Healthy Living Books Books

Rating: - An uninspired collection of ideas...
We eagerly bought this book to help address sleep issues. Nobody wants to let their child cry if they can help it and this is the main selling point of this book - it is presented as an infallible way of getting your child to sleep better, and that if you contemplate allowing your child to cry you are a cruel and insensitive parent. Like many areas of parenthood and parenting guides guilt is a major element of why you should follow this book - i.e. you won't feel guilty and what a wonderful person you are!
Having said all that, the guide comes up with several suggestions, all of which I have seen before in a number of other books and pamphlets, each of which are not bad in their own right. The key element to what the author is advocating though is to keep a diary, review it, change your approach where possible, and then keep another diary. Repeat as many times as necessary. This is pretty much common sense, and maybe it is a help to a parent who needs assistance to become more organised or structured ( hard to do on 3 hours sleep of course! ). Please don't expect this book to be the panacea to all your sleep problems though as you will be disappointed. We were expecting more and felt let down when we actually analysed what was involved.

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Rating: - A must have for all sleepless mothers!
Elizabeth Pantley's no cry sleeping solution really works! I am the mother of a one year old baby girl, who would wake me up about every hour to breastfeed! In my surroundings, everyone, including my pediatrician, adviced me to let her cry herself to sleep. Finding this absolutely barbarous as a method of treating this helpless little bundle depending on me, I resigned myself to sleepless nights! Until I found Elizabeth Pantley's book! Read it, it is clear, well written and based on real mother experiences. I am now sleeping 12 hour nights, undisturbed!!

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Rating: - A viable alternative to CIO/CC
I didn't find this prescriptive at all. Just a series of ideas and suggestions that you can try, which I found a lot more helpful than the usual one-size-fits-all advice given by other sleep gurus. Using a combination of Pantley's techniques, and a lot of patience, my son finally started to sleep through at 11 months. You may not think that's all that impressive, but I can assure you that when he was 9 months old, and I started with the techniques, he was an incredibly poor sleeper. But patience is the key, because none of Pantley's ideas are quick fixes.

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Rating: - Baby sleeping all night long!
This book is an absolute life-saver and is perfect for anyone like myself, who does not want to use any sort of `cry it out' method to help their baby to sleep.

I was an exhausted mother of a 1 year old baby who would use breastfeeding as a means to help him sleep. He would wake sometimes up to 8 times a night leaving me completely exhausted wondering how I was going to get through the next day.

I was determined not to use any kind of `cry it out' method and had resigned myself to the fact that this was the way it was going to be. Fortunately, I stumbled across this book and within 6 weeks my baby was sleeping all night through and I felt fantastic!!

As clearly stated in the book the methods used do take time since they are not an overnight remedy. I decided to give myself 2 months. It was really hard work and for those 6 weeks I was even more tired than usual since the procedure used often had to repeated - but it was definitely worth it. We had very little success for the first month and I was becoming quite disheartened, worried that all this effort was going to be for nothing. Anyway, we somehow managed to stick to the plan and by the 5th week we started to see some dramatic improvement in the length of time my son slept between feeds. By the 6th week he was sleeping all night long. We still can't quite believe it.

The only advice I would give for anyone using the methods is to try and have lots of patience and try to remain really calm (easy to say - I know) at 2, 3, 4 o'clock in the morning. The first few weeks for us were really hard since progress was very slow - but I am very glad we stuck it out - it was really worth it.

Nowadays, when my baby sometimes wakes at night I pick him up for a quick cuddle and then lie him down (awake of course!) and as long as it isn't a teething problem he falls back to sleep himself, happily. Best of luck!

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Rating: - This is not the only way
This book was a disappointment, and in retrospect has made me quite angry, for two main reasons:

1) the sleep method is presented as infallible and any failure is solely the fault of the parent;
2) it suggests that the only alternative is the crying-it-out method, where the baby is left to cry for as long as it takes to fall asleep, and which is presented in very emotional terms as cruel and traumatic for parents and baby.

After 6 months of increasing sleep problems (30 minutes in the day if we were lucky, 5 disturbances a night, and waking up at 4.30) we tried the Pantley method for a while, with no success and no hint of any improvement. In the end we tried a 2-minute version of crying-it-out, where you go back into the baby's room to comfort them every 2 minutes, as we could not stand the thought of hearing our baby cry for even 10 minutes. The first night it took 50 minutes, the second night 20 minutes, and the third night ... BINGO!!...silence. 6 months of bad sleep solved in 3 nights by a method which Pantley doesn't even mention. And 8 months later and we've not had a single sleep problem! Now we can expect 2 hours during the day and 11 hours at night.

Peruse this book for ideas but keep an open mind about other approaches, and DO NOT blame yourself if something you try doesn't work.