Sleep Training

Any parent of an infant or toddler will say, every moment your child is asleep is a gift from the Great God Almighty. When The Boy is asleep, I do my best to walk one inch off the ground to avoid any footfalls or floor-squeaks. I remove a glass from the pantry as if I was removing the “funnybone” in Operation (the Whacky Doctor Game). I “shush” the water as it runs from the tap. Of course, The Wife can stomp and clank to her heart’s content and The Boy will never wake up.

Until recently, we had a few methods for getting The Boy to sleep (or “sleeping him” as it is called in our house). The best was when he fell asleep while breastfeeding, and The Wife would carefully stand and reposition him in her arms, then tip-toe to his bedroom and lay him gingerly in the crib. Then, slowly lift the guardrail (which is frustratingly sticky), and creep from the room.

The worst way was to clutch him belly to belly, with his legs around her waist, rocking and singing to him until he conked out. This often began with much “I don’t want to go to sleep now” wailing, with screaming interludes when he would snap out of this hypnosis and realize what we were up to. Then, when he was finally out, the same tip-toe process began.

Around midnight he would usually stir, at which point The Wife would go into the bedroom and join him on a futon on the floor. At 4 or 5am, The Boy would start crawling all over the place, whacking The Wife in the face, banging on the wall to the room I had fallen asleep in an hour earlier, and sometimes even find his way into the kitchen unattended. There I’d find him juggling knives or chewing on broken glass. It was a nightmare.

So, The Wife was at a get-together with some other neighborhood mamas the other day, and one friend was raving about a book she had read and followed about putting your baby to bed. The Wife picked one up used for a few hundred yen on Amazon. It was your typical, drawn out baby book—like Happiest Baby on the Block. The kind that could have been 20 pages but somehow they manage to make it 250 pages. She read it one evening and put a plan in action.

Those of you who have kids and have already been through all this might find it elementary, but I found it to be nothing short of a miracle. The first night you gently plop your child awake in his crib. Oh, he’ll howl and screech! Give him a few soothing words (inaudible, of course, under the din) and then cheerfully walk from the room. For the next 5 minutes, endure every urge to run in and comfort your child. No matter how he gasps, snuffles and sputters. After the five minutes are up, go in and say hi. Don’t pick him up. Just give him some comforting words and, after one minute, take your leave. Repeat until he is asleep.

Surprisingly, it only took a few visits before he finally fell asleep. When he woke up in the middle of the night, we just went through the same routine. The next night, 5 minutes becomes 7 minutes. The following night, 7 becomes 10. By that point we didn’t really need to go in at all. He’d whimper a bit when we’d lay him down, but then he’d be out.

Supporting this plan is a rigid nap schedule. Two scheduled 1 to 1 1/2 hour naps during the day, and the 2nd nap needs to end before 4 hours before bedtime (i.e. his bedtime is 8pm, he needs to be up from his 2nd nap by 4pm). The naps can sometimes be a little more tearful, but not much. It has been a few weeks since we started this and it still amazes me every time he falls asleep. Sometimes I miss hearing The Wife’s lullabies from the other room, but I know she really appreciates the extra time she has been blessed with.

Update

Once The Boy outgrew his crib, which was not long after this post, we made the mistake of falling into the same routine of “sleeping” him. Now, 9 months later, we are beginning once again to train him to sleep on his own.