can not recommend this book highly enough!

[bestmamaderwelt]

At 3 months my son woke on the hour every hour for a feed. I was at my wits end and decided i needed help. this book was amazing and by 4 months he was sleeping for 12 hours straight whatever time he went to bed. Any way though some of you might find it useful I'm not sure what i would have done without it.

What sort of approach does it take? can you do us a basic outline?

"A baby who sleeps well is no accident of luck. Parents hold the key and this title shows how to unlock your child's natural ability to sleep through the night from the first weeks of life. It sets out a simple method that can be applied throughout childhood so that broken, disrupted nights never need be a problem. Taking the cue from the baby, and working with parents' natural instincts to help their child, this book puts parents in charge. Avoiding conflict over sleep, this recommended approach builds trust, communication and confidence in your relationship with your baby."

I'm glad you're happy and that's brilliant for you. But I don't like the synopsis and I think it's normal for a tiny baby to wake up in the night. The synopsis is accusatory, inaccurate and tells you nothing really about what's expected of you if you follow this book.

I am interested to learn more though to see if I'm wrong.

cosmosis I think they would prefer you bought the book.

how very jaded of you. I didn't write the book, nor do i sell it actually, i just thought some one might find it useful. It worked wonders for me and actually isn't as airy fairy as it sounds. it works on the principle of noticing how long your baby sleeps and for how long and then extending it. sounds simple but didn't occur to me before reading. Any way i genuinely just thought some one might find it useful. like i said my son has slept through the night for a solid 12 hours since reading the book and it involves no 'controlled cry' something i just wast happy to do.

How do you extend the periods of sleep?

< Still has ingrained dark circles from having had three bad sleepers for 8 years of my life >

Yes, but how do they extend the sleep of a tiny baby?

To be honest its been over 3 and half years since i read it but i think the basic principle is to extend the sleep by not feeding them between the time you have noticed they have previously slept. It seems that the other main principle is to make your baby secure enough to go back to sleep on there own, because with out remembering in the morning, we all actually wake but go back to sleep instantly if secure enough. I might not be explaining it right. But it worked for me. Yes i only have one son so maybe fluke but seemed to be more than a coincidence than my son settled in to a routine with in a couple of weeks of reading is book. And like i said no crying so no trauma for me or my son.

i dont think the aim is to get a baby to sleep through the ight untill they are 3 moths but just to work on it from as early as poss.

I work as a maternity nurse so will probably buy the book if it is a genuine reccommendation.

I must have about 10 books on sleep and they can be helpful but parents sometimes blame themselves when they try to apply some of the methods and it doesn't work for them.

Glad it has worked for you.

If I'd refused any of mine a feed in the night they'd have screamed for hours and woken the whole house up. Would have been controlled crying, in fact.

Do you know at what age it starts recommending you refuse night feeds? Before 3 months presumably?

And does it sell itself only to babies that have had a previous long stretch?

So basically it's recommendation is don't feed them at a time when you want them to sleep, yes?

if I hold the key to unlock my child's sleep how come DC1 & 2 slept through from 3 mths and DC3 8 mths wakes up to 5 times a night?

There is no refused feeding and it in no way suggests that if your child cant sleep its your fault. Its actually a very gentle approach and maybe just gave me the confidence not to feed him every time he cried. And like i said i didn't start until my son was 3 months were before he was waking every hour. This is just a recommendation it might have been fluke but seemed to work for me.

Core sleep method or something, isn't it? Is explained in the GF books I believe.

Can I ask, what prompted you to post this, OP, if it was so long ago that you used it?

Yes that's it! well I'm new and just browsing the topics thought it might be of some interest. I'm sure iv probably put it in the wrong section? but like i said I'm new. [new]

I stongly contest the line "A child that sleeps is no accident of luck" Absolute bollocks. I was MrsSmug when my PFB slept through at 16 weeks. That soon bit me on the arse when DS1 arrived 5 years later. He was diagnosed by me as a 'high needs' baby and his worst episode of waking was 24 times between bedtime and midnight. We co-slept from then and still do (he is 4). DS2 sleeps beautifully but is a very early waker, and wakes between 4 and 5 am every morning.

Take that book and stick it up yer arse! (not specifically you OP)

it cant all be down to luck surly? i realise every one has there own story and of course what suits one wont suit others and i am i no way saying that if your child doesn't sleep it something you've done wrong i think i was just badly informed

You know what...I firmly believe that it is luck, and of course genetics. We get what we're given. Some DC walk early, some talk early. We have no control over those developmental milestones so why should sleep be any different? Some adults have insomnia and are unable to get to sleep. Is there a cure? No. Some babies may have similar genetic programming, we don't know.

I think we need to get Prof Winston on the case.

I do agree to a certain extend i was bought up by my mother a heavy sleeper but like my father have terrible insomnia, although I'm not sure i did as a child. But isn't it fair to say that children sleep better with a routine etc so maybe there are small changes we can make to alter sleep patterns slightly. I know friends who regularly get up and play with there babies at 4 in the morning, i would imagine this would change a body clock? My son was never taken out of his dark room when waking in the night so even though he woke regularly it was only for a couple of minutes at a time.

I also prescribe to the thought that sleep is developmental and largely it's luck as to whether they sleep well or not. Of course you can tweak things, you can gently encourage, just the same as you can talk to your children, encourage them to have the confidence to walk etc, but ultimately you get the child you get. The book is very explicitly stating that luck has nothing to do with it and that it's a thing parents control.

And quite apart from any belief in how much you can influence the sleep patterns of a small baby, I think something that tries to interfere with the feeding and sleeping norms of a very small baby is not healthy at all. A small baby should wake up often and it should feed often. It's actually a very good thing.

The book would just never be for me. I always took a view of what I could do to make my life easier as an adaptable and informed adult instead of interfering with the natural sleep and feeding patterns of a baby.

There's nowt wrong with suggesting that something works for you and may work for others but you do need to be careful about how you phrase things (as does that book) because using such polar opposites of a baby up playing all night versus a baby not taken out of a room is directly asserting that it's all down to what a particular parent did. And did right or wrong. Of course getting a baby up for playtime at 3am as a matter of habit isn't brilliant for encouraging good sleep but it's never as simple as 'I did this and this is the answer'.

I fucking wish it was that simple and I may not have to exist on diet coke and keep my eyes open with matchsticks. 5 hours last night.. AGAIN.

DD is 3.8 and still doesn't sleep through. And has the bug from hell so spent most of last night vomitting up everything including water.

Answers on a postcard...

I have said over and over again in this thread that i may have just been lucky. I also don't think mums should give them self's a hard time if your child doesn't sleep. Why on earth just because we are women and mums should we expect ourselves to be experts in everything including sleep? It didn't come naturally to me, (maybe it does to you) to know exactly how to best get my son to sleep. I needed a bit of help with confidence etc and that's what this book did for me. I didn't suggest any one was wrong just that maybe some behavior encouraged bad sleep patterns it was simply an example of how tweaking things might help.

I don think this book does interfere with a baby's sleep in fact the opposite. The only way i new to settle my son was to feed him when in fact maybe he just needed a cuddle and so he woke up to be fed. Maybe i was lucky and my son was just a natural sleeper and i just needed a confidence boost, like i said i jsut thought it might help.

I don't understand why people are so defensive? Is it supposed to be in built that we know exactly how to get our children to sleep through from 3 months and if we cant we've failed as a mother and a women? I don't think so.

I'm happy to take some advice from other people who might be slightly more specialist on this field in this case midwifes.

Midwives only deliver babies, they are not specialist in getting babies to sleep.

Millpond sleep clinic is probably the people with the answers.

Remember the old GF debate, it works for some not for others.