Ciao Baby FAQ
What is "Controlled Crying"?
The aim of the method is to teach a baby how to go to sleep by themselves, without the need of parental assistance (e.g. Rocking, pacing, or late night drives listening to "The Boss" play on the car stereo).In addition to removing stress at bedtime, it can also help the baby to re-settle themselves if they wake up during the night - which means lots more sleep for everyone in the house!
How Does It Work?
The method is often thought of as just leaving the baby to cry for as long as it takes to go to sleep, but it's not that mean! Here's an example of how it works:- Prepare the baby (We'll call him Murray, because every third person here in New Zealand is called Murray) for bedtime.This can be a bath, massage, stories, cuddles, and generally calming down before it's time to go to sleep.
- Put Murray in his crib awake (This is the important part, as it helps Murray get used to going to sleep unaided) and leave the room.
- If Murray keeps crying, then return to the room after a short period of time (say 2 minutes), to gently pat and re-assure him (Without getting him back up) and then leave the room again.
- Repeat this process with ever increasing periods of time between your visits to settle Murray. A simple method is to double the "Wait" period each time (e.g. 2 minutes, then 4 minutes, then 8 minutes etc), but you can set the wait to whatever period makes you feel comfortable.
Is It Effective?
The method isn't for everyone, but we used it with both of our children, and they are now great sleepers.We frequently found ourselves about to get Murray (He's back to protect the innocent) up because we were sure that he wasn't going to settle, but after being distracted by something else for a couple of minutes we found Murray had actually gone to sleep. If we hadn't waited those extra couple of minutes, we could have found ourselves keeping Murray up for another 20 minutes, which would have made him over-tired (and harder to get to sleep), and us more stressed!
