Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems

by Richard Ferber

Perhaps you’ve had the experience of waking during the night just enough to notice your pillow missing. Most likely, instead of going straight back to sleep, you wakened a little more, enough to find the pillow on the floor and pull it back into bed before returning to sleep. But if you couldn’t find it right away, you probably wouldn’t be able to ignore it and go back to sleep. Instead, you’d become more fully awake so you could look around for it. If you still couldn’t find it, eventually you might turn on the light, get out of bed, and begin searching the room. You might get angry and perhaps curse—showing the same kind of frustration that a child shows by crying. Even if your pillow falls out of your bed once or twice every night, it will hardly disturb your sleep: retrieving the pillow from the floor doesn’t require you to wake up very much or for very long. But suppose that you are physically unable to get the pillow yourself, and you have to call someone else—perhaps a nurse—to come into the room to replace it whenever you wake up and find it missing. The nurse will soon learn that once you have your pillow back you’ll fall asleep quickly, but your frequent wakings during the night might still seem abnormal to him or her. To stretch the analogy a bit further, suppose you discover that someone has been sneaking into your room each night and stealing your pillow. Once you know that, you might have trouble falling asleep at bedtime for fear that the pillow will be take...