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According to Hirschberg many parents today have undue anxiety about their
child's sleep, just as parents in the recent past had concerning feeding. Such parents are unable to use rational criteria about the adequacy of their child's sleep, such as whether or not it appears rested during the next day. They attempt to deal with sleep problems by anxiously trying different methods with their child while not giving themselves time to evaluate any of these methods.
Hirschberg's findings are based on generalizations from weekly casework interviews with mothers of children who have sleep disturbances. Almost all mothers reacted to these disturbances with anxiety, anger, and guilt. Many of the mothers seemed to understand unconsciously the factors in the mother-child relationship that led to the child's difficulty. A mother of a young infant, aware of the child's need for symbiosis, described her inability to permit the child to feel like part of herself, while the mother of an older child described her inability to permit the child to be a separate entity. Another mother misjudged her child's sleep problem in terms of her own needs. The mother who was threatened by her child's development away from her wished to believe that its sleep problem expressed its need to be always with her. She unconsciously encouraged elaborate bedtime rituals to assure herself that the child could not fall asleep without her. Hirschberg presents his findings systematically, describing the typical attitudes of mothers toward their children's sleep disturbances at three different ages: the young infant, one to three years, and three to five years.