Ferber Method, Twins and Our Approach

When my wife and I learned that we were having twins, the joy we felt was indescribable. These were our first children and we obviously felt humbled and overwhelmed by the challenge in front of us. As two very well educated and very smart inidividuals, we spent hours reading, talking to friends, talking to family, trying to fill our brains with every morsel of information to help us be the best parents we could be. But the truth is, parents, and especially parents of twins, should prepare themselves as much as possible and then realize that everyday they will face something for which they have no preparation. With this mind, every parent should include in their preparation, a plan for getting rest. And for parents of twins, the Ferber method and your approach to it will aide you in getting your sanity back.

For those people new to the Ferber method, it is a process of teaching your infants to put themselves to sleep and also self-sooth and put themsleves back to sleep when they awake from normal sleep cycles during the night. It it done by essentially creating increasing time intervals in between which you will go into their room for no more than 2 minutes and provide comfort and then leave until they ultimately fall asleep. You repeat this process if the child awakes during the night. Some people refer to it as the "cry it out" method but this is only true if you the parent ignore the individuals needs of your child and apply his method blindly. Dr. Ferber describes many of sleep problems experienced by children and tries to lay out a plan for parents to improve the sleep habits of their infants and thus provide better sleep for the parents as well. He does provide general guidance on how his method should not be used when the child is going through seperation anxiety, teething or other developmental milestones. But like many doctors in America today, he fails to provide the necessary guidance around taking the individual into account when prescribing treatment. It is my opinion, if parents decide to apply the Ferber method, it should be done with their own individual approach to their child's needs. With the following account of mine and my wife's experience, I hope to detail how we incorporated using the Ferber method but also paid attention to the individual child's needs into a successful effort to improve the sleep of our twins and of us.

I may be a bit mistaken on when Dr. Ferber recommends first being able to use his method. I seem to remember him stating that parents should wait until atleast 6-8 months. In my opinion, 10 months should be the minimum to try and start this process. Again, this just seemed the right time for our twins. The fact is, for the first year, you will be exhausted beyond any concept of exhaustion that you may have floating in you heads. Remember this is a long term approach.

At month ten, after having read Dr. Ferber's book, my wife and I made a plan on how to apply it our kids. Our twins were in seperate rooms becase they were less likely to wake eachother up if one of them awoke during the night. We decided to try and start them on the process at the same time. As a note, Dr. Ferber recommends not picking your kids up from their cribs, but for us this did not make sense because our kids showed no aversion to going back in their cribs when we picked them up. We decided that at the first and second intervals, we would pick them up and then make assessments at each subsequent interval. We also continually talked gently to our kids telling them that we were able to sleep on their own and we loved them.

After several nights, we quickly realized that one of our twins was not taking well to the approach and was obviously not ready. We decided to move his crib into our room, thus, allowing my wife to comfort him to sleep and allowing me to continue with the other twin. After several weeks of improvement, the night came when our son finally put himself to sleep and slept through the night. We continued to have our other son in our room for several more weeks and then we moved his crib back into his room and continued to comfort him to sleep. At about 11 months, we decided to try again with our second twin. It was clear from the start this time, that he was ready. Again, after several weeks of improvement, he finally put himself to sleep on his own. He contninued to wake several times at night, but with a little comfort was able to put himself back to sleep in his crib. Our twins are now 23 months old and the first twin continues to sleep through the night while the second twin always wakes up once or twice. They are who they are. And I am so happy that my wife and I were aware enough even in our sleep deprived state to understand the needs of the individual and make our plans accordingly. They are much happier inidividuals as a result.

I purposely left out specifics on what lead us to the conclusion that our kids were ready or not ready for this approach. I believe the important concept is to pay attention to the individual kids' needs and make your best assessment on them. The misguided application of packaged approaches can be harmful to children and I think it is our greatest responsibility as parents to pay attention to the individual needs our of children and try to meet them. We may fail at times which is natural. But our awareness of our kids' individuality will always pay long term dividends in their development.