Training young kids to sleep alone

This was posted on 22 July 2008 in my previous blog.  Here is a reposting.

I recently discovered how my sister trained her kids to sleep alone. Though I find the method too drastic, I am impressed that both my sister and nephews coped with the training stage quite well. I would never be able to do what my sister did.

Her older son was left to sleep alone when he was 1 year old. Going through the normal ritual of reading and saying their prayers, she remembered, as she related the incident to me, walking out of the room and closed the room door when he was still awake. The brave boy didn't give any cry of protest at all. That was how it was done, she recalled.

She did the most cruel (so she said) thing to her younger son. She 'abandoned' him alone in the kid's room when he was just a baby at two months old. She did that because the masterbed was too small to have a baby sleeping with the parents. However, she could also recall checking on him many times each night. Today, she still feels guilty for leaving him to sleep alone at that tender age. Despite this, she is proud that her younger son is much more independent from young.