Infant Sleep Books: a Review of My Experience

I'm afraid to write this. Seriously.

If you're a parent you know that you never bring up where or how you get your child to sleep with anyone but your nearest and dearest. Because the amount of judgment on this subject in the world at large is overwhelming.

I'm writing this post, though, because I have been the mom who is so desperate for sleep that she reads everything she can find on the subject like it's a part-time job. Wanting ideas, not unrequested advice. I know there are more of those moms out there now and they are worth risking judgment from those who seem to know it all.

For you, Desperate Moms, I will write my experience and what worked for me. In case you've never tried it and you might want to and it might work for you. That's all I mean by it. I promise. It's a long post. Read at your own risk.

So, 20 months ago I became a basket case. I mean that in the nicest, warm and fuzziest way possible. I need sleep and when I didn't get it I became desperate. And furthermore, Lilia was getting desperate for sleep herself. She was crying every night in our arms and pretty much needed to be on my person or Jeff's to sleep at all.

I was all about kind and gentle methods. Lilia slept in our bed and we really enjoyed the bonding time with her, so we wanted to keep going with that if we could. So we started with The No Cry Sleep Solution. We tried to gradually stop her from nursing to sleep, we tried nearly every method listed in the book. She got worse. In fact, she cried more than she ever had, despite all our efforts to the contrary.

Next, we tried The Secrets of the Baby Whisperer. The basic methods in that book are the EASY (this is one of the many places you'll find the "eat, wake, sleep" pattern recommended), and the "pick up put down." This is basically a method where you pick the baby up whenever she fusses and then put her back down when she's calm. We had some success with this one and I think it might have worked really well if we'd started it from the get-go. Eat, wake, sleep was a great thing for Lilia, but "pick up put down" really, really upset her. She hated it every time we did it and it made her cry harder because it was frustrating to her.

At some point around 7 months we had to switch to formula and she slept through the night on her own, but still had a *terrible* time going to sleep. It was so sad! She would cry and cry. One night at 11pm when we were driving her to get her to go to sleep I realized we needed to do something different. I googled something like "infant sleep expert" to try to find someone with more qualifications than just personal experience as a nurse or mom and was pleased to find Dr. Jodi Mindell, a psychologist with over 30 years' experience in the field of pediatric sleep disorders. Bingo!

We ordered her book, Sleeping Through the Night and I read it immediately. Now, her book is a little different in that there's more theory involved. There is an "official method" in there, but it's really only about 4 pages of the book. I felt that, in reading this book, I learned a whole lot about sleep in general and how it works. In fact, Jeff and I now sometimes use these methods to help ourselves get more sleep!

Her basic ideas are creating a routine that is reliable every single sleep time (she actually makes a great case for routines in the rest of your child's day as well!), and making sure that your child's environment the moment he falls asleep is identical to the environment he will experience at 2am. So basically if you don't want to have to be in the room at 2am getting him to sleep, dont be in the room when he first falls asleep in the evening either.

It's not really a "cry-it-out" method because you can go in the room and comfort them as frequently as you want (we did every 5 minutes with Lilia, every 3 with Evan because we started him younger). You just can't help them go to sleep. You also don't worry at all about night wakings -- you can nurse them down, pat them, sing to them, whatever it takes to get them back to sleep. We found that a lot less stressful than the idea of letting them cry in the middle of the night!

This method worked like magic for us. Lilia cried less than she had in months starting the very first night (I think she only cried 20 minutes) and completely stopped crying at sleep times after about 3 days. In the weeks that followed she started asking to go to bed when she was tired. We felt it was a miracle.

We've used the same method with Evan (she recommends starting between 6 weeks and 3 months) and it has worked well with him also.

That's an experiment of 2, which is not a very large control group. But there, our experience is out there in case anyone else can use it. Hope it helps someone.