Anyway

We’ve had prob­lems with get­ting the baby (now 10 months) to sleep prop­erly dur­ing the day, and when she also star­ted wak­ing more often dur­ing the night I decided I had to fig­ure out an answer. Our first child slept read­ily, took sched­ule vari­ations in his stride, and so it was a big shock when our second child was com­pletely dif­fer­ent. We tried put­ting her on vari­ous routines, but couldn’t find one that worked until recently (yay! sleep!). Given that lots of searches on my blog are about how to get babies to sleep, and the vast num­ber of books out there on the sub­ject, I fig­ure some other people might be inter­ested in the sub­ject. The rest of you will undoubtedly have already tuned out by now.

I got heaps of books out of the lib­rary, but can only recom­mend two. Some of the books seemed to be writ­ten along the lines of “this worked for me, I don’t know why, maybe it will work for you too” and per­son­ally I prefer an approach that has a little more research to it. I’m not going to talk about the books I read and didn’t like since other people may find them use­ful; I’m just going to review the two books I liked best.

If your baby is young, you could try The Hap­pi­est Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Cry­ing and Help Your Baby Sleep Longer, which looked like it had some use­ful tips. I wouldn’t bother with it if your baby is more than about 6 months old though.

The book I liked a lot, and even bought, is Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, which con­tains a lot of inform­a­tion, includ­ing some research into how long chil­dren sleep at vari­ous ages, a strict routine (which really suits our baby but wouldn’t have been neces­sary for our first child), and dis­cus­sions about what to do as the child gets older in terms of chan­ging the sleep and nap routine. A lot of people may find the advice to let the baby cry harsh — you do have to be able to recog­nise the vari­ous types of cry your baby makes so you can respond to fear or dis­com­fort while ignor­ing the baby when she’s annoyed. It worked very well for us (at least so far and we’ve been on the sched­ule for a week) and we not only have our happy baby back, I’m also catch­ing up on sleep. Get­ting up at 6:30 am every morn­ing is a bit of a change, but not being woken up at 11 pm, 2 am, and 5 am more than makes up for it.