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

If you’re a parent, you’ve no doubt found yourself debating the merits of different ways of helping your kids get more sleep. Do you leave your baby to “cry it out”? Do you ease them back to sleep with various methods of hands-on parenting? If the attachment method is depriving you of sleep but you can’t stomach the idea of traditional cry-it-out, you might be interested in The Happy Sleeper. This is one of the gentler methods of sleep training I’ve come across (although the authors try to avoid using that term); their “Sleep Wave” method promises to help babies access self-soothing techniques with fairly minimal periods of crying. One of the biggest issues with this book is the idea of applying the technique to a baby as young as five months, an age at which many experts claim a baby should be able to go for eleven to twelve hours straight without feeding; advice like this may help parents sleep more, but it could prove damaging to the milk supply of a mother who wants to keep nursing until the minimum recommended age of twelve months. That aside, this book is recommended to parents who are searching for a gentle way of teaching their baby to sleep.