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


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22511 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-04
• Released on: 2005-10-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 544 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

Ingram
The child care classic is now totally revised and updated as Dr. Weissbluth, a leading researcher on sleep and children, promotes a revolutionary program to ensure healthy, happy sleep for a child--both at night and during equally important daytime naps. He offers dozens of anecdotes and new case histories of children with various sleep disorders and the prescribed methods of therapy.

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.

Customer Reviews

Scientifically correct....but harsh to put into practice
While the doctor is a specialist in the area of sleep the book fails to appreciate that babies are people with feelings.

To give you an understanding of what I mean here are a few EXACT quotes.

Page 177 "Use thick layers of zinc oxide paste in the diaper region so that no rash will develop when you do not go to your baby at night to change diapers."

How long to let your baby cry? Page 159 for naps "no more than one hour" for bedtime "there is no time limit at night if the child is not hungry or ill"

Why do you let him cry? Page 159 "We are leaving him alone to forget the expectation to be picked up."

To answer "Isn't crying harmful" he says: "Not necessarily." "When a child cries she may more quickly unlearn to expect to be picked up."

And if your baby cries so hard she vomits? Page 176 "If the vomiting is irregular and occasional you should try waiting until after you think she is deeply asleep before checking, and then quickly clean her if needed."
(Wait until she's ASLEEP before checking? Clean her IF NEEDED?)

In response to a parent who says she wants to respond to her crying baby at night, Page 178 "Letting your baby cry is not doing nothing. You are activily encouraging the development of independence" He then says you may not want to hear your baby cry because you have Page 179 "Working mother's guilt. You may feel guilty about being away from your child so much."

What if your baby climbs out of the crib? Page 193 "A crib tent will prevent your child from getting out of the crib, and it allows you to remove yourself from his protest crying" And if you don't want to use a crib tent because he says "some parents feel that the crib tent locks their child in the crib like an animal caged in the zoo" then "lock the door instead."

To keep a 3 year old from getting up too early in the morning "Place a digital clock in her room and set the alarm for 6 or 7" "You do not respond to her cries before this wake-up time."

Enough said. Not only are the ideas harsh and the grammer terrible, I much prefer the sensitive approach in The No-Cry Sleep Solution by Elizabeth Pantley where you don't have to deal with vomiting, crying or crib tents.

Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child
I consider this book to be the "bible" for sleep-deprived parents. It gives you all the background info you need to understand children's sleep problems and how to fix them. I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone with a child who is not sleeping well.

However, be prepared for a long, cumbersome read. Like many other reviewers have stated, this book needs some good editing. It is difficult to understand in parts, contradictory at times, and just an overall boring read! Difficult to get through the whole thing when you're a tired mom!

Despite all that, I'd still consider the book worth buying. But for those of you who just want to get to the facts and solutions, and only have a couple of hours to spend reading, there is an even better book out there. It's called the Sleep Sense Program, by Dana Obleman. You can order it at wwww.sleepsense.net

We were following Healthy Sleep Habits to the letter, but our son was still not sleeping through the night consistently. When we came across Sleep Sense, we quickly ordered the book and devoured it. We found that Dana's techniques were very similar to Mark Weissbluth's. The difference we found in Dana's book was removing the soother from our son's bedtime routine. As soon as we did that, no more night wakings!

If you have to pick one book, I'd pick Sleep Sense for its quick, no-nonsense read, easy to implement, effective tips as well as the extras it comes with (workbook, electronic sleep log and audio interview with Dana). But if you really want to get in-depth and truly understand how children sleep, what causes sleep problems, different types of sleep problems and how to fix them - Healthy Sleep Habits is the book for you. Personally, I'm glad I have both, and refer back to them whenever my son enters a new sleep pattern.

Not terribly useful
I would have to agree with the reviewers who found this book largely baffling and filled with contradictory advice as well as all of the reviewers who noted how terribly written this book is. It does offer useful information on helping your child to nap but also offers contradictory advice in differing sections (sometimes it says checking on your child won't work, elsewhere it says that checking on your child can be fine) and buries key information in chapters that are not relevant (such as the tip that children under 4 months are getting enough sleep if left to their own devices and the even more key point that one should not try to let a 4 month old cry it out). It also repeats tedious, useless phrases far too frequently (it's not logical, but it is biological). I think this book is most useful if either your child already is an easy sleeper and so the suggestions are easy to implement, or if your child is older and its sleep is a disaster and you're desparate for help. Also, the book focuses far too much on disfunction and relies on far too many first person accounts that are not really relevant and are very repetitive.