by Andy Scaer

Created on: November 14, 2008

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 individuals, 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 for parenthood, 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 themselves back to sleep when they awake from normal sleep cycles during the night. It is 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 individual 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 separation 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

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