Reddit Reddit reviews The Happy Sleeper: The Science-Backed Guide to Helping Your Baby Get a Good Night's Sleep-Newborn to School Age

We found 6 Reddit comments about The Happy Sleeper: The Science-Backed Guide to Helping Your Baby Get a Good Night's Sleep-Newborn to School Age. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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The Happy Sleeper: The Science-Backed Guide to Helping Your Baby Get a Good Night's Sleep-Newborn to School Age
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6 Reddit comments about The Happy Sleeper: The Science-Backed Guide to Helping Your Baby Get a Good Night's Sleep-Newborn to School Age:

u/bebebey · 3 pointsr/beyondthebump

8-1 is a good stretch at least! This sounds similar to our story. We stuck it out until I went back to work (around 5m). Then when it became clear that she wasn't waking for milk but rather for her pacifier, we decided to sleep train using the happy sleeper method. Hope you find something that works! Sorry all your friends babies are unicorns!

u/Redshirt_Down · 3 pointsr/Parenting

1- I highly, highly recommend 'the happy sleeper'. It provides a really good breakdown on what is involved physically, emotionally and mentally with children's sleep. It provides a guide for helping your child learn to self soothe, how to take a step back and let them figure out sleep for themselves and eventually also training them. It starts off with a 'sleep ladder' before you actually start training, in order to help your kids learn to sleep while not getting in their way. Once your kid is a certain weight and is ready (this varies from kid to kid) you can move on to actual sleep training. Four months might be a bit young, typically the recommendation is 6 months (though we started at 5 and a half on the reco of our pediatrician and it was fine).

Building a solid routine and helping them navigate their own self soothing techniques is critical to infant sleep. Your routine should be exactly the same every night, regardless of your routine. Ours is change to PJ's, massage, quick feed, story, song/dance and then sleep. Once you get to that point you can try their 'sleep wave' technique to get them to sleep through the night.

BTW I discovered that sleep training is highly polarizing on reddit (and elsewhere?) and people have feelings about it. I land solidly on the side of the data available, which overwhelmingly says that teaching your kid how to safely sleep by themselves early in life leads to healthy sleep habits later.

2- For sleep sacks and 'fussiness', reading 'the happy sleeper' really helped me re-evaluate what I saw as 'fussiness'. What tends to happen is they'll fall asleep safely in your arms and will wake up in a new environment, and basically go: "Hey, this isn't how I fell asleep!" The book (and most other techniques) recommend putting your baby down half drowsy so they wake up in the same environment they fall asleep in. The 'fussy' part, where they kick and move around and flail, this can be part of your baby learning how to self-soothe. My daughter used to do this and would raise her legs up and hold them up against the sides of the crib - I thought she was just being really fussy and this wasn't comfortable so I would gently move them down. MISTAKE. This is how she self-soothes! She does it 4 months after sleep training and it's part of her own routine.

3 - I don't think there are any recommended medications to help kids sleep. Babies sleep like garbage after the first few months until they learn how to self-soothe and you sleep train them (or they eventually learn on their own). It's just life, I'm afraid.

Also about the pillow - unless your baby actually has flat head and this is something your doctor prescribed, I would absolutely not have it in the crib. The WHO and many other orgs are very clear about this - nothing should be in the crib except your baby, safely in their sleep sack. That's it. If this is a 'preventative' measure you have to carefully weigh the small odds of possibly getting flat head (and you'll know it if it happens and it's very easy to treat) vs the very real dangers of having anything that can harm your babies breathing, be it through covering them or putting them into a position they can't get out of. Also you said your baby is fussy and moving around a lot - they won't get flat head if they're doing this!

u/quiteatoughlass · 3 pointsr/sleeptrain

I'm cannot recommend The Happy Sleeper HIGHLY ENOUGH. Changed my world and saved my sanity. Its an easy read, approachable, and the method feels very gentle and intuitive, so the steps came very natural to me and LO both. This is the only method I've ever used so I feel strongly about it. I am purely repeating what one book says and what works well for my family.

You're spot on with the laying groundwork idea about establishing healthy sleep habits. The Newborn (0-4 months) chapter in The Happy Sleeper breaks it down into some basic ideas. (My summary will not do it justice, I highly suggest you pick up the book, but here goes.)

Newborn sleep is expected to be erratic because their nervous system and internal clock are immature. Just bear with it, it won't last long. There will be day-night confusion because they are used to Mom's chemical signals telling them what time of day was. Now they're developing a new sense of cues and signals of day-night.
Tips: Expose baby to sunlight during the day, go for a walk in the morning, darken the lights and household activity at night, use soft voices in the evening, etc.

Around 4-6 weeks, babies "wake up" from their sleepy potato-like state and their awareness of the world broadens very quickly. All this new information and awareness can be scary and alarming and all this new input is freaking them out, man! Sleep is hard to come by because while the brain is developing, the nervous system that regulates sleep hasn't quite caught up yet. Stick with a good day/night routine or habits. Help the brain along, help them learn.

Around 8 weeks, this is when the magic happens. Many babies start (mercifully) stringing together one long stretch at night (4-8 hours). Pay attention! This is the sign! Your baby's circadian rhythm is starting to develop and baby's brain is going, "Hey! Night time! I know what to do here!" This stretch will probably land around 6:00-7:00 pm. THIS IS THE TIME. This is when its time to move up bedtime to 7:00-7:30. Prolonging bedtime to a later more "adult" time (9:00-10:00) results in a "witching hour" which leads to overtired fussiness and you do not want to deal with that business.

Naps at this stage are pretty easy to nail down- 90 minutes of wake cycles. That's it. When baby gets up in the morning, start the clock. 90 minutes later, its time for a nap. Build your naps around a 90 minute wake cycle, regardless of how long the naps are. After a few weeks of this, the timing should start to sync up and you'll start to see your baby's natural rhythm take shape and form a schedule. Important not to hold them to the clock per se, but rather a timer. Babies aren't ready for a clock-based schedule until around 6 months.

The book has so much more fantastic info about sleep environments, nap and bedtime routines, and also a really approachable explanation of the science as to why all of this works. Its a great mindset to get into and helps frame the day and night behaviors of your baby as a developmental progression. It taught me what I can do to help my baby grow and thrive through these stages, help her develop important skills at appropriate times, while maintaining my own sanity and health. I wish you the best of luck. Please let me know if I can be of any help. We are on night 2 of proper sleep training tonight (Chapter 4: The Sleep Wave!), so all the earlier stuff is still fresh for me. Happy sleeping!

u/mmandapants1691 · 2 pointsr/sleeptrain

I would purchase this book. https://www.amazon.com/Happy-Sleeper-Science-Backed-Helping-Sleep-Newborn/dp/0399166025/ref=nodl_ We used this method to sleep train our 6 month old daughter. It goes over weaning night feedings and check-ins for crying are never longer than 5 minutes! It’s a great book and I feel definitely suits all your criteria and needs.

Edit. If you don’t want to purchase the book, research sleep wave method.

u/gwendolyn_trundlebed · 2 pointsr/sleeptrain

We ST my son at 7 MO and never had to retrain. Maybe after an illness there's a night or two of bad sleep (since I often let him sleep on me in our glider if he's sick) but it never warranted full re-training. For my family, it was the best decision we ever made. 26 MO now and still sleeps very, very well. We used The Happy Sleeper method and it worked wonders for both naps and nighttime sleep.

u/emuleemt · 1 pointr/beyondthebump

You can get a used copy on Amazon for 6.99: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0399166025/ref=cm_cr_arp_mb_bdcrb_top?ie=UTF8

Good luck!!!