alibrarymama

This is the last back-logged book!
Quite a while ago, I read the first No-Cry Sleep Solution. I thought it was good, but ultimately decided that Mr. Froggie Pants wasn’t having enough sleep problems to warrant doing anything radical. We tried moving his bedtime earlier, per her suggestion, with good success, and that was about it. Now – well, he still sleeps pretty well for me, most of the time. But I’m gone two evenings a week, and he absolutely refuses to go to sleep for Daddy now. So, I thought it was time to look into the newest Pantley book. This time, we even bought the book – a rare move for a dedicated library user like myself.

The No-Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers and Preschoolers by Elizabeth Pantley Are you feeling groggy, wondering if your toddler or preschooler will ever let you sleep through the night? Thinking there might be something wrong with your child? (I know you’d mentioned something of the sort, . ) Pantley opens the book by taking a look at the numbers (which I’ll do my best to remember without having the book handy.): over 50% of toddlers wake up and need a parent’s help to go back to sleep at least once per night. It’s down to 30% for preschoolers, but still 82% of parents of toddlers and preschoolers in a national survey said they would change their child’s sleep habits if they could. So really, there’s just a big conspiracy to get you to think that little babies are the only ones that don’t sleep through the night. (My own conclusion.) Pantley looks briefly at cry-it-out – citing bulletin board mommies in despair after months, and hours a night, of cry-it-out aren’t getting them anywhere, and recent studies that say that even when cry-it-out appears to work well, problems are likely to mutate and resurface, leading to more difficult long-term problems. Then, messages from some of her happy test mommies (several hundred surveyed, and about a hundred with whom she intensively tested her methods.)

On to the actual solutions. Pantley starts with eight steps to help every child, including a regular bedtime and routine and foods to help with bedtime. She talks about realistic expectations, how to figure out what you want to do, and how to track your progress. Then there are many, many chapters on individual problems and how to deal with them. These cover a wide variety of difficulties from different parenting approaches – how to get your child out of your bed (and if you’re really ready to) and how and when to transition a crib-sleeping baby to a big boy or girl bed. How to cut down on night-time nursing and how to wean your child off a night-time bottle. Plus, the regular sleep problems – the child who doesn’t want to be left alone, the child who keeps waking up in the night, the child who is up for the day at five a.m. Also, how to tell if your problems are serious enough to warrant seeing a specialist. There are many more chapters than I can talk about individually here. What I like best about her approach is that she never says that there is only one way to do things and that any problems that persist are from not following the method correctly. For many sticky problems, she presents a variety of end results – you choose where you think you and your child will be happiest. Then, a whole bunch of ideas to try to get to your end result. will be happy to note that while she does include ideas for helping your child stop nursing to sleep, she says that nursing to sleep is valid, effective, and common, so that the main approach will still work if you want to nurse to sleep. I’ve been scanning sleep literature for a while now, and every idea that I’ve seen in a book that I thought might be good was in this book.

So is it working? Well, I’m waiting for to get a little farther through the book, so we can come up with our new Sleep Plan. Friends that have used it have gotten good results. I can let people know if it works for us, if there’s interest.

Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy My loyal readers (such as I may have) will perhaps not be surprised to learn that this book is a wonderful book, a fabulous book, the most important book that I’ve read in a very long time. This book, my friends, is a serious scientific look at motherhood by a scientist who is also a mother. As such, it is crammed with so much good information that I can only describe part of it to you here. Hrdy is a primatologist trained in anthropology and evolutionary theory, and she looks seriously at motherhood across time and across species, comparing what is actually known about mothers with what has been said about mothers by mostly male scientists over the past couple of hundred years. Perhaps not surprisingly, her conclusions are quite different.

Putting “motherguilt” into perspective, she shows that mothers have always had to make tradeoffs between their own survival and that of their children – and that primates of all species rely on child care from other members of their group. She talks about family planning in primates, traditional cultures, and early modern Europe. Fertility used to come years after sexual desire, I learned, giving girls a chance to fool around before they had any chance of becoming mothers. In early modern Europe, the consequence of increased nutrition without the resources to care for children on the one hand or birth control on the other was millions of babies being left in foundling homes, the vast majority of whom ultimately died. Hrdy gives the most rational argument on abortion that I have ever seen, effectively explaining how both positions are rooted in behaviors millions of years old. She talks about the conflicts between what mothers, fathers, and children want and need, and the compromises that we make between them. Where feminists have tended to ignore research into evolutionary and attachment theory as inherently sexist, Hrdy separates the facts from previous cultural bias, and talks about how to pay attention to the needs of both your children and your career.

If you are a mother, or a father, or are planning to become one, I highly recommend this book. , this most definitely means you! The only sad part of this recommendation is that it is lengthy and dense, so that unless you are a Dedicated Reader or accustomed to reading scholarly writing, it will take you a while to get through it. Still even if (dare I suggest it) you don’t make it through the whole book, you will be rewarded by reading however much of it you do read, wherever you start, since it is stuffed full of interesting and obscure knowledge about mothers of all species and all times. Your world will never be quite the same.