Peace of mind for parents from renowned pediatrician Marc Weissbluth, M.D. This must-have boxed set contains the trade paperback editions of Healthy Sleep Habits, Healthy Child , a step-by-step program for a good night's sleep, and Your Fussy Baby , how to soothe your newborn.
Healthy Sleep Habits, Healthy Child One of the country's leading researchers updates his revolutionary approach to solving--and preventing--your children's sleep problems. Dr. Weissbluth outlines proven strategies that ensure good, healthy sleep for every age. This distinguished pediatrician and father of four explains with authority and reassurance his step-by-step regime for instituting beneficial habits within the framework of your child's natural sleep cycles.
Your Fussy Baby If your new baby cries inconsolably for many hours a day, take heart. The soothing help you need is here.
Renowned pediatrician Dr. Marc Weissbluth knows firsthand how stressful life can be for a sensitive, fussy newborn–not to mention the child’s frantic, exhausted parents. With this reassuring, down-to-earth guidance, you can help your fretful, fussy newborn to become the sweet, happy baby he or she was meant to be.
My toddler has always been a healthy sleeper and I give credit to this book. We started sleep training/cry it out at 4 months old and she has always slept through the night ever since, except for feeding while an infant.
This book was a lifesaver for my husband and I after our son was born. Of course, when I first read it, I skipped the sections on colic, assuming we wouldn't been in that 20% minority. Unfortunately, we were in that dreaded minority and the research presented here was invaluable in helping us to weather the storm.
Strengths of this work include the author's expertise in sleep research and how to implement it's teachings in training your newborn to sleep. He offers a variety of approaches, informing you of the positives and negatives of each, allowing the parents to chose what works best for them and their child.
The breadth of this book is a strength. While we often think of sleep for newborns, and the early sections on younger children make up the bulk of the book because this is where it starts, Weissbluth gives us information all the way through the adolescent years, so we can guide our children through all sleep stages to adulthood. This means the book could be helpful for parents whose children are no longer babies, but have gotten off to a bad sleep start. It allows you to know about where your child should be at (in terms of what the normal range is) so you know what to work toward, while also giving you the principles that lead to success, which allows a parent to identify where their child may have gotten off track, thus revealing what to work on.
Our son's sleep patterns have pretty much followed the course presented according to the research, though he has had variations within the normal range. This was helpful in terms of planning a routine, and in terms of knowing how to prepare for the next step. For example, if you know that the next step is for a child to move to one afternoon nap, you can mess around with the morning nap until he is ready to get rid of it, but guard the afternoon nap. This was tremendously helpful to us in dealing with a child who had difficulty sleeping, but deparately needed the sleep (not to mention how much his parents needed sleep!). After months of work, our son has turned into a good sleeper and our training on this only needs to be resumed after he is sick or experiences a significant break in routine (such as a vacation) - thank God!
Negatives of this book are also, unfortunately, noteworthy. It is not well written; parents without background in reading and analyzing scientific research will struggle with it's tediousness. Parents accustomed to reading/ analyzing scientific research will long for the principles to be presented in a more accessible form. Perhaps even more detremental to the accessiblity of these principles for desparate and sleep deprived parents is the lack of editing to overcome the cumbersome writing. It isn't organized particularly well. Some concepts are overly repetitious while others are not covered in enough depth to understand either what he wants or how to implement it.
Wiessbluth would have greatly benefited from a ghost writer and/or writing partner on this project. I'm sure it would have saved him a lot of time (leaving more time for him to practice medicine), as well as lead to creation of a better book that was more organized and accessible to exhausted parents.
But, if you can overcome these negatives you will discover a strong and helpful resource. I recommend reading it BEFORE you have a newborn (so your mind is sharp), and then referring back to it for reference as your child grows.
This is one of the best things I read as a new mom. Although the book is obviously written by a doctor, and not a writer, if you can get through the charts, stats, and somewhat disorganized chapters, it is life-changing. I didn't follow this book 100%, as I don't think it's realistic to do so. Life doesn't always revolve around your baby's sleep. But it should as much as it can, and this book tells you how. My baby slept through the night at two months, and has never had a problem with nighttime sleep since. He's now 15 months. Naps have always been harder for him to take, but after several months, he is now on a fantastic schedule. Where he used to "Catnap" for 30 minutes 3 or 4 times a day, he now sleeps for 2 1/2 hours at the same time every day. What a wonderful break for me, and what restorative sleep for him! This book emphasizes that sleep is of the utmost importance for a growing baby. It's important for his physical and mental growth. It also helps in creating a happier, more peaceful home. I highly recommend it... along with "Babywise". I combined some of the suggstions from both books, and also followed my baby's cues. I couldn't be more pleased with the outcome. One note, I became stressed out over reading how one's baby is "supposed to do" this, etc. Now that I'm more experienced, I realize that all babies are different, and it doesn't mean something is wrong with him or me if he doesn't do what "average" babies do. It's a good reminder for all new parents. If I could do it again, I wouldn't be so concerned over him not doing every single thing this book says he should be doing. He has turned out very happy and healthy, and is actually now a great sleeper.
I wasn't planning on reviewing the sleep books I read, but I wish I had read some comments before spending the money on books.
I very much appreciated the information in this book and it gave me a lot to consider about my child's sleep and development. But it made me totally neurotic and as I fought my child to get her to sleep according to the "plan" in this book, it resulted in a lot of crying by not just my child but me as well. I finally had to loosen up on the practices in this book and then we found a pattern and I regained some of my sanity.
I put the word "plan" in quotes because although it claims to have a plan, I found the book not very linear and in some places confusing. Also, if you are going to call something a plan, I feel that there should be numerical steps or a breakdown bulleting the entire process. This book did not have that. You really had to dig in there to find a step-by-step plan.
I really appreciated the information regarding children with colic or difficult dispositions, but I found myself constantly questioning if I had a colicy baby. This information was great, but its so interwoven through the text, that it made some pieces hard to follow. I feel that with the colic information, it could have its own separate part to help it read better. Turns out my child was not colicy but had issues with reflux. This a subject matter I haven't found in any sleep books that I think many parents out there could benefit from.
I agree with Dr. Weissbluth's general premise that children need ample sleep so that while awake, they are alert and observant...not to mention happy.
However, upon reading many portions of this book, I became neurotic, worrying we were slowing our son's development because we couldn't get him to sleep through the night.
I feel like the good doctor takes a one size fits all approach to helping your child sleep. Who knows why some kids sleep through the night by the time they are three months, and some only when they are three years.
I think his approach, the let the child cry it out, even it takes an hour, could have some negative psychological impacts. Of course, I'm not a psychiatrist, but I am a father and I know when enough is enough. For my son, an hour is far too long.
We tried the cry out method, we tried the every ten minute method, we tried shifting his nap hours during the day. Nothing seemed to work until we moved when he was about 10 or 11 months old. He has slept through the night ever since.
Dr. Weissbluth, in my opinion, has some very helpful pointers but tends to oversimplify the problem, making those who read his book but can't get the magical results he promises feel like poor parents.
Look, his medical degree simply doesn't qualify him to know what is right for your child. At least, it certainly didn't for mine.
This book helped a LOT with my baby's sleep problems. It still took a couple months to sleep-train my baby, but I definitely learned a lot from this book that had I not read it I would probably still be having troubles. My baby now sleeps nearly 12 hours a night without me having to go to him. He is also becoming a great nap-taker. He was AWFUL before--only taking 30 minute naps and struggling to go down. I was spending hours of my day getting that kid to sleep. Now I just soothe him for about 10 mintues put him down awake and he rolls over and goes to sleep. if he does cry before going to sleep he only cries 10 minutes or less. I couldn't have done it without the knowledge I got from this book!!
I read several parts of this book a few times because it was helpful to reread certain parts to make sure I understood what I needed to do and what kinds of things to expect. There are lots of stories from families in the book and I was able to use their stories to relate my own experiences and know better what I needed to try and what things would probably work for my own baby.
The sleep bible! Thanks to Sarah for giving me this book as a gift when Cache was just a few weeks old, I credit it for our son sleeping through the night from about 12 weeks old (I started reading the book when he was about 9 or 10 weeks). The writing was a bit cumbersome (lots of charts and data, Weissbluth is a doctor & researcher, not a writer) and the chapters were arranged in a confusing order, but once you muddle through that, the info will change your (and your child's) life. All babies & families are different and Dr. Weissbluth offers more than one method for sleep training your baby. The one negative thing is that after reading it I feel like an expert on sleep and become one of those annoying people who have 1 child and think they know what is wrong with everyone else's children. ha ha. Like every time I see a kid that is grumpy or spazzy or bratty I think "That kid is overtired" and am tempted to start asking the parents about bed times etc, when obviously sometimes kids are well rested but are grumpy or spazzy or bratty anyway. ha ha But that is clearly a problem with me, not with the book.
I really wished I had read this book with my first child. Though tedious at times and scientific, it helped me understand sleep better and made me feel more confident in the "crying it out" (extinction) method. First though we got naps down and nighttime kind of fell into place after that. Seriously. When my child started sleeping better he acted better too! Sleep begets Sleep is one of the themes, and the book is exhaustive ( ha ha) in it's age breakdown and how sleep changes a bit with each stage. The main thing I take from the book is that good sleep is equated to good nutrition. You wouldn't feed your kid junk food all day and you shouldn't give your kid "junk sleep" (inconsistent nap times, naps in the carseat while doing errands, etc). I will also add that after a brief interruption to the sleeping all night(month long ordeal) we had to re-train but it only required a couple nights of crying and my son was back to sleeping well again. I started the book when he was 10months old, and now he's 14 months old. I really should have started while pregnant reading this book :)
I loved this book on sleep problems and solutions for infants through teens (although I skipped the very short chapter on school-age kids through adolescents) because it is written by a doctor who has a sleep center in Chicago where he does research on children.
We didn't really have any sleep problems to solve with James, so I was reading this more for any added insight on infant sleep I could get, and I found quite a bit. For example, Dr. Weissbluth believes (although he hasn't proved it yet) that behavioral problems such as ADHD are directly related to sleep-deprivation in children. Also (and this was much more proven by studies that he cited) he claims that accident-prone children are in reality much more sleep-deprived than their peers, which is why they are prone to accidentaly injure themselves more readily.
This book reminded me of "The Promise of Sleep" which I think is a must-read, except it focuses on infants and young children.
I highly recommend this book. We saw such a change in our son when we followed this physician's advice and put him to bed, for either naps or nighttime sleep, during the windows of time that are consistent with an infant's sleep rhythms. He actually slept longer overnight when we put him to bed earlier -- between 6pm and 8pm. We have learned to watch for his cues when he is sleepy and not let him get overtired. We are also learning to resisted the temptation to keep him up because it was convenient for our schedule.
Our son was colicky and didn't sleep more than 4 hours at a time until 6 weeks old. I wish we would have had this book earlier. I might not have helped since his reflux was a big part of his discomfort with sleep, but we could have possibly started easing him into an earlier bedtime sooner.
This book made a HUGE difference in our quality of life - for baby & parents. Recommended to us by a friend, we decided to try it with our son when he was about 4 months old. He slept with us until that point, but we got exasperated after he started waking me up to feed every 2 hours and seemed genuinely uncomfortable in our bed.
It took a couple weeks of dealing with some fussing, but it quickly became apparent that he preferred his crib over our bed and was a happier baby now that he was getting more sleep. The nanny also helped get him on a better nap schedule, but this book helped us get to the point where we are now at 10 months old (sleeping from 7:30 or 8 pm until 6ish am with no wake-ups).
As a first time mom, I really felt I needed some guidance as to a baby's sleep pattern- I just had no idea. It is a phenomenal guide that really helped (and still helps) shape my daughter's sleep pattern. It makes her happy, which in turn makes me happy! Because she is now consistent in her sleep pattern, it is much easier to schedule our day together, and rarely have to worry about her melting down or falling asleep when I need her to be up. Has lots of helpful hints, as well as references.
Third of the sleep books I read, and it seemed the most scientific and moderate -- until I tried to apply its lessons to my munchkin. The book claims that babies should only be up for 1-2 hours at most. Trying to make my baby sleep when she wasn't sleepy was a nightmare, and I resorted to believing Penelope Leach (Your Baby and Child) who said that some babies are just alert and wakeful. No doubt that sleep is important, but there's still a lot to be said for just paying attention to the baby .... I hope.
This book had a great plan to follow. It also had some good information on fussy babies. I think if my situation had been different I would have liked this book.
It's hard to review any of the "sleep books", since none of them worked for us. I started out thinking they were all pretty good, but since I was unable to implement any of their suggestions I may not be the most objective reviewer.
I can't recommend this book enough. We used his theory starting when Anderson was about 12 weeks old. The proof is in the pudding. Our little guy sleeps like a dream, goes down easy, and even if he wakes up at night, he puts himself back to sleep. He takes great naps. Although it seems harsh at first, it really is much harder on the parents than on the baby. Have faith and strength to stick it out. It works!!!!
Weissbluth's writing is a bit like being on a marry-go-round but the wisdom is well worth the read! I LOVE THIS BOOK! It's the reason my children sleep at all. This book was recommended to me months before my first child was born by at least 4 people independent of each other. People I totally respect and trust. Learning to be a good sleeper is a learned skill and good parents teach their children how to sleep!
This book was a life saver! I would recommend reading pre-baby since I was too tired and overwhelmed trying to read it after the fact. This book, along with a video monitor, and a swaddle blanket allowed us to start crib sleep after about one week. We learned to follow a schedule, lay our baby down awake, and had to let him cry once for awhile for him to be ok with bedtime. Although every child is different, this worked for us.
This book, written by a famed sleep specialist, had a lot of interesting information regarding the sleep patterns of babies and children. The ironic thing is, I read it before I had my baby, and even then, I found it to be difficult to read; I can't imagine an actual sleep-deprived parent trying to wade through it! I think the problem is a lack of organization and readability.
The book has a lot of useful information, I just wish it were more user-friendly.
I love this book because it really helped me get Reagan on a sleeping schedule. This book liberated me when I was having a really hard time learning about what Reagan needed as far as being able to fall asleep on her own, sleep patterns, etc. However, I must warn that this books is really EXTREME and it sort of makes you paranoid about sleep!
It sounds good in theory. I am having a hard time getting my baby onto the schedule he suggests. We tried the morning nap and he screamed for the full hour and then didn't fall asleep for another 2 hours. He is taking two good naps so tonight we are going to try crying it out. If this works then Dr. Weissbluth is my hero.
I haven't read this cover-to-cover, but read enough of it to know that it is a very valuable book for those of us who need help understanding how to get our children to go to sleep. I have turned to this book on many occasions for help with my children, from infant to 4-5 yrs, and the advice given has always worked for me.
THis was my first sleep book and it was pretty helpful in learning about how babies sleep. The organization is a little confusing, but we followed the plan and have a pretty good sleeper on our hands. It may be just a coincidence, but... if you are overwhelmed by the whole sleep/nap concept this is a good place to start.
Mark and I consult this book regularly as we continue to strive to meet the needs of our kiddos. We aren't quite great at having the triplets sleep through the night from 6 until 6 a.m. as some of our beloved mentoring families; yet, we are working to make this happen. Any ideas or thoughts are welcomed!
This book is my baby sleep bible! When my oldest was 3 months old and sleeping horribly, this book was recommended to me by a relative. After reading it and doing what Dr. Weissbluth suggests, I was able to get my son to start sleeping much, much better! I have since used this book with my other 3 children. I highly recommend this!!
I continue to reference and use this book to help know how as a mom I can help my kids learn to sleep. Just like all the other skills in life it too must be learned. He does a great job incorporating many different ways to do this and has basic ideas that adjust to every family's sleeping preferences.
This book is a life saver! A must read for anyone brining a new baby home. I read and re-read. I started to understand what type of sleep my daughter needed and how to help her get to sleep. It's still a rocky road some days, but now I feel like I understand my baby girls fussy periods. This book helped me to understand colic, so I don't feel guilty about my screaming baby.
Some of the theories in this book I didn't agree with, but for the most part I thought he had some great insights into how to get your child to sleep. It helped me get my son to fall asleep on his own.
This has been such a helpful book. It is written by someone with so much experience and credibility and he tells you the truth about so many sleeping myths out there. I still refer to it often and think it is a must read for all parents.