Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Marc Weissblath
For the past few months, my little girl has been having trouble sleeping. She was waking every 1.5 to 2 hrs and I was trying to comfort her each time. As you can imagine, we were both grumpy and sleep deprived.
Before reading Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child I was adamant about not letting her "cry it out". I thought it a cruel way to get my LO to sleep. But after reading this book, I realized that I had to do something .
Dr. Weissblath explains how needing to use soothing techniques the first 4 months of a colicky/extremely fussy baby can continue after they are not needed anymore and keeps baby from learning how to put themselves to sleep. The other interesting, and worrying information, was about the effects on a child from not getting enough sleep. This part got me worried about my little girl's sleep habits or non-sleep habits.
After talking with the hubby, family and friends we decided to give his "extinction method" a try; the only option we felt would work with our little girl. We stopped using the swaddle, took her out of our room/bassinet and put her in her crib and stopped picking her up every time she cried.
The first night was the hardest but almost 2 weeks later, Emma is sleeping 10-12 hrs a night with one wake up around 4:30am to nurse. She is also taking two naps a day, usually about 2 hrs long. She is definitely a much happier baby when she is awake.
Very helpful book, but like most sleep training books, you have a lot to read through before getting to the part that tells you what to do. The first 3/4 of the book is the information about the dangers of sleep deprivation and what causes the sleep problems, etc. Once you get to the ideas on how to fix, there are more than one option, including ways to do it with minimal crying. Also, different options are explained for different ages from newborns to toddlers.
I do wish I had read this earlier to better have avoided the sleep problems developing.
4/5
Source: purchased ebook
_________________________________________
FTC Disclosure: Clicking on title and image links will lead you to my Amazon Affiliate page.
It's amazing what a difference sleep makes, isn't it? So glad it was helpful for you. We did the extinction method too as soon as we could tell our baby was starting to fight going to sleep around four months old. A week later and she goes down almost everytime without difficulty. WHEW!
ReplyDeleteI wonder if my current sleep problem could have been "fixed" when I was younger
ReplyDelete