How to create your own personal hell

I have an acquaintance with two lovely, apparently well behaved, children. They are 3 and 1. Neither child sleeps for more than 3 hours at a time, with wakeups, screaming fits, and hours of soothing happening with both kids, every night. To cope with this, the parents sleep in separate rooms, one with each child. This has been the case for 3 years, as with the first one they started by taking turns sleeping in the kids room or the adult room. That is 3 years without a decent night of sleep, a break, or a semblance of sanity. This family is approaching urban legend in my circle of friends, and we all know that they have really severe issues with their kids sleeping.

Today, I ran into them. We did the usual small talk about kids, etc and I mentioned that Cooper just finished his 3rd ever week of daycare, and it went pretty darn well. The mom said something like, "Have you had any problems with Cooper adjusting?" To which I replied (far, far before thinking it through) that the only thing we are adjusting to is having a child that now likes to sleep for 12 or more hours straight, because he is so tired from all the activity and stimulation of his big days at daycare, and how that is making our mornings so very different.

I think I saw tears forming in this woman's eyes, and she said, "What have I done? What did I do wrong? Why won't my kids sleep?"

Trying to be less stupid and insensitive, I said something like, "Well, it was hard, but with Cooper we did end up needing to just let him cry sometimes- even for up to an hour. And then he adjusted and started sleeping well."

And she said flatly, "Oh, I could never do that. I can't do that to them. They need us."

What do you say here? What can be said? I wanted to say right to her that what she has done wrong is place her child's very temporary frustrations above her family health and personal sanity, and that what she needs is to create boundaries around the sleeping experience, and that if she never lets her kids figure out how to sleep on their own, the whole family will suffer for many, many more years.

Instead I just said that maybe she should talk to her pediatrician, because that was what worked for us, so I didn't have any other ideas.

So now I am reminded how to create your own personal hell- fail to see that sometimes you must be strong and sacrifice a small thing (perhaps a week of kiddies screaming frustratedly in the night) for the greater good (years of sleeping well for an entire family).