Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child
by Marc Weissbluth
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Book Reviews of Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child
Book Review: Mostly useless
Summary: 1 Stars
To say that Marc Weissbluth's method doesn't work gives this book too much credit, as it implies that there is actually a method to be found somewhere in it. Now it is certainly possible that Weissbluth had some method in mind when he was writing, but he completely failed to convey this method, if it in fact exists, to the pages of the book. The man's inability to effectively communicate is truly astonishing. He has an abnoxious habit of completely dancing around the point he is trying to make, instead of just making it. For example, he never comes out and says that for the first three to four months of a baby's life, you can't expect any regular sleep patterns. Instead he just starts talking about establishing sleep patterns in your three to four month child. Furthermore, chapter headings mean nothing to this man. There is almost no organization to the book, so it is nearly impossible to reference something you may have read earlier. To give another example his teaching style, he repeats the mantra "never wake a sleeping baby" a number of times. Later he advises you to wake your baby if it is time to wake up. On yet a different page, he explains that you can in fact wake a baby if it is necessary to maintain their sleep schedule. Perhaps he should have written "seldom wake a sleeping baby". If you have a photographic memory, and can instantly index everything you have read, maybe you can figure out what it is you are supposed to do.
As far as content goes, Weissbluth spends alot of words telling you that your child needs sleep. Its really important that you child gets enough sleep. And it isn't good if the child falls asleep and wakes up too soon, the sleep needs to be of sufficient duration. Well duh, if I hadn't already assumed that I wouldn't be reading a book that claims to tell me how to get children to sleep. He also includes alot of testimonials from parents who have used his method. Other books have used these with some success, mainly to show you that you child's behavior, as atrocious as it may seem, is really quite common, but Weissbluth botches these too. He will have some story about parents who came to him with a sleep problem, and he tells them to put the child to bed thirty minutes earlier, and everything is magically cured. But he includes no mechanism to explain why this supposedly worked, so unless you have the exact same problem, you learn nothing from this.
The closest thing I could find to a method was to simply let children cry themselves to sleep. Maybe that is what all of Weissbluth's research boils down to, but if that is the case, then this book only needed to be about a page long. But even if that is what he meant, I have known several children, one my own, who don't cry themselves to sleep, but instead work themselves deeper and deeper into a frenzy when you do just let them cry at night. I only tried this because it was doctor recommended, and it didn't work.
So, if this book is so incoherent and impossible to use, why do so many reviewers claim the method works? Remember when I pointed out where Weissbluth never quite said that babies are incapable of having a regular sleep schedule untill the age of three to four months? Well, I suspect that most people read this book before that point, and then whatever they interpreted this book to mean they should try appeared to work because their child naturally developed normal sleep habits by that age. This is what happend with my second child. We really didn't try anything, and it worked. He developed good sleep habits on his own. It is only with exceptionally difficult children (like my first child) that you realize that this book really isn't doing anything for you.
Finally, I called this book mostly useless instead of completely useless for a reason. While I don't believe that Weissbluth has discovered anything to improve a difficult child's sleep habits, it does appear that he has at least observed and documented what normal sleep habits are like. He also points out the somewhat counterintuitive notion that sleep deprivation can actually make it harder for a child to sleep than being on a normal schedule. This could be useful to prevent messing up a normal child's sleep schedule, but it doesn't help if the child is difficult and simple won't get enough sleep in the first place.
I am convinced that if you have a child with a real sleep problem, that none of the experts really have a solution. If there were a simple solution, it would be be too valuable not to be common knowledge by now.
Book Review: Unscientific, dangerous, and will drive parents crazy (and needs an editor)
Summary: 1 Stars
Dr. Weisbluth repeats the assertion that this book is based on science so many times that it's easy to get bamboozled into taking it seriously, especially as a sleep-deprived new parent whose brain isn't functioning at full capacity. My husband and I fell for it at first, in spite of my PhD in physics and usual skepticism towards vague claims about being "scientific." When we were trying to follow it, it just about drove us crazy. The author gives brief lip service to the idea that every baby is different and you need to pay attention to your particular baby's needs and temperament. Then he goes on to tell you exactly how many naps your baby should be taking, at what time of day, and for how long, and argue that if your baby isn't following his schedule, he is really going to be screwed up. This, along with his claim that it's bad for babies to sleep in a sling, swing, or anywhere other than a firm bed, resulted in us being confined to our house, spending hours a day trying desperately to make our 6-week-old baby go to sleep when Dr. Weisbluth said she was supposed to. Once we gave up on this book and just let our baby sleep when and where she wanted to, it was clear that she didn't really have any sleep "problems" other than following her own schedule rather than Dr. Weisbluth's, and our whole family was a lot calmer and happier.
For the first few months, while it's clear what you're baby's supposed to do, it isn't clear what you're supposed to do to make your baby do it. After that, the main "solution" he proposes for any and all sleep problems is to leave your baby alone to cry until he falls asleep. He claims that this method is based on science, but if you read carefully, the scientific evidence he presents to support it is incredibly weak. He essentially builds up a straw man of the opposite extreme, responding to every tiny sound a baby makes, and argues that since the straw man is bad, his method must be good. For example, one of the main pieces of evidence he presents is a study that "...compared children over six months of age whose parents indiscriminately responded to every cry, day or night, to those children whose parents were trained to respond promptly to every intense, stressed, or demanding cry but to delay their response to quite vocalizations or weak cries" and found that at one year of age the children in the latter group cried more. This study suggests that one should not respond to every sound, but certainly does nothing to support the opposite extreme of leaving your baby to scream alone for hours even to the point of vomiting. Yes, Dr. Weisbluth actually suggests that if your baby cries so hard he vomits, you should clean up the vomit and then leave him to cry some more! As a scientist and a caring human being, I would hope that anyone suggesting something so apparently cruel and contrary to all my maternal instincts would have some overwhelming evidence to support it. However, this book does not present any such evidence. I would suggest that anyone contemplating using this method first read chapter 10 of Dr. Sears' The Baby Sleep Book: The Complete Guide to a Good Night's Rest for the Whole Family (Sears Parenting Library), which presents strong evidence that it is in fact quite dangerous. Dr. Sears perhaps goes a bit too far to the other extreme, and it may be that leaving a child to cry might be necessary as a last resort for a few babies, but advocating this for all babies is just irresponsible.
Aside from the disturbing content, this book desperately needs and editor. A friend who is more generous than I am described its incoherent, rambling, and repetitive prose as "perfectly in tune with the delirious post-partum mind." But really, it's just hard to understand what he's talking about. For example, he frequently emphasizes the benefits of keeping a sleep log, and this seems to be a central feature of his method, but to find directions for how to do this, we had to look in the index. The directions are buried on page 222 in a subsection of "Weeks Seven To Eight," in between the subsections on easy babies and fussy babies. These directions are so complex that they seem to require Excel to implement, and so confusing that we never really figured it out. Really, if you're going to suggest making color-coded bar graphs, at least include a diagram for us poor sleep-deprived parents!
Book Review: Helpful for a small number of children
Summary: 3 Stars
When I first read this book, a lot of things clicked for me. He does a good job explaining how sleep works and why children wake frequently. However, the actual task of reading the book is like pulling teeth. It is incredibly repetitive and poorly written, even though a lot of the information is valuable.
In our case, our son had developed a rock-to-sleep "sleep association." One of my problems with this book is that Dr. Weissbluth never mentions sleep associations, which is at the root of the problem for most children, and thus parents. Children quickly learn to associate certain conditions with falling asleep, and when they wake up to find those conditions absent (mommy/daddy isn't rocking me, singing to me, etc., is out of the room), they find it impossible to fall back asleep. When I read Dr. Ferber's book, "Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems" (which I find far superior to Weissbluth's in every category), this was a huge lightbulb moment for me.
Unfortunately, I read Weissbluth before Ferber and ended up doing the cry-it-out with my son at 4 1/2 months. The reason I did it was that he was waking every 15 to 20 minutes, expecting to be rocked back to sleep. We went on like this for weeks until one night I realized: I'm not doing him any favors by continuing to reinforce this problem. He's just as miserable constantly waking and having to start the falling asleep process over as we are. One night we gradually phased out the soothing (rocking first, then back rubbing and singing, then just singing, then just being in the room, then not returning). He cried almost hysterically for an hour, and I cried for the last 20 minutes of it. Then he fell asleep and slept through the night--a miracle. The second night, he only cried for 10 minutes and then slept all night again. I thought it must be working. Unfortunately, the cry-it-out was absolutely useless for naps. I finally found Dr. Ferber's book and realized just how cruel and ineffectual (for most children, anyway) the cry-it-out really is. I have never done the cry-it-out again and our son falls asleep in one minute flat and sleeps 11 hours a night. Sometimes there's 2 or 3 minutes of fussing before naps, but he takes two good solid naps a day and is a happy, sweet, cuddly baby. He is 8 months now.
I think Weissbluth's advice is fine for people with easy babies, but I do not believe that it works for babies who aren't great sleepers or for babies who are colicky or very difficult. With an easy baby, you will have minimal crying and the effect will last. But if you don't have an easy baby, any change in routine is a huge setback. For anyone who doesn't want to do the cry-it-out, I highly recommend Ferber's book. You'll actually enjoy reading it (unlike the painstaking process of reading Weissbluth's) and it provides myriad insight into the way your baby works than the repetitive, droning-on nature of 'Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child.'
I think Weissbluth's theory is lazy and is a radical approach. It's lazy because he doesn't even suggest trying to uncover the reason your child is waking. It's like a one-size-fits-all.....TOTALLY unrealistic, as every child is unique. In Ferber's book, he explains sleep associations in detail and recommends that your first step as a consciencious parent is to determine why your child is having a hard time falling asleep by himself. Then you address it and are on your way to a solution. Weissbluth says without actually saying verbatim that your child is manipulating you by crying when it's time to sleep. This may be the case in some significantly older children, but to me it makes utter sense that once a baby gets into a rut (sleep association), it's difficult to break. Cutting that association off cold turkey is like an adult suddenly trying to sleep without a pillow. It would feel awful and you would be miserable for nights on end.
Babies are emotional, not rational, and I believe there is a much kinder approach and just letting them misery-it-out.
Book Review: Helped my 3.5 month old sleep 11-12 hours a night
Summary: 5 Stars
Ferber (I know this is a review for Weissbluth but bear with me) says "It's entirely reasonable to cut back to two nighttime feedings by the time your child is two or three months of age, one feeding by three or four months, and none at all at five months. Many children give up nighttime feedings altogether around the age of three or four months;basically no normal, healthy full-term babies still require a nighttime feeding when they are five months old, and you can certainly insist on stopping them altogether at that point if you want to."
Sounds too good to be true? That's exactly what my son did.
From talking to my friends, it sounds like I won the lottery on the sleep friend since my 3.5 month old son has started sleeping 11-12 hours straight a night. He just started a week ago and he's not completely consistent about this yet, so there are some nights he still wakes up to be fed, but I can happily live with that. I think part of it is genetic & part of it is luck, but I also attribute it to the fact that I obsessed over having him develop healthy sleep habits early on so I could avoid having to "sleep train" or break bad habits later on. Some of things I did as soon as he turned 2 months old:
- Moved him to his crib in the nursery (before that he was sleeping with me in bed)
- Did not wake him for feeding during the day (if he slept through a meal, I would just time shift subsequent feedings)
- Avoided rocking him to sleep
- Put him down while he was drowsy but still slightly awake
- Separated the time between his last feeding for the day and bed time (so he didn't need to rely on food to fall asleep)
- Made sure all his naps and bedtime were in the crib
- If he fell asleep in a swing, I would turn off the motion so the swing would be still
Basically, I tried very hard to teach my son how to fall asleep by himself while respecting his demands and need for sleep (i.e., watching for his sleepy cues and letting him sleep for as long as he needed, even during the day).
The two books I swear by that gave me the necessary methodology are "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child" by Marc Weissbluth and "Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems" by Richard Ferber. There was some overlap between the two, but I gleaned enough different information from them that I recommend getting both.
Parents often think that to get their kids to sleep longer at night, they
should be kept awake for as long as possible during the day so that they become exhausted in the evenings and snooze better. WRONG! Kids actually become "overtired" and can't sleep. Instead, they should sleep as much as they need to during the day and be put to bed earlier -- completely counter intuitive. I used Weissbluth to make sure I paid attention to when my son showed signs of being sleepy and put him down for napping right away. Weissbluth also gives some very helpful descriptions on what to expect (and what to do) when a baby is 0-2 months old, 2-3 months old, etc.
Ferber is attributed (and in a bad way) for the "cry it out" method, but I think it's because people misinterpret his recommendations. I think he is misunderstood and his methodology isn't as traumatic as people make it out to be. Having said that, I never actually had to sleep train my child or "Ferberize" him. Ferber doesn't recommend this for children until they are four months old, and I wasn't going to even try until he was five months old, but I was able to avoid this altogether.
Oh, and try to read these books BEFORE you baby is born! These books are not light reading and I made the mistake of tackling them after my darling was born which is tough to do when I had so little "free" time and was horribly sleep deprived. But the effort paid off in spades.
Book Review: very helpful, but you must read it
Summary: 5 Stars
I'll start by saying my daughter is 11 months old and we have been using this book from the beginning, every single suggestion in it has worked. That being said, this book is not set up in the best most organized way and it can be difficult to read. That is why I think there are negative reviews...people don't quite understand what Weissbluth is saying and jump to the wrong conclusions. I have heard him accused of heartless cry-it-out. This is untrue. Yes, Weissbluth does recommend what some people refer to as cry-it-out...but only in certain circumstances. Your child must be old enough, you the parent must be able to handle it, and your child must be of the disposition to handle it. He freely admits that cry-it-out is not the best for every child and he gives alternate suggestions. He is not against co-sleeping or breastfeeding and he also suggests that babies may still need to be fed overnight well into the 9th month and that you should always go to your baby if you think he or she is hungry. I'll state that again, you should always feed your child when hungry. That's right, it is not recommended by this book that you ignore your child's basic needs. People that are stating otherwise have not read this book carefully. This doesn't sound so heartless to me. But it is also proof that this book is not written well that people are able to jump to such negative conclusions about this book, if you don't read carefully you may miss some critical advice. Weissbluth also provides research studies to back his claims up. As a professional with a master's degree, this is important to me. This man knows what he is doing. I now understand the infant sleep cycle and how to help my baby reach her sleeping potential. This is a long read and like I said, not organized well. I think for some people the reading material is over their heads. It is a shame it could not be more user friendly. Also, there are some individuals that are unwilling to entertain the notion of crying it out under any circumstances. This is not the book for you then, I would suggest "The No Cry Sleep Solution" By Elizabeth Pantley. But don't give this book negative reviews because you don't understand teaching your baby to self-soothe. Every parent is different, but this book does work if it is something you are willing to undergo. His information really hit home for me. His point that every time you go into your child and respond to his crying, you are depriving him of sleep and the ability to learn to soothe himself on his own made me really think. My baby was a horrible sleeper with no self-soothing abilities. I waited to try modified cry-it-out until 9 months. Now my baby soothes herself to sleep and is a much happier baby. But I listen to my baby's cries, if I think she needs me I always go to her. This book will work if you will let it work and come into it with an open mind. But all parents are different. If you are unwilling to let your baby cry at all, even at an older age, don't buy this book. Recognize that this approach is not for you, but don't knock it and give it negative reviews.
Another point, I am using the term "cry-it-out" loosely in this review but that is not exactly what is being recommended here. Throughout the book, you are taught to recognize your child's tired cues. When you catch your child on the wave of drowsiness and put them to bed at that point, crying should be minimal. When a child becomes over-tired, then they fight going to sleep and may cry. Some of these negative reviews seem to be from people that are anti any form of baby crying so they are twisting the meaning of this book and just searching for things to find wrong with it. This book was so meaningful and helpful to me and I consider myself a compassionate and caring mom. Don't let the negative reviews scare you off.