It will come as a surprise to precisely no-one that, often mums and dads have very different opinions as to how their little one is growing up. This was clearly illustrated in our house one day, back when our Hazel was about six months old, when my wife Ev arrived from town carrying a book entitled How to solve your child’s sleep problem.

“Um, she has a sleep problem?” I asked.

Her response was that, yes, Hazel did have a sleep problem. Didn’t she need the dummy to go to sleep? And didn’t this mean that, if she woke up in the middle of the night, one of us would have to get up and restore the soother (which always popped out when she fell asleep) so she could get return to the land of nod?

Yes, that was all true. But did it mean that she had a “problem”?

I wasn’t so sure. In fact, if my wife wasn’t flat-out addicted to sleep herself, I’d suggest that she wouldn’t have viewed that state of affairs as problematic either. However, in the interest of a happy household, I acquiesced. We would use the methods of Dr Richard Ferber, for it was he who wrote the above book, to “cure” Hazel.

That said, neither of us was in a rush to be cruel to our baby so the start date for the plan’s implementation kept being put back. Our hand was eventually forced by Hazel. She developed a love of sleep crawling. Yes, sleep crawling. She’d start to wake up but, while still not fully conscious, would set off crawling around the cot. I guess she was looking for her dummy. This would generally end with her banging her head into the side of the cot! It sounds funny but it did mean that not only would she now be awake but she’d also have a sore head. This signalled the end of us bringing her into our bed to get her back to sleep – what if she woke up before us and crawled off the bed?

Finally, as she approached her first birthday (D-Day in the world of Dr Ferber), we took some deep breaths and gave it a go.

For little Hazel, it must have been quite a shock. With no warning that anything was afoot, apart from the fact that she was given her bedtime bottle 30 minutes beforehand (because Dr Ferber had told us to), we simply put her into her cot and left the room. I’m sure her state of mind could, at that instant, have been summed up using a bit of text lingo: “WTF?”

So she cried. She cried because she was tired. She cried because she wanted her dummy. She cried because she wanted her parents back in here right now with an explanation and IT BETTER BE GOOD. But we couldn’t go back in. At least not until Dr Ferber told us we could. The delightful Dr Ferber’s method is basically a cold turkey programme to get a baby off their soother addiction. The plan only allows the parents to re-enter the room at specified intervals. For example, on that first night, we had to wait for three minutes before we could go back in.

Ev was first up for this tour of duty and went back in after those long 180 seconds had passed. Even when you go in to see your baby, you’ve got to restrain yourself to just reassuring the little one that you’re still there but you must not (under all but one circumstance, more on that later) take the child up, or help them to get to sleep, and Ev did what she was told. She was back out in about 10 seconds and the clock was started again. This time we were to wait for five minutes.

After that visit, the next interval set was for 10 minutes but, I’m glad to say, it wasn’t needed as she nodded off before then. So she’d fallen asleep in about 12 minutes. That wasn’t bad for a first night, we decided. Maybe Dr Ferber was on to something!

Alas, were it so simple.

The following day was a nightmare. For a start, Dr Ferber tells you that, if the child wakes at any time after 6am, they are up for the day. Our little lady woke up at 5:55am and, while I was tempted to take the good doctor exactly at his word and let her go back to sleep, Ev decided we were getting up.

The surely sadistic Dr Ferber also told us that we weren’t to alter Hazel’s nap schedule, even if she did get up at 5:55am. Theoretically, this should have meant that she was really tired by bedtime that night but, in actuality, it meant we had to deal with a cranky zombie all day. A cranky zombie who couldn’t even enjoy her naps because, of course, there were no soothers to be seen there either.

By the arrival of that night’s bedtime, the cranky zombie was, if anything, over-tired. She found it very hard to get to sleep and was crying well after we’d waited five minutes, then eight minutes and even another 12 minutes. As bad luck would have it, a pair of family friends called in for a visit that evening and so we had to explain that we weren’t really being callous, as we ignored the screams coming from the baby monitor. Their opinion of us can’t have been helped, either, when Hazel cried so hard that she vomited.

And thus we arrive at the one circumstance in which Dr Ferber will allow you to lift your child out of the cot. He even has a section on it in his book so it must be one of the risks you run when using this plan. So we changed her, and the sheets, “quickly and matter-of-factly” and put her back into the cot. Thankfully for all concerned, she fell asleep quite quickly after that.

We took it one day at a time after that, sometimes stretching Dr Ferber’s rules a bit here and there, doing whatever it took to help Hazel through this change. Thankfully, the plan did work, although it was a gradual process.

There were a few blips. We’ll never forget one particularly bad night when, all excited after playing with her visiting cousins, it took her over 40 minutes to stop fighting the tiredness. By the end, she wasn’t the only female crying in our house.

Our experience that night was one of the low points. It’s a bit tough going through a process that you believe is good for your child only to end up being emotionally flipped around, feeling like you’re actually being selfish and cruel to them.

However, night by night, the time it took her to get to sleep did diminish and now, about six weeks on, she falls asleep within 90 seconds of being put into her cot! Dr Ferber told us it would take a fortnight at most. In this he was wrong. In a lot of other ways though, we feel he is right. Hazel never wakes us during the night any more as, presumably if she does wake up, she simply rolls over and goes back to sleep herself. My wife is particularly happy with this fact.

So was it all worth it? It was tough but, yes, I think so. I’m also hoping that listening to that much crying now will immunise us against the tantrums she’ll undoubtedly be throwing for the next, what, 15 years.

Hoping…

The day our daughter Hazel was born, the hospital midwife warned us of the dangers of ‘nipple confusion’. Stop tittering at the back! The theory went like this: if you (the mother, obviously) are trying to breastfeed and you give your new baby one (just one!) bottle feed, there’s a chance that they will prefer this easier method of milk delivery and reject your milk production devices forthwith. We bought this one for a while but it turned out, in Hazel’s case at any rate, that there was no confusion. Our girl liked milk – wherever she could get it! She could go from boob to bottle, and back again, without seeming to be the least bit concerned. Just so long as the milk flowed, no questions were asked.

So far, so good. After a few months though, it’s one of your parental responsibilities to introduce the little one to food. Looking back at it now, I don’t know why this one is overlooked when the Top Ten Parental Responsibilities list is drawn up. Everyone knows about toilet training, helping them learn to walk and sleep training. But no-one seems to factor in helping them to eat. This is strange, when you consider that it’s one of the first things you actually have to teach them. They arrive into the world with an instinctive desire to suck down milk and sleep, but they need to be taught ‘how’ to eat.

Our Hazel’s first taste of solid food didn’t really look all that solid. It was a mash of various vegetables, depending on the day of the week. Interestingly, this phase actually expanded our culinary horizons – I’d never tasted Butternut Squash before but Annabel Karmel recommended it, correctly in my opinion, as a tasty treat in her Complete Baby and Toddler Meal Planner. At the risk of gaining a reputation for always writing about books, I’d like to take a minute to mention this one.

This is a lovely cook book which even comes with a hardback cover, so Hazel could play with/chew down on it if she felt the urge. It’s also got little happy and sad faces on each page so you can mark off whether your little VIP liked the dish. In the early days, when we were making anything and everything, this was useful as otherwise I’m certain we’d have ended up making a meal just before we realised that we’d done it last week and she hated it!

In this initial period, Hazel only refused one meal. She absolutely would not eat mashed green beans. She took one spoonful and then clamped her mouth shut. This was a surprise both as it seemed totally unlike her and also because of the fact that I hate green beans too. It’s a bit of a strange thing to have inherited, a detestation of green beans, but at least she has an understanding parent who won’t judge her too harshly!

Since then, Hazel’s food has gradually become less mashed and more lumpy. These days her favourite meals include Irish Stew, Sole, Spaghetti Bolognese and she’s also keen on sampling whatever’s on our plates. This can be a bit of a drawback for her parents, of course. Sometimes I find myself sneaking off into the kitchen for a quick snack, before she cottons on. If I succeed, I eat my sandwich in peace. If I don’t, she’ll be there smacking the palm of her hand down on my knee, demanding a piece of bread crust – at the very least!

The eating of solid food proceeded, obviously enough, at the same time as she started to produce teeth. Teeth are great, they help her to eat. However they also help her to chew anything that takes her fancy. Judging by the sheer number of things we find her sticking into her gob, it must be an interesting, perhaps even pleasurable, experience. Hazel’s mantra must be: “Sticks and stones may break my bones BUT they may also be very tasty.”

The teeth, of course, arrive randomly and are accompanied by howls of pain. We’ve been lucky as the teething pains haven’t really disturbed her sleep too much but they do turn our placid little girl into a howling dervish in the evenings. “Who are you and what have you done with our Hazel?” we ask.

Returning to food, lately we have run in to a slight problem. By now, she should be getting the hang of feeding herself. She should be able to sit in her high chair and get through a small meal, using her hands to lift the pieces of food. Our problem is that Hazel decided the high chair wasn’t cool about two months ago. Don’t go thinking we can put her into a regular chair! She’s only 15 months old after all. So now she gets most of her meals standing up, sitting on someone’s lap or sitting on the couch (watching TV). The last method is the only one where she’s guaranteed not to get bored and wants to leave but it does make us feel a little uncomfortable, as we’re doing our best to keep TV watching to a minimum.

She also isn’t very hungry in the middle of the day. Our plans for three main meals in the day have proven to be a bit of a failure and, if I can get her to take some yoghurt or a banana at lunch time, I feel like I’ve achieved. However, this disinterest in some meals doesn’t mean she’s wasting away. The opposite is the case, actually. Whenever my wife Ev’s worried about her not eating, I say “Look at her!” “If she was a chocolate bar, she’d be a Kit-Kat Chunky.”

Back in 1992, a younger version of me headed off to Dublin for his first big concert experience, seeing U2’s Zoo TV tour in the RDS. A nightly part of the show was that, as they walked onto the stage, their massive sound system played a song by the Disposable Heroes of Hip-Hoprisy: ‘Television – The drug of the Nation’.

The lyrics of the song told us that the TV was responsible for “breeding ignorance and feeding radition…” and that it was “apathetic, therapeutic and extremely addictive…”

Well, 17 years on, it’s definitely the drug our Hazel is most addicted to.

Hazel loves TV. Not just on an emotive level, but on what must be described as a physiological level. She doesn’t just like to watch TV, as I do myself (whenever ‘Home and Away’ isn’t on). Put her in front of the television and even the stormiest emotional waters are instantly becalmed. Sometimes we are so thankful that Iggle Piggle, Upsy Daisy and those strange creatures in Waybaloo exist that I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before a small shrine is erected to them in our garden.

Hazel is so captivated by her favourite shows that she’ll pretty much stay put for as long as she’s allowed to keep watching. Certainly she’ll safely stay in the room where the TV is. She may get off the couch – to get nearer to the TV – but she won’t be able to stray too far away from her fix. But we daren’t let her watch too much. Like a lot of things, we figure television is best enjoyed in moderation.

How much is “too much”? Well, truth be told, we still can’t decide. This topic is debated often but not really between us, as people. It’s more like a debate between those angels and devils that hung out on the shoulders of characters in Hanna Barbera cartoons. We’re both of one mind actually – unfortunately it’s a mind full of doubt, worry and guilt. Ev was keen on a limit of 1 hour per day. If you’ve been reading my articles, you won’t be surprised to hear that she read about this in a book somewhere. I think that’s a bit low, to be honest, but it’s the official amount that I strive to keep to during each day. A bit like the public service and their efficiency targets, however, I find that this ideal is hardly ever actually achieved.

As I write this, it’s 4pm and she’s already watched about an hour of television. We’ve also made a habit out of her being allowed to watch ‘In the Night Garden’ between dinner and bedtime, so that’s another half-hour at least. And, um, she’s watching the TV now also. No other way of getting some typing done I’m afraid. It’s when you add all this up that you really start to feel the guilt pangs. Two-and-a-half hours a day equals almost 18 hours per week. What are the effects of that? Well, it’s 18 hours where she isn’t running around getting any exercise for a start. Furthermore, is the pacified state a natural one? If I heard that someone had been feeding their healthy child Calpol, for example, just to keep them quiet I’d be horrified. Does the TV not achieve the same end but without the drugs?

There is a part of me, the angel I suppose, that regrets that TV has become so prolific or was even invented. When my parents were young they didn’t have televisions so they had to run around the place and amuse themselves. When I was a kid, we had TV but I’m pretty sure it didn’t come on-air until about 3pm. Now with CBeebies, which broadcasts from 6am to 7pm. As an aside, if you can get it, watch CBeebies. All the programmes are gentle, happy and educational. And there are no ads. She may be watching 17 hours of TV a week, but at least we know that she isn’t watching almost two hours of advertisements as a part of that.

That’s the devil talking. Seeing the best side of things. The devil also claims that if I could go back in time and ask either of my grandmothers, as they did their best to mind four children under 5 in one house and five children under 7 in the other, if they’d like to be able to stick their kids in the corner of the room watching the wireless that they’d very definitely answer “Yes!”. Finally, the devil points out that Hazel really enjoys these shows now, so wouldn’t it be cruel to deprive her?

But the devil has a worry too. No, I don’t mean that she’ll grow up to be slothful, dislike reading, have a low vocabulary and no imagination. Those are the angel’s worries. We have two friends who have a little son, not much younger than Hazel. Whenever we call over to their house, the television is always on. They’re obviously not too bothered about it and that’s alright. However, most of the time, as we arrive, we see the little boy playing with some toys in the hall. When we’re brought into the house, we are invited into the sitting room and offered a cup of tea. The TV stays on and Hazel sits down to get her fix. Her little friend though, might stay, or he might follow his Mum out to the kitchen, or he might try and interact with Hazel. There’s the rub. He’s obviously not addicted. He can take it or leave it.