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Love to Sleep: Good Nights and Happy Days for Your Child and You
'My sleep angels!' Izzy Judd
'These women are a lifeline to shattered parents everywhere' Rachaele Hambleton, Part Time Working Mummy
Calm & Bright Sleep Support was founded in 2009 with a mission; to help exhausted parents enable solid sleep in a brand-new way. Headed up by Devon sisters Eve, founder and Mum-of-four & paediatric nurse of 18 years Gem, they have supported thousands of families around the world to get the sleep they need. Now it's your turn!
In their ground-breaking book Love to Good Nights and Happy Days for Your Child and You , Eve and Gem reveal the pivotal role of the parent in their child's sleep. Using their unique, love-led approach, they encourage parents to cast aside restrictive beliefs and behaviours that contribute directly to broken sleep cycles. They gently explore the impact of sleep deprivation on both parent and child and the startling physical and mental repercussions when lack of sleep continues unchallenged.
This liberating, judgement-free book will be a must-read for every tired parent who wants to live a present and connected family life.
'These women are a lifeline to shattered parents everywhere' Rachaele Hambleton, Part Time Working Mummy
Calm & Bright Sleep Support was founded in 2009 with a mission; to help exhausted parents enable solid sleep in a brand-new way. Headed up by Devon sisters Eve, founder and Mum-of-four & paediatric nurse of 18 years Gem, they have supported thousands of families around the world to get the sleep they need. Now it's your turn!
In their ground-breaking book Love to Good Nights and Happy Days for Your Child and You , Eve and Gem reveal the pivotal role of the parent in their child's sleep. Using their unique, love-led approach, they encourage parents to cast aside restrictive beliefs and behaviours that contribute directly to broken sleep cycles. They gently explore the impact of sleep deprivation on both parent and child and the startling physical and mental repercussions when lack of sleep continues unchallenged.
This liberating, judgement-free book will be a must-read for every tired parent who wants to live a present and connected family life.
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Published December 23, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 22, 2023
I like that Eve and Gemma have found a middle ground between sleep training and …. whatever the opposite to that is. Their perspective is much less rigid and unforgiving to what my initial impression of sleep training was. They draw on parent intuition to guide the process.
Although you don’t get the full process in the book which is a bit annoying. They give just enough info to think you can start working on your baby’s sleep until you try one night and realise there’s a bunch of gaping holes in your plan. They direct you to their consulting service for the full plan.
Also, the discussion around the research is lacking. I would recommend other books to better elaborate on this (The Discontented Little Baby Book by Dr Pamela Douglas, Safe Infant Sleep by James J McKenna, Ph.D. for the fourth trimester or longer if it’s your jam, French Children Don’t Throw Food by Pamela Druckerman)
Although you don’t get the full process in the book which is a bit annoying. They give just enough info to think you can start working on your baby’s sleep until you try one night and realise there’s a bunch of gaping holes in your plan. They direct you to their consulting service for the full plan.
Also, the discussion around the research is lacking. I would recommend other books to better elaborate on this (The Discontented Little Baby Book by Dr Pamela Douglas, Safe Infant Sleep by James J McKenna, Ph.D. for the fourth trimester or longer if it’s your jam, French Children Don’t Throw Food by Pamela Druckerman)
May 1, 2022
It gave very little advice, essentially just told you to buy into their consultancy/online courses.
April 7, 2023
This book is about gentle sleep training (as distinguished from popular controlled crying, which as I understand it involves leaving baby for five- to seven-minute intervals until baby learns to fall asleep alone).
This book advises that healthy babies are capable of sleeping through the night from six months of age. You can start training at four months by giving any suitable opportunity to let baby have a go at falling asleep (e.g. when sleepy after a feed) without your involvement. This is best done at the most reliable nap time. Allow baby to squirm and fuss alone but pick baby up once baby is clearly unhappy - like with tummy time! I like this book because every other sleep book for parents seems to condone leaving your baby alone screaming, like a battle of the wills.
This book talks itself up a lot (it sometimes reads like an info-mercial) but is very sympathetic and, in places, is also beautifully written. Although sleep issues are covered comprehensively, I feel that the authors have kept some information to themselves about how to change sleep, because the book keeps offering to sell you a sleep plan. The book makes it sound simple to establish solid sleep, with testimonials to the miracles Calm & Bright has performed, but I think the truth is that sleep training takes a bit of hard work, support and investment - if it were simple then millions of people wouldn't struggle with it!
Calm & Bright's hypothesis makes sense to me: you condition your baby on how to get to sleep, and if that conditioning involves you doing things every time then that is what the baby expects every time a sleep cycle ends. I found the book did not give clear guidance on exactly how to go about sleep training, but it did give me the confidence to make changes to improve my family's sleep, and sleep has definitely improved as a result. I am still responding to my child's needs but I am setting healthy boundaries to help us all get better sleep.
What I like about the book is that it's saying to trust your instincts and read about what they do, and then find out what works for you, because mother knows baby best (rather than some books that want to convince you that you should ignore all your instincts for a few nights in order to establish solid sleep). And the other message is that if sleep isn't working for your family then something has to change.
I had a couple of reservations on the content. My main reservation was with the very short section about a dirty nappy as a physical obstacle to sleep. This book apparently assumes that all parents will leave their babies in a nappy for 12 hours straight and suggests that Calm & Bright has never worked with parents who are practising "elimination communication" with their baby. (At 12 months old, our daughter woke during the night to use the potty and therefore had dry nights and was potty-trained early but did not sleep through the night. We did not use single-use nappies but most parents use single-use nappies for night-time.) There was also an acronym or two used in the book that I was unfamiliar with and didn't find reader-friendly. And the way the book is set out, with long chapters, is not accessible for a sleep-deprived parent (compared to a book like "Awake at 3a.m."). I felt the writing style could be more concise and the book's structure adjusted to make it easier to navigate.
This book advises that healthy babies are capable of sleeping through the night from six months of age. You can start training at four months by giving any suitable opportunity to let baby have a go at falling asleep (e.g. when sleepy after a feed) without your involvement. This is best done at the most reliable nap time. Allow baby to squirm and fuss alone but pick baby up once baby is clearly unhappy - like with tummy time! I like this book because every other sleep book for parents seems to condone leaving your baby alone screaming, like a battle of the wills.
This book talks itself up a lot (it sometimes reads like an info-mercial) but is very sympathetic and, in places, is also beautifully written. Although sleep issues are covered comprehensively, I feel that the authors have kept some information to themselves about how to change sleep, because the book keeps offering to sell you a sleep plan. The book makes it sound simple to establish solid sleep, with testimonials to the miracles Calm & Bright has performed, but I think the truth is that sleep training takes a bit of hard work, support and investment - if it were simple then millions of people wouldn't struggle with it!
Calm & Bright's hypothesis makes sense to me: you condition your baby on how to get to sleep, and if that conditioning involves you doing things every time then that is what the baby expects every time a sleep cycle ends. I found the book did not give clear guidance on exactly how to go about sleep training, but it did give me the confidence to make changes to improve my family's sleep, and sleep has definitely improved as a result. I am still responding to my child's needs but I am setting healthy boundaries to help us all get better sleep.
What I like about the book is that it's saying to trust your instincts and read about what they do, and then find out what works for you, because mother knows baby best (rather than some books that want to convince you that you should ignore all your instincts for a few nights in order to establish solid sleep). And the other message is that if sleep isn't working for your family then something has to change.
I had a couple of reservations on the content. My main reservation was with the very short section about a dirty nappy as a physical obstacle to sleep. This book apparently assumes that all parents will leave their babies in a nappy for 12 hours straight and suggests that Calm & Bright has never worked with parents who are practising "elimination communication" with their baby. (At 12 months old, our daughter woke during the night to use the potty and therefore had dry nights and was potty-trained early but did not sleep through the night. We did not use single-use nappies but most parents use single-use nappies for night-time.) There was also an acronym or two used in the book that I was unfamiliar with and didn't find reader-friendly. And the way the book is set out, with long chapters, is not accessible for a sleep-deprived parent (compared to a book like "Awake at 3a.m."). I felt the writing style could be more concise and the book's structure adjusted to make it easier to navigate.
August 23, 2023
Not really what I was looking for. There’s a lot about why sleep is important and their method is good but very little on the actual method, especially for kids beyond toddlerhood (even though it says “birth to 6 years” on the cover), and I’m not sure it’s applicable to neurodiverse kids anyway.
December 29, 2024
The author sounded great on a podcast and I’m sure their courses are great, but this book basically just reads as trying to convince you to buy a course/consultancy with them - there’s very little actual advice to implement, but it’s persuasive on the benefits of sleep teaching. Precious Little Sleep contains a lot more practical advice and tips you can put into practice to help your little one sleep better.
September 23, 2023
OK but it doesn't actually give you any guidance on how to use the gentle sleep method they're selling.
August 14, 2023
Big love for Eve and Gem ♥️
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews