Getting a good night's sleep

The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer by Harvey Karp, MD: This book provides excellent advice about soothing fussy babies and helping them to get the sleep they need.

Sleeping Through the Night, Revised Edition: How Infants, Toddlers, and Their Parents Can Get a Good Night’s Sleep by Jodi Mindell, PhD: Jodi Mindell does a fabulous job of explaining infant sleep patterns and all of her sleep recommendations/tips are solidly backed by research. Her tone is warm and reassuring and her credentials are impeccable. (She is one of America’s top sleep experts.) Even if you find the cry-it-out method a bit too tough, you can still pick up plenty of valuable information from Mindell’s book.

Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Marc S. Weissbluth, M.D.: Marc Weissbluth’s book has a lot of useful information on how sleep cycles evolve in babies and young children and what parents can do to promote healthy sleep habits. You don’t have to agree with everything he says in this book or decide to use his sleep training methods to glean very valuable information from this book that you can then apply to your child/family’s situation. Consider this a really solid “sleep science” title.

The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night by Elizabeth Pantley: No sleep book list these days would be complete without a mention of Elizabeth Pantley’s bestselling guide to infant sleep. The book’s key strength is Pantley’s explanation of gentle infant soothing techniques, like helping a baby to be less dependent on the breast for falling asleep. Pantley has done a great job of summarizing a lot of “mother wisdom” on sleep (e.g., pretending to be asleep when baby wants to nurse during the night when you’re cosleeping to see if baby will settle on his/her own). The title is a bit misleading, given that Pantley herself allows for crying in the book; and the book encourages inconsistency rather than consistency in sleep training, something that goes against the basic principles of behavior modification. (Pantley repeatedly tells parents that they should go back to what they were doing before if her plan isn’t working.) Ideally, it should be considered a sleep-soothing rather than a sleep-training resource (more in the category of a “Happiest Baby” book).

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