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

Our baby loves his crib. Took us one weekend of protesting and he’s got a great habit to keep his sleep healthy and rejuvenating. We share this book with all our friends and they love it. It gives you peace of mind in the science behind what you’re teaching your baby so you can have the confidence to know you’re giving them tools they’ll benefit from for the rest of their lives. We reference this book frequently. It’s good from day 1 and helpful through toddlerhood. We started the sleep wave when our baby had just weaned from overnight bottle and could roll over to his stomach. He had used a paci and needed me to put it back in every hour, but we knew he was smart enough to learn to use his hand. Took him about one hour to figure that out and after two nights of protesting, he learned how to barely wake up at the end of a sleep cycle, turn over, and go back to sleep — just like we do as adults! Truly amazing! Having baby sitters has been so much easier because they don’t have to be nap trapped or worry with putting him to bed. He sleeps 7-6:30 every night. We put him down awake but sleepy about 6:45 and he may fuss for a minute but he simply rolls over, sucks his thumb, and falls asleep. This book gave us our health back - we’re able to get sleep, catch up on chores, and relax, knowing he’s comfy in his crib. This made all the difference!!! BUY IT.

This book and then a phone consultation with Heather was exactly what we needed. I can see in other reviews not everyone feels the same way but not every mom or family’s needs are the same. We felt like this book was a life saver. The information, gentle approach and science to back it up has helped me be the mom I want to be....loving, nurturing, supportive and also getting some sleep myself so I can be present and enjoy being a mom. After struggling for months with our baby’s sleep at 4 and 5 months old (up every hour to breastfeed so he could fall back asleep) I was feeling SO conflicted about what to do. Cry it out methods didn’t vibe with us and other sleep strategies we found sounded like organizing a rocket launch (way too much to think about at 3am). I received some advice from a mid wife that he would just grow out of this phase and start sleeping in longer stretches naturally but after months of no sleep, we needed something else. This book was the perfect in between approach...so straightforward, simple and gentle. Our little guy immediately started falling asleep easier, sleeping longer stretches and putting himself back to sleep with a few noises but very little crying. After a few weeks of practicing tips from the book we scheduled a phone consultation with Heather. She gave us some feedback and minor adjustments that made a HUGE difference. The strategies are not black and white, there is a lot of wiggle room to make it your own. I still breastfeed twice a night because I love it. These women know what they are talking about, are so easy to relate to and really helpful!! I shared this book with several mom friends and they are all loving it!

As I type this review, I'm looking at my peacefully sleeping 5 month old son on the baby monitor. I fed him for 5 minutes and promptly placed him awake in his crib. He rolled around for another few minutes to get comfortable and fell asleep. If you had told he could do this last week, I would have laughed at you! I'm a first time mom who did not want to listen to her child cry-it-out in order to get him to sleep. I was worried that it would be unhealthy for him and harm our attachment. I didn't want to sleep train him for my convenience. I read several books on sleep and did lots of googling, which only confused me. Then I read this book. The Sleep Wave technique made sense to me and was very straight forward, but I still wasn't sure if I wanted to sleep train. As my son entered the 4 month sleep regression, his sleep went from bad to terrible, and we ended up co-sleeping for every nap and all night long. This wasn't working for either of us. I wasn't getting any sleep and I could tell my presence was hindering his sleep as well. I could tell he had developed the self-soothing skills (sucking his hands, hiding his face from the light, rocking from side to side, etc.) to fall asleep on his own but that he didn't know he could do it. Like any new skill, he just needed the opportunity to practice and have success doing it. Enter the Sleep Wave! This method has you checking on your child every 5 minutes while they cry without touching them, so as not to confuse them about who needs to be doing the soothing but still letting them know that mommy or daddy is nearby. The first night, my son cried for 2 hours 10 minutes before he feel asleep. This was pure torture, but once he was asleep, he slept for 6 straight hours, waking three times (two to eat), but falling back asleep in about 15 minutes each time. The second night, it only took him 20 minutes to fall asleep, and he slept until 8am, waking three times again, but able to fall back asleep quickly. When I woke up that morning, I saw on the monitor that he was quietly and happily playing in his crib! The third night, he fell asleep in 10 minutes and slept for 10 consecutive hours, waking only once to eat and falling back asleep in 10 minutes. This book has been a life-changer!! My son is getting the sleep he needs and so am I. I also get to spend time with my husband in the evenings, which I haven't been able to do for months. I highly recommend this book and the Sleep Wave method. If you're worried about harming the bond you've formed with your child by letting them cry a little, all I can say is that every time I've gone in to turn on the light and say good morning since starting this method, I've found a happy and smiling baby staring up at me. Give it three days, and I promise you won't be sorry!

First of all, this book has great information to give you a solid knowledge base on sleep for babies. I appreciate that it is based on science and they cite all of their sources in the book. I learned a lot before I even got to the sleep training, the sleep wave as they call it. The sleep training is really why I bought this book. I was nervous to sleep train because I didn't want to feel lile I was torturing my son. Prior to reading this I was planning on doing the Ferber method. Cry it out seemed stressful for everyone and I didn't want my son to feel like I was abandoning him. The sleep wave works great for us. We are on night 6 as I type this and he hasn't cried going to bed since night 2, and that was only for 2 minutes. I think the sleep wave method makes sense. They say if you soothe your baby it confuses them. They are supposed to be learning how to soothe themselves, but if you come in you are interrupting that time that they are learning self soothing. I liked that the sleep wave allows me to let my baby know that I haven't abandoned him, yet allows for him to self soothe. This week has been far less painful than we imagined. He is sleep better, we are sleeping better. I'm glad we went this route to sleep train and would recommend this book to others.

This book worked wonders for our very challenging sleeper. However, it's not a miracle. Here is my synopsis of why this book gets 4 stars, not 5. First and foremost, the important lesson to take away from all these sleep books is that you as a parent need to do what feels right for you, and if allowing your baby to cry at all is too painful for you, you need to listen to that. Some of the advice in this book didn't work for us, and I am relieved I didn't feel like I had to follow it. But overall, this book made a lot of sense to me. Other reviewers criticize it as cry-it-out ("CIO") in disguise, but here's why I strongly disagree. CIO--whether leaving your baby to cry for an hour without checking on her, or ferberizing (patting and soothing after consistent time increments)--risks leaving your baby scared or confused. Full-blown CIO means your baby is alone for a long stretch of time until she stops crying and is forced to learn to fall asleep independently. All my friends who have done this say it's very effective and it happens fast. But to me, I felt like my baby would feel scared, like I abandoned her and was never coming back. Ferberizing seemed like an acceptable alternative, but the Happy Sleeper makes a compelling case for why it's actually harder for your baby: you leave her for five/seven/whatever minutes and she protests, then you come in and pat and shush her so she gets a glimmer of hope that you'll take over and make it all better, then you leave again. So, even though she's not feeling abandoned, she's confused, and you're actually actively preventing her from self-soothing. Enter the sleep wave. Your baby sees you there every five minutes and does not feel abandoned, yet does not get confused (as she does with Ferberizing), because you're telling her she is responsible for teaching herself to sleep. I know in my case the first two or three nights were torturous, but it was clear to me that my baby was not scared, just MAD. Within just a couple days of implementing this method, my daughter became a visibly and palpably happier baby. Now she's 16 months old, and although she's super attached to me and cries when I leave for work, she sleeps through the night consistently and always is very happy when I put her in her crib. She has very strong sleep skills, and I owe that to this book. I wish we'd had it for my older daughter too, who still has night wakings and is almost 5! I do want to note that, at least for us, the baby learned the sleep skills she needed for nighttime sleep very quickly, but solid napping did not happen for a few months. I don't think this has anything to do with the book; just know that consistent naps tend to take longer. I do have a few critiques of this book. First, the 0-4 month chapter (the soothing ladder, I think they called it?) is pretty unrealistic. The first few steps on the ladder never ever worked, and I imagine most people will have the same experience, unless they have a remarkably chill baby. Second, if you are a nursing mom who works outside of the home, I'd read the section about night weaning with healthy skepticism. While your baby might not need the calories in the middle of the night, you and your baby might need the connection; moreover, shaving off one minute every other night seems like a great idea to prevent a drop in milk production, but ultimately if your body is connecting to a pump most of the day and not nursing the baby at night, your milk supply will drop. Finally, I found the sections on dropping naps to be unhelpful and underdeveloped. I had a really hard time navigating the 3- to 2-nap transition, as well as the 2- to 1-nap transition, and was disappointed to find this book had little advice.

This book changed our family's life and brought so much health and happiness into our home. I read all the sleep books. ALL OF THEM. And we chose this method (which has quite a few important differences from Ferber, including an altogether more nurturing tone and many more helpful details). I (mama) was TERRIFIED of what "sleep training" would do to our relationship, his secure attachment, his heart? my heart? Our marriage? I was absolutely convinced there was NO WAY I could hear him cry and not run in and pick him up. It felt so wrong not to soothe him immediately whenever he cried. Our 7 month old son has never slept more than 3 hours consecutively without feeding... he and I were cosleeping in a separate bed... I am a birth doula primarily for planned home births and I put a lot of pressure on myself to cosleep (as did the midwives, birth teachers, doulas, and other "attachment" parents I knew). We had a very traumatic birth ending in an emergency c section under anesthesia and I thought I would be furthering both our birth trauma by separating at night. By seven months, our son was nursing every 45 mins- 2 hours, napping 4 20-30 min naps a day, and not gaining weight on the curve as he had been. Every time he woke to nurse, it took 10-30 mins of rocking, shushing, and sucking in my arms for him to fall back asleep. I was an absolute zombie... I stopped driving because it didn't feel safe, and I wasn't able to socialize with other parents with kids the same age because I was so jealous, and I have never been a jealous person. I finally admitted to my husband that I "couldn't survive this anymore". I had gone back to work part time, as had he, and I really felt like my health and safety were at risk if we continued on this path, but I just didn't know what to do. We tried having him do several bottles a night, etc. but still none of us were sleeping and our son was screaming for mama without me in bed with him. We tried soothing him without nursing, sitting with him while he cried, etc. so he wouldn't "feel alone". This was 100 % the right program for our son. We prepared for two weeks, prepping a space for him to sleep just as the book described, writing a plan, and doing two consultations with Heather (worth every penny!). On our first night of training, I did our bedtime routine, laid him down, said our mantra, and walked out of the room, and then RAN out of the house to go for a walk while my husband did the five minute checks. I thought I absolutely couldn't hear him cry without interfering. After 15 minutes, he called me to tell me that our son was "out cold!" having cried intermittently but never as hard as he did when we were trying to soothe him before. He only woke 3 times the first night, twice the second and third, and once for the next few days (he slept for nine hours in a row and then fed then two hours after). He never cried for more than 20 minutes, and usually not at all or for a few minutes, and never half as hard as he had when he was in our arms. We used their method for almost all of our naps in the next week (he once dozed off on the couch and did a few naps in the pack on papa so I could sleep in) As Heather said, "you will be amazed by how capable your little guy is". Indeed, we were absolutely blown away by how skillful he is at soothing himself. It honestly has been a real pleasure to go through Happy Sleepering him. Heather was available by email throughout the entire process and we tweaked the feedings and such with her help. I really appreciated reading a book about sleep written by MFTs, rather than pediatricians or nurses like Taking Cara Babies or some of the books about extinction methods. This book truly is "science-based" and lays out great detailed plans. Any doubt I had about whether this was right for our baby and our family was soothed by our consults with Heather. Heather and Julie really try to keep their practices open for consults themselves, as opposed to some of the other authors of similar programs who have lots of people working for them. Our family and parenting has forever been changed by reading this book. We are so glad we "sleep trained". All our friends and mentors who coslept happened to have babies who slept for at least 3-4 hours consecutively without feeding, or who nursed for minutes and went straight back to sleep. With our sensitive little guy, it was clearly just too much stimulation to cosleep. Now he is much happier, growing really well, his development is clearly more supported, and he has two very happy parents. We spend lots of time together during the day cuddling and nursing, and he seems so settled in his own independent sleep space. This is THE book. GO FOR IT!

This book will save your life! My baby was 6.5 months old and nursing every 1-2 hours each night. Every night. It was slowly killing me even though I loved cuddling him and nursing him back to sleep. We had the quietest house. The instant the baby stirred I would jump up and nurse him back to sleep. Then he got smarter and wiggled his way into our bed. I swore I would never allow such a thing to happen. Then he found a way to fall asleep with me on my side nursing him as he refused to let me put him in his crib or on our bed unless he was clinging to me. He was so great during the day. Giggling and never crying. I held him as much as I could. What can I say! My 21 pound 6 month old really is the cutest baby. Lol. Then came the dreaded words. Sleep Training. Everyone was urging me to pull the plug. Make him cry it out. Stop spoiling that baby. Just let him cry until he exhausts himself. These were the things I refused to do. My baby deserves more. I could suffer with sleep deprivation. Right?! This is a temporary stage. Right? WRONG! This book is gentle and caring. It’s not about pulling plugs or crying out of control. I tried to wean my baby of night feedings but he wanted more so I decided enough was enough. Last week we moved baby to his nursery next door (probably not recommended but I swear he could smell my milk supply). We got our iPhone timers ready and got out the Kleenex. Except a miracle happened instead. Baby cried for 15 minutes total. Every 5 minutes we said our mantra which made him cranky that we weren’t picking him up and that was it. After 15 minutes he was sleeping. For hours! Now he wakes up about once a night for a few seconds and is back to bed before we even know it. I thought he would starve to death skipping all his night feedings. Nope! For the first time in a LONG time I slept. Uninterrupted for hours and hours. Thank you Happy Sleeper. My baby was not as stubborn as expected and he goes to bed and all his naps without crying. It is a miracle. All it took was 15 minutes. Mind blown! Your gentle caring approach made me feel this was the right thing for us. No one who has seen what I used to go through believes this baby is a big boy now. Sleeping for a solid 9 hours. We will work towards 11 hours but I had to say thank you!

This book works! It was a life saver for me! My baby was 6 months old and had not been a good sleeper since we brought him home. Eventually the only way he would fall asleep was if he was nursed and it was always a 50/50 chance whether he would wake up or not when I tried to transfer him into his own bed. Then it got to the point where I could never transfer him anymore because every time I did he woke up screaming. I spent many many nights with him sleeping on me in his rocking chair where I nursed him. Let's just say I was not getting any kind of good quality sleep and I was starting to go a little crazy since I was back at work full time since he turned 4 months old! While this was my main topic since I was so exhausted all the time, someone at work mentioned this book to me and I was so desperate that I was trying everything, so I thought I might as well give it a go since it wasn't going to hurt to try. I read the book in 2 days and after my husband and I took our son to his 6 month check up we chose a day to implement it and we were confident in sticking to it. The first night was a little rough, but it honestly wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. My son was sleeping in his own crib and in his own room! I was so excited that I didn't know what to do with all my extra time except sleep myself in my own bed! I still nurse my son 1-2 times at night but he will go down between 7-7:30pm and then won't wake up the next day until about 8am. (This wake up time varies between 7-9) I would recommend this book to everyone who has a child and needs sleep!! It is a great read with a lot of helpful information and it has an easy to follow system that you can put into place and follow! I am so ecstatic that it has worked for my family! Buy this book, be confident, and stick to it! Your baby will be a much happier sleeper and so will you!