Product Description

One of the country's leading researchers updates his revolutionary approach to solving--and preventing--your children's sleep problems

Here Dr. Marc Weissbluth, a distinguished pediatrician and father of four, offers his groundbreaking program to ensure the best sleep for your child. In Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, he explains with authority and reassurance his step-by-step regime for instituting beneficial habits within the framework of your child's natural sleep cycles. This valuable sourcebook contains brand new research that

- Pinpoints the way daytime sleep differs from night sleep and why both are important to your child
- Helps you cope with and stop the crybaby syndrome, nightmares, bedwetting, and more
- Analyzes ways to get your baby to fall asleep according to his internal clock--naturally
- Reveals the common mistakes parents make to get their children to sleep--including the inclination to rock and feed
- Explores the different sleep cycle needs for different temperaments--from quiet babies to hyperactive toddlers
- Emphasizes the significance of a nap schedule
-

Rest is vital to your child's health growth and development. Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child outlines proven strategies that ensure good, healthy sleep for every age. Advises parents dealing with teenagers and their unique sleep problems

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #493 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-12
• Released on: 1999-04-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 345 pages

Review
“I love Dr. Weissbluth’s philosophy that the most important thing to have is a well-rested family. And fortunately, thanks to this book, most days (and nights) we do!”
–from the Foreword by Cindy Crawford


From the Hardcover edition.

From the Publisher
I read this book when my second child was born last fall. My first baby was a terrible sleeper, and I was determined not to go through that same nightly hell -- rocking, singing, walking, coddling for hours only for her to wake up when I finally placed her in the crib. So, with my son, I decided to be prepared. And Dr. Weissbluth's methods were amazing. Who knew that babies would actually like to go to sleep early? By watching my son's moods, I learned that he really needed more evening sleep, and two lengthy naps, one in mid-morning and another in early afternoon. Bedtime at 7:30 and he sleeps until 6:00 am! He's happy, energetic and bright. I'm truly convinced that if I had tried to go through the "crying to sleep" method again (my husband and I did attempt it with my first kid, but found it absolutely agonizing), we would have all had a miserable few months.

Now I know why the good doctor gets phone calls from all over the U.S. asking for advice. He is one of the leading pediatric sleep researchers in the country, and is frequently consulted by top parenting and child care magazines.

I'm so utterly devoted to this book, that I'm happy to announce Dr. Weissbluth will be updating the research in a new edition of HEALTHY SLEEP HABITS, HAPPY CHILD due out in 1999. Same life-changing concepts, but with additional testamonials from parents who've used this book so successfully in the past.

Inside Flap Copy
One of the country's leading researchers and pediatricians reveals a revolutionary new approach to your child's sleep in this complete guiding to solving -- and preventing -- sleep problems. Includes a step-by-step program for establishing good sleep habits and individualized guidelines from infancy throughout the growing years.

Customer Reviews

Finally, some evidence-based advice.
As a happy but sometimes sleep-deprived breastfeeding mother of a typical 7 month old, I have read a wide variety of books on parenting and sleep.

Books that promote strict feeding/sleeping routines, such as BabyWise & Baby Whisperer, provide potentially damaging advice to the mother hoping to successfully breastfeed. The assertion that you must follow some kind of eat-activity-sleep schedule is insensitive to the needs of our babies and can be detrimental to the nursing relationship.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I have turned to the No Cry Sleep Solution looking for some instruction on sleep training that preserved the breastfeeding relationship, but was again disappointed with her complicated and sensational advice which amounted to not much more than teaching my baby to fall asleep without nursing.

I guess I want the best of both worlds - I want to nurse my baby to sleep, which I believe is a perfectly natural and enjoyable way to soothe and reconnect with my baby, but then I want to be able to put him down afterwards and allow him to take a good nap or sleep well at night. If he wakes up hungry and wants to nurse a couple of times at night, I consider that perfectly normal (as does Weissbluth!) and am more than happy to oblige, but what I want to avoid is him waking every 2 hours at night wanting to nurse back to sleep!

Weissbluth offers a refreshingly simple, if not necessarily "easy," solution. While he describes multiple different sleep strategies for infants, classified according to their age, the advice I find most helpful is the research-based information about baby's biological rhythms and sleep needs that dictate when they are most apt to take a nap or go to sleep at night, and how much sleep they should get overall.

Moreover, his advice that you can and should soothe your child to sleep by nursing if you desire, but then you should put them down whether they are still awake, asleep, or somewhere in-between, and allow them to fall asleep on their own once put down, is just what this tired nursing mama needed to hear. Yes, there MAY be some crying if your baby is over-tired or if your baby has never been given the opportunity to fall asleep on his own, and this is extremely heart-wrenching for any mother to endure, but this is not the GOAL of this plan, simply a by-product of ALLOWING your baby to learn to fall asleep on his own.

If you truly believe that as a parent your job is to prevent your child from ever crying or otherwise experience any type of frustration in life, then this book is probably not for you. However, if you realize that any sleep-training program may cause some frustration in your child during the learning phase, and if you would like to get some fact-based information on infant/child sleep along with many useful tools to help your little one get the sleep they need, then I would highly recommend this book!

I believe that teaching our children how to sleep well, and making sacrifices in our own lives in order to allow this, is as important as making sure our babies get the best nutrition, and plenty of love! This book is an excellent resource for parents who feel the same way.

Overall very helpful information, poor organization
I bought this book while I was pregnant because I knew too many parents of babies over 9 months who were still getting up several times a night. I was afraid of the same fate and wanted to have some information on sleep. After reading a lot of reviews I got the impression that the people who dislike this book are fans of "attachment parenting" and no-cry methods. I decided to buy the book for its information on sleep, not for any parenting philosophies.
My daughter is now 9 weeks old (and according to the book is at the 6 week stage based on being 3 weeks early) and sleeps for 6-7 hours at night. I have used the information in the book to ensure that we get her sleeping when she needs it, and in 9 weeks she has never cried about going to sleep. I have found that the information in the book very valuable. Several things that I would never have know without reading this include the fact that babies cannot tolerate more than 2 hours of being awake, recognizing signs of tiredness which are not obvious, and that the overtired state will seem like a baby is not tired at all. The author gives many different options and suggestion for sleep problems, soothing etc, so I never felt like he was pushing a parenting philosophy. The book reassured me that my family is not doomed to constant night waking for the next few years.
Now the major thing that I really disliked about the book was that it is completely and utterly disorganized. It is very difficult to find information that you want, and there are many times when there is a heading, but the following paragraph has nothing to do with the heading. It is hard to search for information, so I had to resort to folding pages and highlighting (I hate to mark up my books). This was pretty annoying, but overall I felt that the information in it was worth hunting through the book. I still refer to it once in a while, especially since I have not yet read much about the age groups past 4 months.

Lots of good advice and lots of guilt
I both loved and hated this book. I loved it because it's full of practical tips, many directed at specific problems your child may be having with sleep. I hated it because it combines useful pieces of information with a healthy dose of the "follow this book or you will damage your child" school of thought. Because the good parts of the book are so useful, it's harder to recognize the hyperbole for what it is. I recommend this book, but read it with a critical frame of mind.