Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems

by Richard Ferber

Victoria was a nine-month-old girl with this problem. Her parents wanted her to sleep for ten hours a night, from 8:30 P.M. to 6:30 A.M. Victoria did get ten hours of nighttime sleep, but she got them between 7:00 P.M. and 5:00 A.M. Her parents were particularly unhappy about the early-morning wakings. On several occasions they kept Victoria up until 8:30 P.M., with great difficulty; she woke at 5:00 A.M. anyway, unhappy from loss of sleep. Her parents saw no point in continuing that approach. Victoria obviously had an early sleep phase, but her parents’ attempts to change it by moving only her bedtime had not worked. We needed to look at the rest of her schedule. Since she woke at five every morning, her parents were feeding her at that time. They gave her lunch at eleven and supper at 4:30 in the afternoon. She napped for an hour at eight o’clock in the morning and again at noon, after lunch. In short, her entire schedule was shifted too early, not just her wake-up time. If everything in her daily routine could be moved one or two hours later, the problem would go away. That was what we had to do. If we had kept trying to move Victoria’s nighttime sleep later without adjusting the rest of her schedule, we would have faced a couple of potential problems. First of all, because she was being fed at five in the morning—not unreasonably, given when she was falling asleep—she had learned to be hungry then. If we only made her bedtime later, she might still wake at five, no lon...