I told them to expect the first night or two to be difficult—though only rarely will a child cry for several hours—but by the third or fourth night things should be going fairly well. I also told them that if things were not improving markedly over the first few days, or at any time that they decided that the amount of crying was more than they were willing or able to accept, that we would consider shifting to an even more gradual multistep approach (as described in the next section).
