Teach Your Baby to Sleep Through the Night with The No-Cry Sleep Solution

The No-cry Sleep Solution is one of the best parenting books around for baby sleep problems. It not only offers numerous ways to help you teach your baby how to sleep through the night, it makes sure they are gentle to both baby and parents. And, it gives you plenty of real life mama-tips from mothers who have used the no-cry sleep methods successfully.

Does your baby wake frequently, while your friend's babies all seem to sleep through the night? If so, you might be surprised to discover that you are not alone. Not nearly. In fact, Elizabeth Pantley begins the book by telling us of her own experience with four different babies. Two (the middle two) who slept "perfectly", and two who woke frequently through the night. She then reproduces some of her youngest child's sleep logs - at 12 months he woke eight times through the night, and his longest stretch of sleep was one and a half hours. This was the child who inspired the research that became Pantley's first "no-cry solution" book, the No-Cry Sleep Solution.

Pantley emphasizes that this is not a quick fix book. But it is also a book that requires not one second of crying. This book is about teaching your baby for the long haul, not leaving her to cry it out in the hope that she will give up on crying for you.

The book offers a variety of tips and techniques that you can mix and match to form your own sleep plan. She recommends following your plan for ten days, then doing another sleep log, analysing your success, making adjustments to your plan as necessary, then doing another ten days. This routine of trial and evaluation continues until you get the result you are after.

Some of the techniques the books suggests are:

• Develop a bedtime routine - almost every book or website you consult on baby sleep problems will highlight the need for a bedtime routine. Babies and indeed older children are both helped by knowing what is to come. A simple routine may be dinner (for an older baby), followed by a warm bath, changing into night clothes, sitting in a rocking chair with mom or dad singing quiet lullabies or looking at a book, nursing, wrapping and into bed. This is not a prescription though - you might choose to nurse baby or provide a bottle before the bath, or you might skip the bath altogether for instance. The important aspects of the routine are that a) it is regular and predictable for the baby, and 2) it is a winding down routine - a bedtime routine that involves tossing baby in the air amid gales of laughter right before you want him to fall asleep is probably not going tobe helpful!
  
• Help your baby take reqular naps: research shows that the length and quality of naps affects night time sleep - naps that are too short or two few will actually be an impediment to sound night time sleep!
• Make night sleep different from day sleep - for instance by having the room darkened in the night, even for diaper changes, by having a different pre-sleep routine at night, keeping any activity toys out of the sleeping areas, and not talking to or even making eye contact with your baby during night feedings.
• Use a music of sound as a sleep cue - a soft, simply lullaby tape played at nap and bed-time can help baby to relax; just be sure it is simple repetivite music, nothing to complex.
• Change your baby's sleep association - Pantley has a step by step plan for how to wean your baby from falling asleep while sucking (be it while breastfeeding, bottle feeding or sucking on a pacifier), but the short explanation is to gentley easy her off the nipple just before she goes to sleep - let her start sucking again if she objects, then try again. And do it over and over again if necessary.
• Put your baby to bed earlier. Sometimes, simply moving a baby's bedtime to an earlier hour can help them to sleep longer. Most baby's are best served by a 6:30 or 7 o'clock bedtime, and many will actually sleep less soundly and wake up earlier in the morning, if they have a later bedtime.

The book offers many more ideas than this, and provide far more detail, but hopefully these few points have given you a place to begin.

If you need to change ingrained sleep associations in order to teach your baby to sleep through the night, then success will not be yours in one day. But if you put an appropriate sleep plan in place - and follow it - than gradually, your baby will learn to sleep for longer and longer stretches. And one day, you will look back on your night wakings with your baby with a sense of nostalgia. This is an exhausting time, but it can also be a magical time. Treasure your baby while she is young. But don't beat yourself up if some days, you just get through by telling yourself - "this too shall pass".