Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems

by Richard Ferber

If you have chosen to work on the nighttime hunger problem first and change sleep associations second, then don’t change the bedtime ritual yet. Let your child fall asleep in your arms during or after feeding, if that is what she has been doing. If she wakes and cries before it’s time for her next feeding, you can try to comfort her, if it helps. Do whatever seems to comfort her most: hold her, soothe her, rock her, or talk to her. The purpose is only to calm her down and help her fall asleep while she learns not to expect a feeding. Sometimes it’s best not even to try to help: if she sleeps in her own room, she may become more upset if you go in but refuse to feed her, and she may calm down more quickly without you there. If you are a nursing mother, it may be difficult to hold your child without nursing her. You may have a letdown response, and your child will smell the milk and expect to nurse. In a two-parent family, it is often easier for the non-nursing parent to settle the child at times when she is not being fed. Your child may still seem a bit frustrated, but in this way she will learn not to expect you and to nurse so often during the night.