New parents are confronted with many questions when a baby enters their lives. For many, one of the most challenging is: how should I help my baby settle and sleep?
'Helping Your Baby to Sleep' offers parents practical advice and gentle sleep techniques to ensure their child feels loved, happy and secure. This type of parenting also helps build a powerful bond between child and parent -- a bond that lays the foundation for healthy emotional and psychological development.
Bringing together research into early childhood development, babies' emotions, sleep habits and their brain development, and illustrated with stories from parents, this important book also gives parents realistic expectations of their babies' sleep patterns.
Both health professionals and mothers, authors Beth Macgregor and Anni Gethin clearly contrast gentle sleep techniques with those of sleep training, otherwise known as 'controlled crying', where parents ignore their babies' distress for increasing amounts of time.
They argue that the controlled crying approach creates anxiety in both parent and child, causes distress and creates a burden of stress on babies with which their immature brains and emotions are ill-equipped to cope.
The authors state, 'We expose the common myths that parents are presented with about babies and sleep. We recommend a gentler approach to sleep by which parents sensitively respond to their babies' needs and fears at bedtime. This early investment will reward both parents and children for the rest of their lives.'
