The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night
 | Average Customer Rating: Recommend A breakthrough approach for a good night's sleep--with no tears There are two schools of thought for encouraging babies to sleep through the night: the hotly debated Ferber technique of letting the baby "cry it out," or the grin-and-bear-it solution of getting up from dusk to dawn as often as necessary. If you don't believe in letting your baby cry it out, but desperately want to sleep, there is now a third option, presented in Elizabeth Pantley's sanity-saving book The… Product details and pricing info |
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684 Customer Reviews Posted
- No-cry HELP for babies & their parents!
- The Pantley No Cry Sleep Solution has been a GREAT sleep help companion for us ever since we bought it for baby #1. The support and encouragement in this book gave my husband and I the stradegies we needed to stick to our gut resolve to NOT ignore our child when he was crying at night! Now that we have 4 children, we have 2 copies of this MUST-HAVE sleep resource. One to refer to whenever a new strategy was needed for our latest child . . . and another to loan out to friends and family when they were sleep deprived and desparate for immediate help! They say ANY sleep-solution will help if you follow it and use consistancy. But THIS is the one that freed my hubby and I to help our child w/o compromising our instinctive need continue to be there when our children need us in the night.
Good luck to you!
Blessings,
Kaycee Farrell
[...] - 2008-06-20, 1 of 1 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- It was a complete waste of our time, money and sanity.
- I had really high hopes for this book, as it is so highly rated and seems to have helped a lot of parents deal with their childrens' sleep issues. My daughter, now 6 months old, has had trouble getting to sleep almost since birth. She was waking up 9 or 10 times every night and I was bringing her into bed with me just to get a couple of hours of unbroken sleep. By the time my daughter was 3 months old, I was tired, more tired than I've ever been in my life (my older child is a good sleeper), and desperate for a solution. Since I was terrified of the idea of my baby girl crying or being unhappy in any way, I bought Ms. Pantley's book.
Unfortunately, I was almost immediately put off by the author's tone and her approach to teaching her sleep method. She starts the book by basically selling her technique to the reader. The first chapter is peppered with scathing criticism of other sleep methods, glowing reviews from mothers who have successfully tried her method, and some very judgemental commentary about parents who use parenting techniques other than the ones the author herself is selling. As I'd already bought the book, I was a little confused by the author's apparent need to further justify her philosophies. But I was willing to disregard the negativity and try Ms. Pantley's sleep program.
The basic principles in the book are valid. The research outlines views shared by respected sleep experts including Drs. Sears and Ferber. Certain ideas in the book, especially the establishment of a concrete bedtime and a bedtime routine are very good, and are echoed by many other experts. However, the corrective measures that Ms. Pantley presents were impractical, overly passive and generally ineffective for my daughter.
I spent 3 months obsessively tracking the baby's sleep habits, making sleep plans, repeating my key words and phrases, and repeatedly attempting to progress from one phase to the next with no success. All the while my daytime life suffered immensely as I struggled to function on a few hours of broken sleep. Not only did I see no improvement, it seemed like my daughter's sleep problems actually got worse. Toward the end of my experience with the No-Cry Sleep Solution, she wouldn't stay in her crib more than 20 minutes at a time. She had learned that her cries would summon me promptly (the author insists that the parent must respond to the child's cries immediately) and that I would mommmy her back to sleep. My frustration was compounded by the fact that the author insists that any lack of progress can only be a result of some mistake or oversight on the part of the parent.
Ms. Pantley promises that there will be improvement, but constantly redefines what she means by "improvement," stating that "sleep through the night" simply means that the child will sleep for 5 consecutive hours sometime during the night. She frequently states that any positive change in the child's sleep habits, no matter how insignificant, should be taken as a great success. She constantly reminds the parent to be patient, but seems almost apologetic that her program is so lengthy. I have trouble putting faith in a so-called solution when its creator feels the need to constantly justify it.
I know some parents have had success with this program. I am very happy for them. Maybe my child is simply more stubborn than other children, or maybe she learns differently. Either way, the author's insistence that her methods will work on every child no matter what and that failure is always a result of the parents' wrongdoing finally put me off this book for good. I gave the program 3 months of my life and have nothing to show for it. I could not, in good conscience, continue to put my family through that nightmare. My baby needs her sleep even more than I do and it just wasn't healthy to continue to let her wake up 8 or more times during the night. I turned to another sleep program that, admittedly, involves some crying (though it is not a true "cry-it-out" method by any means) and am having great success.
I wish anyone who's considering trying this method the best of luck, but I would not recommend this book to anyone. - 2008-06-19, 11 of 16 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- We're all sleeping through the night!
- My daughter was not one of those babies who just magically started sleeping through the night at a couple months old, but when she was 10 months old she started sleeping for eleven hours a night without needing us to go to her, and we never made her "cry it out." In addition, she takes two, one-and-a-half hour naps each day. How did we get from our sleepless nights to where we are today? We used Elizabeth Pantley's book, The No Cry Sleep Solution. We were never comfortable leaving our daughter alone to cry herself to sleep, and we found this book to be a great, loving alternative to the sleep training methods out there. My daughter is breastfed and did spend time co-sleeping with us, but she now sleeps the entire night in her room without waking to nurse.
Pantley's book is well-organized, and in addition to her supportive, encouraging tone, she offers solutions that you can start trying right away. Her book is not a quick fix, but rather it provides the tools necessary to nighttime parent your child with love. You *can* start seeing results right away.
I know that my daughter will not be a baby forever, and she will not always need us to make her feel loved and secure. Right now, however, she does need us, and we wanted to offer her comfort and reassurance while still teaching her to sleep on her own. Our family is now rested, and my husband and I are proud that we were responsive to our daughter's needs. Buy this book; you are sure to find solutions that will apply to your baby's sleep problems. We will be purchasing Pantley's other books because we believe in her methods! - 2008-06-18, 4 of 4 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Don't buy the Kindle Edition!
- This review is for the Kindle Edition ONLY. I can't tell you how we like the book as we are stuck on the second chapter trying to piece together the figures and re-make the charts we need to fill in.
They totally screwed up the Kindle version. All spacing for diagrams and charts is off rendering them next to unreadable. In some books this wouldn't matter, but in this one they are a key part of the book. There are worksheets you are supposed to photocopy and fill out. I don't know if a Kindle will print out forms from a book or not; it's not in the user's manual and I'm not that computer savvy. Even if I did know how to, again, the spacing on these is all messed up so it wouldn't help anyway. So I have been sitting at my computer trying to guess what these things are supposed to look like so that I can recreate them on in my word processing program and it's been a lot more work than I wanted to sign on for. I think I will check my local library to see if they have a hard copy I can check out and photocopy, which makes me wonder, "Why did I bother buying it on my Kindle then?"
Again, do NOT get it in Kindle version! If you are going to buy it, get a paper copy. - 2008-05-29, 3 of 4 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- This approach sounds nice but you may regain your sanity quicker if you try a cry-it-out method first
- I recommend trying cry-it-out before buying this book. You just may find that you solve your baby's sleep problem without spending any money or using precious time to read this book.
I have a 6-month-old son and a couple of weeks ago I was nearing my wit's end when it came to putting him down to sleep. In order to get him to sleep, my husband or I had to hold him while bouncing on an exercise ball. Once he fell asleep in our arms, we had to carefully lower him into the crib without waking him up. If he woke up, we had to pick him up and repeat the process of bouncing and getting him into the crib. We tried the cry-it-out method at 3 months and 4 months but it didn't work. He cried for upwards of 90 minutes and never fell asleep.
I bought this book the day he turned 6 months thinking I might be able to pick up a couple of tips I hadn't seen online. I did not read the book cover to cover - just flipped through and read things that caught my eye. It turns out that we were already doing many of the things suggested in the book: we had a bedtime routine, we played music, he had an early bedtime. It just didn't seem that we were making any progress at getting him to go to sleep on his own. Even if I had read the book cover-to-cover and implemented every suggestion, I don't think it would have helped us get away from the bouncing and holding him until he fell asleep. Fortunately for us, my son had his 6 month check up with the pediatrician just 2 days after I bought the book. We brought up the sleep issue with her and she said to get rid of the ball and just put him in the crib and let him cry (with us checking in frequently, of course). We implemented the new sleep process that day and he's been going to sleep on his own for about 10 days now. I'm so glad that we tried the cry-it-out method and solved the sleep problem in days, rather than trying suggestions from this book and dragging it out for months if not longer. And now that I think about it...we were already doing a no-cry method of getting him to sleep - it just involved us holding and bouncing him. What incentive did he have to start going to sleep on his own? - 2008-05-27, 6 of 10 people found this review helpful, Rated:
