A mum-of-two has claimed she can get a baby to sleep for a full uninterrupted eight hours of sleep – with a touch of trickery. We kid you not.
According to Yahoo parenting, Florida-based mum, Karen Kirsner devised her own formula after trying to get her first born to sleep using various strategies that didn’t work.
The method came from combining and reordering tried and tested sleep training methods, which resulted in her subsequent children sleeping through the night from the ages of seven and six weeks.
Don’t tell me you’re not tempted to find out what she does!
So, she calls it progressive watching – not crying it out – but not immediately responding to a babies cry. “Instead of just jumping up the second your baby starts to cry, wait 30 seconds,” she says. “They just may have some gas.”
She found the method so successful; she has gone on to self-publish a book revealing all her methods. It’s called The Baby ‘Fast to Sleep’ Formula.
She told Yahoo: “Crying is a baby’s only way of communicating with you. So if they need you — if they need to be changed or fed — they will let you know. Otherwise, sometimes you’re creating a need, and they get used to it. They think, ‘I make a noise, and they come running.’”
She advises parents to increase slowly the time they wait before going in to check on a crying babying – waiting 30 seconds, then one minute, by the time they are eight weeks old, she says to give it five minutes.
She also suggests to stretch out the time little-by-little between feedings too – a combination of the right feeding times and the right amounts of food help her method succeed.
She is pretty confident that parents sticking to her formula from day one will get a full eight hours sleep a night by the time their newborn is, eh, eight weeks old!
Consistency is key, notes Kirsner. “You start to put the work in and then have a rough night, break the consistency, and you have to start all over,” she says. “Having a good support system helps and goes a long way.
This approach is not for everybody, and as our our resident sleep expert advises, you shouldn’t approach any type of sleep training until the baby is at least 12 weeks. Read her advise here. We think you would need to invest in the book and determine exactly how her methods work before trying this out.
What do you think, readers, is this too young to start testing out any new sleep methods or is it best to be there to comfort the minute any baby cries?
Here’s how our sleep expert thinks a little sleep coaching works. Tell us more: editorial@HerFamily.ie.
