The Ferber Method: Goals and Critiques

Origin of the Ferber method

The Ferber or 5 Minute Scream method goes back to the American sleep researcher Dr. Richard Ferber, from whose name the common designations such as “ferbern” are derived. In the mid-1980s, Dr. Ferber developed a treatment plan for children to learn how to fall asleep and stay asleep.

This is how the Ferber method works

According to Ferber, the prerequisites for using the Ferber method are a minimum age of the child and that the child is healthy. After performing a sleep ritual , the child is laid awake in its bed and left alone. In most cases, the child starts crying.

The plan is for the parents to let the child cry for five minutes before going over and comforting them. However, the child should not be picked up from the bed. After a maximum of two minutes, the parents leave the room.

If the child continues to cry, the parents only go back to him after another ten minutes to calm him down. The intervals increase to a maximum of 30 minutes. The procedure is repeated until the child falls asleep.

As a rule, it should only take a few days until success is achieved and the child falls asleep and sleeps through the night on its own

Goal of the Ferber method

According to the author, the use of the Ferber method is primarily useful for changing unfavorable sleeping habits in children. For example, if the child only falls asleep when being carried around, they have learned to relate this. It has thus become accustomed to falling asleep in this way.

If he wakes up in the night, he’ll also likely “require” to be carried around to help him get back to sleep. Carrying it around is therefore a sleep aid that the child should break the habit of using the Ferber method. This rarely works without protest: the child screams. By sticking to the schedule, she’s learning that while her parents are there for her, she’s not getting the sleep aids she’s used to.

Weakened variant “Every child can learn to sleep”

The Ferber method has meanwhile been modified in many ways, for example in the “plan for learning to sleep” that the child psychologist Annette Kast-Zahn and the pediatrician Dr. Hartmut Morgenroth in her book “Every child can learn to sleep”. However, the time intervals that the crying child is left alone are much shorter.

Fast results with the Ferber method?

Proponents of sleep-learning programs based on the Ferber Method repeatedly emphasize their effectiveness:

• After a few days, the baby falls asleep on its own and gets its restful sleep and is more balanced during the day.
• It learns to soothe itself at night without the need for any props.
• Parents get the night’s sleep they need so quickly.

Criticism of the Ferber method

However, the use of sleep learning programs such as the Ferber method also encounters a lot of criticism:

• First of all, such a program relies on the parents being absolutely consistent. Many find it difficult to let their child cry for so long. This often leads to them giving the child the tried and tested sleeping aid to calm it down. Thus, the child does not learn to break the habit of getting help, but that it only has to cry long enough to get it. Instead of the situation getting better, it got worse.
• Crying is stressful, and stress can cause negative brain changes in babies. Critics do not rule out that the child could suffer mental damage.
• The basic need for closeness and security is withheld from the baby and can lead to a disruption in the parent-child bond.
• If the baby’s sleep ritual is disturbed by changes or illnesses, this can lead to additional/renewed sleep disturbances.

Many experts also see sleep programs only as emergency solutions for desperate parents, which should really only be used as a last resort. Rather, they advise giving children a positive relationship to sleep right from the start and thus laying the foundation for healthy sleeping habits. In our “ 10 tips: How your baby learns to sleep ” we explain a few important building blocks on this path.

Gentler sleep programs as alternatives

In recent years, numerous alternatives that are “softer” for the child have also emerged. We present the two approaches of the authors Elizabeth Pantley (“Sleep instead of crying”) and Petra Kunze and Helmut Keudel (“Learning to sleep – gentle ways for your child”) in our special “ How your baby learns to sleep ” in more detail.