Wiessbluth method

It works. I was amazed at how efficient it was. All it took was one night, and 15 minutes of discomfort (to say the least)

I am talking about Neil's sleeping habit. He was a fussy sleeper. Even as a 4 month old he tried to fight off sleep, especially when we were around. And since he had difficulty falling asleep we always used to be around to help him. He also never slept through the night except for a brief period of 1 month when he was 3 months old. Sure, our method of making him go to sleep at a fixed time were helping, but that did not do anything for his nightly arousals. Lately Lisa was getting very tired as she did not get good continuous sleep. He would wake up about five to six times a night, and needed to be comforted to get back to sleep.

So we decided to bite the bullet and went for the cold turkey, Weissbluth method. It involves letting a child cry to his sleep. This sounds very ruthless, but the underlying philosophy is teaching the child to soothe himself, and be self reliant in this matter. In his excellent book (name?) he discusses the importance of continous sleep and getting enough of it. He looks at it as an important skill for lifetime.

But from a parent's viewpoint it is a drastic step. We went through the nightly routine, and instead of patting him to sleep, put him in the crib and walked out of the dark room. We sat outside. And he cried. It was a harrowing experience. He kept crying for a while. We could tell that he was some times standing up in the crib, sometimes he was looking through the crib bars towards our bed to look for us. He cried harder and pitifully. We wanted to go inside so badly. But the book said that he had to convince himself that there was no danger there. Going into the room at this point to soothe him would have reinforced just the opposite of what we had wanted. Lisa grew anxious, my mom was almost in tears and I too was shaken. Lisa was telling me about kids that cry for an hour or even two hours in some cases. Somehow after 10 long minutes the crying was not as intense. Fifteen minutes later the crying stopped. We ventured inside after another 15 minutes or so, and he was sound asleep. Even though he woke up couple times during the night, he went back to sleep without our assistance.

Tonight we thought he might cry, but amazingly, when my mom kept him in the crib, he went to sleep almost immediately, within about 5 minutes without crying at all. After 15 minutes I checked, he was sound asleep.

It is hard to explain how relieved Lisa is. This has been the most important thing for her lately. I am glad for her that everything turned out so well and so smoothly too. We wonder why we did not try this earlier. But oh well, we are thankful that he finally has learned to sleep.