Falling asleep with Mom

Early on, I rocked Lucy to sleep and comforted her during late-night wake-up sessions because I wanted her to know I loved her. The idea of letting her tough it out never crossed my mind. I didn't know how to combine squishy love with firm rules.

Then, as all my friends' kids started sleeping through the night, and even toddling off to their cribs on their own, I started to wonder if, perhaps, I was screwing things up.

Fortunately for my ego, even experts run into these problems. In writing her book Rewards for Kids!, Virginia Shiller, Ph.D., had to field-test a fall-asleep strategy on her 6-year-old son Derek, a midnight rambler. It wasn't that Derek needed comfort (though there are times when a kid might wake up for that reason -- when there's an illness or divorce in the family, for example). But if kids wake up in the night, they often fall asleep more easily if they have an adult beside them, if that's what they're used to.

Shiller says she used two tools -- a chair and a reward plan -- to help Derek return to sleep on his own. She started with the chair by his bed for when he woke in the middle of the night. When he called out, she or her husband would sit beside the bed, not touching Derek, until he drifted off.

Every night, they moved the chair a little farther away. For each night he managed to fall asleep, he got to hunt for a small treasure and track his successes on a reward chart the next morning. By the time three weeks had passed, he'd learned to get himself back to sleep without a peep.

The approach gave Derek a fun, tangible way to measure his progress, even as his parents were in charge. Rewards worked for Lucy, too. She coveted a giant pair of blue fairy wings, and I promised I'd buy them for her if she stayed in her own bed all night for a week.

Lucy made it -- with one small slipup. One night, I heard her tiptoeing into our room, but all I had to do was whisper "fairy wings" and those little bare feet padded back to her bed. Ever since, she's slept on her own. And she's sleeping better -- and longer -- than ever now that her sleep isn't so regularly interrupted. (Not coincidentally, so are we.)

Or you could try the Tortorices' approach: the universal rule. When Sophia Tortorice, then 1, would wake up in the night, her mom, Carolyn, of Fulshear, Texas, would bring her to their bed to soothe her. The reason? She didn't want to wake their newborn twins, who often woke up anyway and joined the party. This dragged on for years.

About a month before Sophia's fourth birthday, her weary mom and dad knew she was old enough to handle sleeping on her own, but they didn't want to lower the boom suddenly. So they gave Sophia a positive goal.

"We presented it as a worldwide rule that four-year-olds sleep in their own beds because they're big kids," Tortorice says. Then they reminded her every night, and they let the twins hear the rule, too. It worked. This is because most kids really want to be older and more independent, and the desire for this can help them overcome the normal fears they have about sleeping alone.

Bonus: "It even worked for the twins," Tortorice says. There were a few setbacks, but Sophia had internalized the new ground rules, so all they had to do was take her to the bathroom and back to bed.

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