The Sleepeasy Solution: The Exhausted Parent's Guide to Getting Your Child to Sleep- from Birth to Age 5

by Waldburger, Jennifer

• ISBN13: 9780757305603
• ISBN10: 0757305601
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-04-01
• Publisher: HCI BOOKS

Summary

Two experts who are helping Hollywood's A-list babies get their zzz's share the no-fail, family-friendly method that has helped thousands of sleep-deprived moms and dads.Psychotherapists and sleep specialists Jill Spivack and Jennifer Waldburger, the dynamic "girlfriends" all of Los Angeles calls on to solve sleep problems for babies and young children, offer a sleep technique that will get any child snoozing in no time'”usually less than 5 nights. The key to their method? It addresses the emotional needs of both the parents and child (yes, how to handle the crying!), a critical component of success'”and why other sleep methods often fail.In this much-needed, family-friendly guide, weary parents will learn to define personalized sleep goals that work for their family's schedule and style. They'll create a customized sleep planner to ensure consistency with both parents as well as caregivers. (As an added bonus, they'll also improve their relationship with their spouse with the "marriage-saver" section.) With comprehensive chapters devoted to each stage of a child's development, detailed scheduling information, plus solutions to special circumstances like traveling, Daylight Savings, moving to a "big kid bed" and multiples, The Sleepeasy Solution is a dream come true!

Author Biography

Jennifer Waldburger, LCSW, is a trained psychotherapist and partner of Sleepy Planet, the preeminent parenting/sleep company in LA. She is a former writer and editor for Town & Country, Redbook, Good Housekeeping and Harper's Bazaar. Jill Spivack, LMSW, is a psychotherapist who worked as a pediatric sleep consultant who co-founded Sleepy Planet, Inc., in 1999. The two offer private sleep consultations for celebrity clients and others, standing-room only workshops and regular keynotes at Baby Expos with audiences of over 300. They have appeared on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, Inside Edition (feature piece) as well as in The Wall Street Journal and Fit Pregnancy.

Excerpts

Excerpts from The Sleepeasy Solution No-Cry Versus Crying It Out Most parents wanting to make changes with their child's sleep have heard all the debates about allowing a child to cry. This has led to a lot of confusion. Some of the methods that promise "no-cry" solutions suggest to parents that their child wonÆt ever cry. The idea is that being ôgentler and more responsiveöùcontinuing to soothe your child by patting, picking her up, holding her hand, and the likeùmeans that she is less traumatized. Ironically, though, parents often report that the child still cries even while they continue to attend to her; all children protest change, and the way they let us know they don't like the change is to cry. As important as it is for parents to express love to children through physical touch, and as illogical as it may seem that doing so while helping a child learn to sleep is counterproductive, it is indeed the parent's touch that can exacerbate a child's frustration in this scenario. The result? The child often continues to struggle with sleep, usually for weeks or even months, because she is not being allowed to learn how to soothe herself. With older children, using touch can be especially detrimental, as it tempts them to continue testing limits with you, to keep pressing until you cave in and help them to sleep. WeÆve found that when using these kinds of "hands-on" methods, parents often give up on sleep learning because it takes so long to actually get better sleep that the process itself becomes exhausting. On the other end of the spectrum are the experts who suggest that the fastest way to help a child to sleep is to allow him to "cry it out" in other words, shutting the door and leaving your child completely alone, crying, for as long as it takes him to fall asleep. Also known as full extinction, this method actually does work, and sometimes quite quickly, although we have heard stories of children who have cried for as long as several hours at a stretch on the first night or two, perhaps bewildered and frightened because the usual helpers (namely, you) have disappeared. The idea of a child alone in the dark, crying inconsolably, doesnÆt sit right with most parents, and it doesn't sit right with us, either. It seems unnecessarily hard on both parents and child. We think experts on both ends of the spectrum are well intentioned, but we also believe that the so-called no-cry solutions focus too much on the parent's and child's emotions and not enough on the necessary conditions for learning, and that the extinction methods focus too much on the child's learning and not enough on the emotional side of sleep learning. This is how we arrived at what we call the "least-cry" approach. The "Least-Cry" Approach So if giving your child too much help makes her cry harder and longer, and giving her too little help makes parents (and possibly the child) feel uneasy and overwhelmed, what's left? Finding a balance between allowing your chil

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Excerpted from The Sleepeasy Solution: The Exhausted Parent's Guide to Getting Your Child to Sleep from Birth to Age 5 by Jennifer Waldburger, Jill Spivack
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