IT’S 7pm and, as I tuck my five-year-old son Felix into bed for the night, I breathe a sigh of relief. There are no pleas for one more story or other tactics to delay bedtime, and I know he won’t wake up and wander into my room at midnight. Yes, I’m one of those mums who claims their child sleeps through the night — and has done since day dot.
When Felix was born in June 2018, I was hell bent on getting him to sleep through the night , so I could get my life back on track. And I cracked it in just two weeks. I was a single mum — I’d split with Felix’s dad before he was born — so after I gave birth by C-section , my mum came to stay, bringing her no-nonsense brand of Italian parenting with her.
“We’re going to do this the European way,” she insisted, and told me about the Gina Ford method of getting a baby to sleep through the night. Gina is an advocate of initially letting babies “cry it out” , and claims it is completely harmless. Her best-selling book, The New Contented Little Baby Book, has sold more than a million copies and has been translated into seven languages since it came out in 1999.
The more I looked into her approach, the more I liked it. She recommends following a strict feeding and sleeping schedule. This involves waking the baby at 7am for a feed and keeping them awake until their next nap which shouldn’t be longer than two hours.
Bedtime is always 7pm, and after some hand holding, mum should leave the room for a few minutes at a t.
