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We used Weissbluth at an early age and were the envy of all our friends. While I was pregnant I read all the sleep books because I was so terrified of sleep deprivation - I knew it was a necessary evil for a while, but wanted to get back to a regular schedule as soon as possible. We settled on Weissbluth because for us it seemed the cleanest and most simple. I was afraid we wouldn't be able to really be consistent with Ferber.

What I love now is that when my son does cry in the middle of the night, we know that something is really wrong and don't hesistate to go in. This hasn't happened more than 10x since we completely sleep trained, which was over 2 years ago. My son who is almost three knows bedtime is bedtime, and if he isn't ready to go to sleep he plays quite happily in his bed until he gets tired. Then he just goes to sleep.

Proper sleep is so important to a child's cognitive, social, emotional and physical development. Parents who don't insititute a sleep schedule very early are harming their children.

We let Isabella cry out for 2 days (only for 15 minutes each day at full blown power!). That was a while ago. after that, she goes to sleep without crying. even to nap time. The best thing ever. She started sleeping well after 4.5 months old. from 7 PM to 8AM. Right now (23 months) she sleps from 8:00 PM to 8:00 AM since she goes to school.

joel maria pirela

I'm glad you are all getting your sleep but its strange to frame this discussion with the assumption that we have a sleep training story.
I just wanted to chime in and say we are a happy co-sleeping family, including on-demand night nursing. There are no tears and lots of sleep all the way around. We are prepared to continue this way of nighttime parenting until our daughter no longer needs it. This is not the path that matches all families well, but we can't imagine doing it any other way.

Our first child was no problem putting to bed once we had a routine in place-pajamas, lights lowered, books read, hugs & kisses and a short lullaby. Then number 2 made us realize how naive we were. He demands a lot more, wakes easily, has slept in our bed way more than we ever wanted, rises with the sun, walks into our room and demands to get in our bed for the last 45 minutes we sleep. He's now 2.

Interestingly, my husband now recalls being a small child and doing almost the same things to his parents. His dad would scoop him up out of their bed in the morning, put him out in the hall, close the door-AND LOCK IT!

We are getting regular sleep now, so the morning wake up call is being tolerated for now. Beware any disruption of your routine for a cold or teething or vacation, it can set your child back and you'll have to reset the sleeping ritual. But it works. Good luck and good sleep!

my goodness, this topic has carried over to AT: the nursery now? i thought this was a design blog, not a parenting forum. i am here to read about cute eye candy for kids' rooms, not to read about how to let an infant scream until he gives up and falls asleep out of sheer exhaustion. thumbs down.

Ny son is a 5'10", size 13 shoe, 13 year old now.

When we brought him home from the hospital, he had been in the NICU for his first month, the result of a malpractice case (he is fine now).

The NICU taught him to wake up every 45 minutes and it was a nightmare! My husband and I made a deal- one of us was "on duty" every other night. On your night "off" we could get most of a nights sleep.

We worked really hard patting and rubbing, but not picking up our son (drs recommendation). In a couple of months, he was self soothing and sleeping through the night.

To this day, he is a wonderful sleeper, always wakes up in time for school and is a cheerful kid. This may not work for everyone, but sure did work for us!!

Ok, we are mid- sleep camp. to add one more to your list of books tried, we also tried the mindell (the babycenter woman) book. the mindell advocates a moderate CIO at bedtime (similar to ferber) and says that overnight wakings will right themselves. also, we continued to soothe down for naps (as per the mindell). upshot is that we let our 7 month old cry at bedtime every night for 2 months until i was ready to jump out of my skin (and divorce my husband). such stress can only be envisioned by other parents who have been through it (i think).

our particular problem was that our son slept through the night very early, and then stopped just before 5 months. so i was convinced that he knew how to self-soothe, but he just wasn't doing it all the time. anyway, after trying mindell for so long, we called everything off for a couple of weeks and just rocked him down. then we found a consultant, a nurse from a sleep disorder clinic, who walked us through a system that we are using now.

the essence is a ferber system of crying with check-ins, but it starts out using one parent (who had not been doing most of the soothing) then the other and we started with bedtime, then moved quickly to naps and now we're dealing with nighttime wakings. the bedtime and naptime falling asleep is now down to less than 10 minutes and i'm holding my breath for the overnights. it really is working and i think the upshot is that staging things can help if you can't deal with a lot of crying all at once, but it drags out the process. for us, it was the balance that we could handle.

congrats to you guys and ursula! it must be amazing to have your life back and your perfect baby back! keep your fingers crossed for us...

sorry for the monster post -- this topic has possessed me for months!

lb - absolutely right. I wanted to bring up the topic of sleep in the home, and didn't meant to frame it as all sleep training, but then I'd expect people to jump in and add their angle if necessary. Of course, not everyone even NEEDS to sleep train, as some children fall into it naturally.

exxon23 - are we a design blog? yes. But I believe that design extends to much more than the stuff you buy or make for your home. Design is about how you use your home, and issues like sleeping and children are certainly open to discussion here.

We do the same thing with our interpretation of design on all our other sites, and I hope that it makes us a touch more relevant and interesting than simply being a product blog.

That said, don't worry, we're not going to turn into a parenting forum. It's just a little salt and pepper in our mix.

We have our second child now and we sleep trained (Ferber) her at 6 months when she suddenly started waking up more and more frequently. We trained my son (now 2.5 years) only at 9 months and that was after 9 months of 2-hourly wakings and endless hours searching the internet for solutions and support. Until I finally couldn't handle it any longer and decided to bite the bullet. It was tough. We had more complicated issues with him, which Ferber also addressed; my son moved his day earlier and earlier - I still have his sleep charts on my computer. I think part of the reason it just went from bad to worse with him is that we initially followed Elizabeth Pantley's technique, which REALLY didn't work, and her method relies a lot on you doing the soothing bit. With both my children the crying lasted a maximum of 3 days and never longer than 15 minutes at a time, but we armed ourselves with a bottle of red wine every night and all of us were the better for it afterwards. You have to occasionally "re-train" them after a trip away and when you break the rules, but it's usually only for one night and I now love listening to my 8-month old daughter chatting away to herself before she falls asleep. She also wakes up happy and not screaming like my son used to do. I can really recommend the Ferber method, it's the least amount of pain involved with the best long-term results.

you guys must be getting good sleep because this has been the hot topic around the AT universe lately i see.

anyways, i guess that's the thing - does anyone really need "sleep training"? i guess we see it as something coming out of a parenting choice and not any kind of biological/emotional/etc need. even just the phrase sounds weird to me.

but we can agree to disagree on that point.

we can agree to agree however, that the design choices we make in building our everyday environment are inseparable from the choices we make living in it. so its all relevant. (so you won't find us commenting on many crib threads, because we dont even have one.)

- k
(posting from the other side of lb's cosleeping bed)

I can certainly understand deviating from paint colors and "stuff" and decorating in order to cover topics that promote more desirable lifestyles within our homes (organization, decluttering tips, etc) but I would draw the line long before this point. Most of these sleep "training" (anyone else see anything wrong with the use of this word for babies and children, as if they are pets?) books and methods are bogus and harmful to the mental and physical development of newborns and infants. "Crying-it-out" is associated with failure to thrive and SIDS.
Babies sleep plenty - as much as they ought to. They will fall asleep when they are tired and when their needs are met. If your baby is screaming or crying and not going to sleep at night, ask yourself if he is hungry, wet/poopy, cold, hot, in pain. It's really very simple: Once his diaper is dry, his belly is full, and he is able to relax with the comfort of his caretakers' arms, he will sleep. No "training" or screaming necessary. Just be prepared for it to not happen exactly on YOUR time table (in which case, oh well!). This is the method I have used - love and logic - and my son is thriving and nursing and growing and... sleeping!

I can totally understand. I have a three month old and I loath when people tell me they are tired. Try waking up 3 times during the night for feedings and diaper changes!!!

Where have all the comments gone?

I stopped eating dairy (i'm breastfeeding) which helped, she would be gassy and cry because of that. And we cosleep, so whenever she needs to feed, I just roll over and do. I don't even have to fully wake up. It's awesome, and we are very fortunate that this works out for us. Out of the five months since Maggie has been alive, we have had only about 2 sleepless nights. I'm serious. Some nights she fusses a bit more than others (usually if I sneak a little dairy in).

http://www.nd.edu/~jmckenn1/lab/

This site has a lot of good information about healthy co-sleeping.

It's all about finding what works best for your family.

Love Dr. McKenna! He has a new book out on co-sleeping too.

Our own sleep story was a blend of obsessive research and a baby who responded beautifully to our efforts to lay a good early foundation for sleep. Since my husband and I had experienced all manner of sleep problems since we were young, we were worried that that would be a legacy we'd pass along to our daughter (along with dry skin and unruly hair). While pregnant and suffering through rounds of insomnia I read all the big sleep books including those that were firmly against sleep training, did medline research on infant sleep physiology, and invested in a baby hammock just in case she was inclined towards colic (she wasn't but I still can't say enough about the Baby Hammock -- her bed for her first six months, a great supplement to all the information).

I'd heard so many mentions of Ferber that seemed to treat his method as this draconian option, the worst possible way to go. And yet, it became clear while reading that most of the research-based books were working off his research. So I read Ferber, and within a few pages it became clear that he didn't want babies to be sad and lonely in their beds; he wasn't a bad man. He wanted babies to be happy, and well-rested.

The science behind his research was profoundly convincing to us; among the elements that I found the most helpful were his recommendations for darkness in the child's room during sleep, his distinction between the brief arousals between sleep cycles and full awakening and the consequent need for parents to allow the baby to transition rather than opening the door and preventing sleep from continuing, the need for a comforting, but brief, bedtime/naptime routine, and the little reminders throughout that parents need to adapt as the babies needs change: sleep will get wonky when the baby is able to pull up, vacations, illness, etc can throw things off for a while -- for reasons known and unknown a successful sleeper will suddenly not sleep -- not the end of the world, usually just requires some minor adjustments like a slightly earlier bedtime for a while. Seeing this in print is a huge comfort when one loses the horizon and thinks, "she'll never sleep again, and neither will we."

One more thing I wanted to mention. So often "sleep training" is seen in harsh contrast to cosleeping, etc. While we went through a couple of nights of comforting her at intervals and in so doing fall into the sleep trainer camp, I encourage anyone to just take a look at Ferber (his work, not summaries). He does not dismiss cosleeping; he doesn't see his work as its polar opposite. Instead he encourages early communication between parents so they can decide on an approach and stick with it. The harm to children's sleep comes from comes from swinging back and forth. The science can be helpful to everyone. Essentially we have to compensate, once children get past 4-6 months, for electric light, traffic noise, and all manner of modern distractions that can prevent them from achieving healthy sleep.

I'm so sorry for the long post. We've been so very happy with this, I can't stop myself from proselytizing a bit. Earlier today, my two year old daughter rubbed her eyes a as I was getting her ready for her nap and said, "I sleepy. I tired. Need nap." And then she happily headed for her bed for three hours. Ferber and Weissbluth (for more developmental information) are deities in our home.

and I swear, to make up for the length of my non-design comment, I'll only weigh in on things like paint colors and the rise and fall of mid-century modern for the next ummm... two months. No more testimonials, I promise.

I'll echo what lb and karey said.

No sleep-training story here. My 3 year old is still in my bed. In 2 weeks, he'll have his own bed in his own room, but I expect that transition to be slow, gradual, and relatively drama-free, just like the transition from nursing on demand to night nursing only, the transition from night nursing to nursing to sleep only, the transition from nursing to sleep to going to sleep with his hand on my breast, and the transition from going to lseep with his hand on my breast to going to sleep lying next to me. I am really ready to begin this transition and get my bed back after 3 yrs, but I am also really going to miss our time together at night. I get to listen to his sleeptalking, which is hilarious (this week: surreal knock-knock jokes) and occasionally he wakes up in the middle of the night to mumble "I love you" and give me a kiss. Beat that!

I have had him "cry it out," but only in the last year, when I was sure he could understand I was not abandoning him. The issue was naptime, not bedtime, and he now puts himself to sleep for naps, no problem. To me, it makes all the difference in the world that he was old enough to understand why I was not responding to his cries.

I'm not claiming that co-sleeping and nursing on demand solve all sleep problems, I know they won't work for all families, and I know my child was easier than most. But don't discount them. The family bed is a pretty tried-and-true concept, having worked with great success for the vast majority of humanity throughout pretty much our entire history.

And to bring it back to design, I know of no better small-cool, de-cluttering, minimalist parenting solutions than co-sleeping and breastfeeding.

Where design and this thread intersect for me was remembering determining what to do in our tiny apartment where my son's crib was next to our bed. He would wake at night and want us to get up with him. It wasn't until we put up a curtain between us that he fully understood that nighttime was for sleeping and not for interaction. Having survived the sleep-deprived infancy of 2 boys, 5 and 2, I want to say I think it's great that there are so many choices of philosophy and so many parents who are vitally concerned that they're doing right by their babies. We co-slept with my elder for 18 months until he transitioned to crib and then bed. The younger shared our bed for only 2 months. I feel like I've worked through all the sleep possibilities and respect that there are different strokes for different folks. It's easy to feel smug when you've found your way, but please remember to have empathy for those still finding their way—it can be painful. P.S. Despite all the things I'm sure we did, and are still doing wrong, both of our kids are now happy, healthy, solid sleepers.

"Parents who don't insititute a sleep schedule very early are harming their children." Matilda - could you be more judgemental?

Catsi, I encourage you to read the research on poor sleeping habits in children and the resulting behavioral and physical ramifications. I differ with exxon that children inherently know how to sleep well. There is much research to support the theory that good sleep 'hygiene' is a skill that is learned. You can read Weissbluth and Ferber to see these studies. Or you can talk to parents who have sleep trained and ask them if their children are different after successful sleep training.

I still can't figure out benefits to cio for someone who desires a family life as opposed to a parent one and a completely separate child one. Do you do a family dinner? At what hour? How can the breadwinner be there at such an early hour? I presume then that the parents are fine with early rise times as well (while my 3 year old and I roll out of bed at 9 and I think how glad, nightowl that I am, that parenting doesn't equal 7am rise times around here)? Don't they sleep less as they get older, in which case, do they get up earlier or go to bed later? Do you follow similar strict rules and punishments on other developmental milestones such as potty training?

Catsi--Well, Matilda has demonstrated in other threads well before Ursula or the Nursery site were born that she believes in dictatorial, and what I consider cruel, parenting, so I always skip her posts anyway. I'm just annoyed to see AT becoming Baby Center, even temporarily.

You clearly don't skip my posts, since you have formed such a firm opinion of my parenting style. There are many different ways to parent. Yes, my husband and I parent in a more traditional way than many parents do these days. My son is an extremely happy and secure toddler so I don't think we are doing such a bad job. And, we also have a life as parents that is separate from our son. I don't think that makes us bad parents, just parents who recognize that we are separate beings from our child.

KatieD, I'd sworn off writing more on this, but you raise questions that I think many may have. There is no single sleep training experience, but I hope this clarifies at least one family's encounters with the aspects of sleep training that you brought up.

First, "cry it out " is, for many families including mine, a misnomer. The stories of miserable and seemingly ceaseless weeping are less associated with any particular method than with children who have developed sleep problems due to physiological problems or external distractions that prevent sleep cycles from completing. These sleep problems can apply to children who have used a crib or who are transitioning from a family bed to their own (and an earlier schedule possibly required by school attendance or something else), When a family has not chosen a family bed and decides to help reinforce natural circadian rhythms (those that we had when we rose with the sun, slept with the dark, and snoozed in dark caves) crying doesn't happen. Period. When families follow the methods for addressing existing sleep problems, the transition may be difficult, but it doesn't last long. This isn't because the child is cowed, broken by the will of sleep=obsessed parents, it is because they have learned positive associations, an understanding that sleep is something to be enjoyed. This is not to say that children who sleep in a family bed don't have such associations, but simply that there are different avenues to positive, restful, complete sleep.

As you mention, the one drawback is the earlier bedtime and the way this can limit family time. Since, for now, it is my husband who is working outside the home, he and our daughter stood to lose out on that precious time, but I would have lost out too. The way we have chosen to approach it is to modify our family meal so there is no prep time required. She eats her porridge and vegs and we share a plate of easy appetizers (last night we had pita, hummus and tomatoes), linger over the food and then play until 7:30. We don't do nighttime baths unless they are absolutely necessary as our bathroom is so tiny only one parent can fit in there with her. After she goes to bed, my husband and I cook our dinner together and talk about our days.

Early rising hasn't been a problem around here. My daughter wakes up between 7:45 and 8, and by then I really need to get moving because my old bones ache if I sleep for more than about eight hours.

As for sleeping less, most children will hold to 12 hrs for some time, and when that diminishes, the bedtime is moved in 1/2 hr increments as needed. While we can't know for sure until things shift, I expect she'll move to an 8:00 bedtime in a year or two and stick with that for a while. None of this involves strict rules and certainly NEVER punishments, but instead it involves observation and a comparison of what we see in her to what researchers have uncovered regarding the differences between adult and child sleep physiology. Regarding your secondary question of potty training, we are following a similar tack, simply observing her, listening and responding/encouraging her curiosity about all things toilet, and looking for signs of developmental readiness and willingness (she only just turned two).

Hope some of this addresses your questions. Best wishes.

sorry, should have been more clear. there may be initial crying, but it it isn't endless, it quickly shifts to a sort of grunty talking-sound, then sleep.

and with us that grunty crying only lasted a couple of days. Last comment. Sorry.

Shelby, thank you for a very reasonable, intelligent post. Although I did not choose sleep-training for my son, your post helps me understand why and how it can be a good, healthy, loving choice for some families. The extreme end of CIO, where the child really does cry himself to exhaustion and the parents must train themselves not to respond to his cries, is what scares me, but it sounds like you (and others) have found a really loving, gentle way to work it in your family.

I'll add that although my son has always been a good sleeper, and I'm extremely happy for that, potty-training has been and continues to be H-E-L-L. I want to smack all the smug, clueless parents who say "Oh, he'll just start going potty when he's ready. Have you tried letting him run around naked?" And I know this is karmic payback for all the times I pissed off sleep-deprived parents with my sleep advice.

Matilda, I do agree that we all need to learn good sleep habits. I disagree however that young babies should have a sleep schedule like that. I do not think infants are supposed to sleep through the night, especially if breastfed (since breastmilk takes less time to digest than formula). I can't really say at what age they should; I guess that's something I would judge by the individual baby, and I can't even tell you when my son started sleeping through the night. I guess that's my bottom line, none of this is one size fits all.

Who on earth ever said "cry it out" meant nights of tiny infants sobbing themselves to sleep until they passed out from exhaustion? All the "cry it out" experts advise (and it is true) that within one week your child will not cry when put to bed anymore if you sleep train them at an appropriate age (4 months and older). They also talk about working with infants who have to be fed during the night while you are sleep training (and no, it doesn't mean letting them starve while they "cry it out"). I wish everyone who was so critical of "cry it out" would actually READ the books.

I am expecting a baby, and I was thrilled to see this topic here. I actually just bought the Pantley book, and will explore others, as well. Crying it out does not mean that the child is sobbing for hours--more like crying for minutes. Besides, babies may have "natural" sleep patterns, but considering most parents have to get up and go to work, I fail to see how being a suffering martyr enriches your parental experience.

Just in case anyone wants some alternative readings, please, please read Dr. McKenna's work (referenced above). He is a sleep researcher at Notre Dame. Mary Sheedy Kurcinka's book Sleepless in America is also really good. I suppose Dr. Sears might be a bit pedestrian?
How about this?
http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/1998/04.09/ChildrenNeedTou.html
And if you'd like an anthropological perspective, try this:
http://www.kathydettwyler.org/detsleepthrough.html

I actually think that living in smaller spaces with our children can really foster some of these old, deeply old, family practices.

I also wanted to add--even though I am fanning the flames--I hope this is the last time that AT chooses to bring up sleep training. It is admittedly a topic that people are very passionate about, and it will inevitably cause conflict among those who hold disparate views.

We were those suffering martyrs Fiona mentions, and no! It did not enrich our parenting experience. When people mentioned any version of CIO (we lumped it all together) we felt they just didn't understand how much we loved him. But the truth is, he wasn't getting enough sleep. He is a restless sleeper and cosleeping was becoming co-non-sleeping for all three of us. He's always been a terrible napper, so he wasn't making up for it during the day. And he was tired. He rubbed his eyes and had little smudgy circles under them. Exxon never met my kid. He didn't need anything, he was warm and dry and well fed with two ridiculously adoring large warm bodies ready to cuddle him. What he needed, as it turns out, was more personal space to thrash around in, and the knowledge that he could indeed fall back asleep without our help. But we resisted that knowledge for a long time, however well-intentioned we were. He cried for less than a half hour for two nights. He has now slept 12 hours a night for nearly a year and has woken up in the night maybe three times.

I am NOT saying this is right for everyone. It's just our story. I agree with lb that this is a very divisive issue. I think people are so insecure about their own choices they feel compelled to judge others, which is too bad.

And I will agree with lb again to say that in some areas, like nyc, your space really influences your decisions. In our 1br, we made different choices than when we moved into our 2br.