On the importance of RTFM

Jason Yanowitz — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 12:16:00 -0400

So, many moons ago, we “Ferberized” our baby and life was good. Our ability to make decisions rationally returned (albeit slowly) and our child was incredibly happy. She would go to sleep at 6:30 and sleep until 7 or 8 the next morning. Cut forward a year.

Over the past few months, her bedtime slowly slipped to 7-7:30. Her nap time at daycare was different than her naptime at home. And she began getting up at 5:00am.

There’s a new edition of Richard Ferber’s Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems and it’s fantastic. (Although I’m sure money was also a factor, he says he wrote the book because of updates in sleep science in the last 20 years and to correct all the mischaracterizations of his work—he wrote it originally to counter the “let them cry” approach to sleep problems.)

Anyway, it turns out that by the time you are two, you only need about 10 hours of sleep a night. I whipped out by calculator. It turns out that you put your two year old down to sleep at 7pm, she’s going to wake up at 5am (I double checked the math).

So, starting last night, we are doing a new bed time—8:30 to 9:00. She went down at 8:45 last night and woke up at 6:40 (I am willing to except an error of 5 minutes). So with one data point (datum), the results are in: Woo hoo!

(Oh yeah—we are also going to have nap time the same every day.)

Remember parents—always RTFM.

yanoblog: On the importance of RTFM

On the importance of RTFM