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Most Popular Sleep Training Methods Essay

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As a pediatric Sleep Coach, I define sleep training as anything a parent does to help their child sleep better during the night or for naps. It often includes working on having a child fall asleep without being held or fed. There are several different types of sleep training methods, and within each type, there may be more than one variation. In my experience as a Sleep Coach I have seen that the more gentle the method, the longer the training may take. This is something important to consider when deciding which sleep training method to use. For the first three years of my son’s life, I rarely slept through the night because he almost never did. Not only was this a very tiring time of my life, it was very confusing. I was reading a lot …show more content…

The idea is that once a child knows how to fall asleep on their own, they will not need the parent to help them go back to sleep. I have found that Cry It Out is one of the most commonly recommended sleep methods, perhaps because it has the most simple instructions: “Let your child cry until they fall asleep”. Parental intervention is not required, so it can go faster than other methods and there are less opportunities for the parent to be inconsistent; however, many parents don't like leaving their child not knowing what is going on with them. For example, a parent who let the baby cry for one and a half hours and finally gave up and went in to the room only to find their baby had a bowel movement at some point in that time. Graduated Extinction Often parents associate Dr. Richard Ferber with the Cry It Out method; however, he never used this term in his book.[5] Graduated Extinction is most correctly associated with Dr. Ferber and The Ferber Method. The difference with Graduated Extinction and the Cry It Out method is that with Graduated Extinction, the parent checks in on the child periodically. For example, the parent starts out at leaving the child for three minutes, then five minutes, and then 10 minutes. The parent subsequently begins increasing the amount of time in between each check in. Parents do different variations of this. My recommendation is checking in every seven

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