Revered by those who have tried his methods and are now peacefully sleeping through the night.
Reviled by those of us high and mighty, but very tired, can’t-let-my-baby cry no matter how tired I am.
I think I’m just tired enough to start considering letting him cry.
While not all the experts and doctors agree with Ferber’s methods, ALL of them agree that no child over six months old NEEDS to eat in the middle of the night.
So Ian wants to eat, and I want to cuddle him, because he’s very active now and doesn’t cuddle much during the day.
I’m weighing that need to cuddle him with my very real and ever increasing need to sleep.
Everything is suffering because of my lack of sleep.
My relationship with my husband, the parenting of my sons, my writing, even my health has been less than stellar. Eight months of less than five hours of sleep a night takes a toll.
So is the answer to let him cry it out?
 In Positive Discipline: The First Three Years, Jane
Nelsen, Cheryl Erwin, and Roslyn Duffy have a whole chapter devoted to sleeping.
In it, they discuss Ferberizing versus the family bed, and suggest that families do what works for them.
Some families allow their children to sleep in their bed, some allow their children to come into Mom and Dad’s bed on the weekend mornings. However, they do suggest right in the first paragraph of the chapter that; “Many power
struggles over sleeping as your child grows can be avoided if you help your child learn to get to sleep by herself as early in her life as possible.” (Positive Discipline: The First Three Years, Nelsen, Erwin, Duffy , page 129)
What they don’t discuss and I haven’t seen discussed in conjunction with the Ferber method, is what to do with the other children in the household.
Surely I am not the only parent who’s children either share a bedroom or whose bedrooms are so close together that extended crying causes wakefulness in the older children.
Certainly this becomes problematic as Alex has school and I will be the first to admit that he can be a real pain without enough sleep.
Remember, this is the same boy who slept six hours a night from the first night he came home.
His sleep needs have only increased as he has gotten older. Now it’s not uncommon for him to take a two-hour nap, go to bed by 8:30pm and not wake until 7:30 or 8:00am.
So although I might be ready to let Ian cry, and accept those consequences, I’m not willing to let Alex pay the price as well.
Somehow I’m going to have to find a happy medium.
Somewhere there is a solution to the sleep deprivation.
I think I’m just too tired to see it.
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