Rating  - No-cry HELP for babies & their parents!
The Pantley No Cry Sleep Solution has been a GREAT sleep help companion for us ever since we bought it for baby #1. The support and encouragement in this book gave my husband and I the stradegies we needed to stick to our gut resolve to NOT ignore our child when he was crying at night! Now that we have 4 children, we have 2 copies of this MUST-HAVE sleep resource. One to refer to whenever a new strategy was needed for our latest child . . . and another to loan out to friends and family when they were sleep deprived and desparate for immediate help! They say ANY sleep-solution will help if you follow it and use consistancy. But THIS is the one that freed my hubby and I to help our child w/o compromising our instinctive need continue to be there when our children need us in the night.
Good luck to you!
Blessings,
Kaycee Farrell
[...]
Rating  - It was a complete waste of our time, money and sanity.
I had really high hopes for this book, as it is so highly rated and seems to have helped a lot of parents deal with their childrens' sleep issues. My daughter, now 6 months old, has had trouble getting to sleep almost since birth. She was waking up 9 or 10 times every night and I was bringing her into bed with me just to get a couple of hours of unbroken sleep. By the time my daughter was 3 months old, I was tired, more tired than I've ever been in my life (my older child is a good sleeper), and desperate for a solution. Since I was terrified of the idea of my baby girl crying or being unhappy in any way, I bought Ms. Pantley's book.
Unfortunately, I was almost immediately put off by the author's tone and her approach to teaching her sleep method. She starts the book by basically selling her technique to the reader. The first chapter is peppered with scathing criticism of other sleep methods, glowing reviews from mothers who have successfully tried her method, and some very judgemental commentary about parents who use parenting techniques other than the ones the author herself is selling. As I'd already bought the book, I was a little confused by the author's apparent need to further justify her philosophies. But I was willing to disregard the negativity and try Ms. Pantley's sleep program.
The basic principles in the book are valid. The research outlines views shared by respected sleep experts including Drs. Sears and Ferber. Certain ideas in the book, especially the establishment of a concrete bedtime and a bedtime routine are very good, and are echoed by many other experts. However, the corrective measures that Ms. Pantley presents were impractical, overly passive and generally ineffective for my daughter.
I spent 3 months obsessively tracking the baby's sleep habits, making sleep plans, repeating my key words and phrases, and repeatedly attempting to progress from one phase to the next with no success. All the while my daytime life suffered immensely as I struggled to function on a few hours of broken sleep. Not only did I see no improvement, it seemed like my daughter's sleep problems actually got worse. Toward the end of my experience with the No-Cry Sleep Solution, she wouldn't stay in her crib more than 20 minutes at a time. She had learned that her cries would summon me promptly (the author insists that the parent must respond to the child's cries immediately) and that I would mommmy her back to sleep. My frustration was compounded by the fact that the author insists that any lack of progress can only be a result of some mistake or oversight on the part of the parent.
Ms. Pantley promises that there will be improvement, but constantly redefines what she means by "improvement," stating that "sleep through the night" simply means that the child will sleep for 5 consecutive hours sometime during the night. She frequently states that any positive change in the child's sleep habits, no matter how insignificant, should be taken as a great success. She constantly reminds the parent to be patient, but seems almost apologetic that her program is so lengthy. I have trouble putting faith in a so-called solution when its creator feels the need to constantly justify it.
I know some parents have had success with this program. I am very happy for them. Maybe my child is simply more stubborn than other children, or maybe she learns differently. Either way, the author's insistence that her methods will work on every child no matter what and that failure is always a result of the parents' wrongdoing finally put me off this book for good. I gave the program 3 months of my life and have nothing to show for it. I could not, in good conscience, continue to put my family through that nightmare. My baby needs her sleep even more than I do and it just wasn't healthy to continue to let her wake up 8 or more times during the night. I turned to another sleep program that, admittedly, involves some crying (though it is not a true "cry-it-out" method by any means) and am having great success.
I wish anyone who's considering trying this method the best of luck, but I would not recommend this book to anyone.
Rating - We're all sleeping through the night!
My daughter was not one of those babies who just magically started sleeping through the night at a couple months old, but when she was 10 months old she started sleeping for eleven hours a night without needing us to go to her, and we never made her "cry it out." In addition, she takes two, one-and-a-half hour naps each day. How did we get from our sleepless nights to where we are today? We used Elizabeth Pantley's book, The No Cry Sleep Solution. We were never comfortable leaving our daughter alone to cry herself to sleep, and we found this book to be a great, loving alternative to the sleep training methods out there. My daughter is breastfed and did spend time co-sleeping with us, but she now sleeps the entire night in her room without waking to nurse.
Pantley's book is well-organized, and in addition to her supportive, encouraging tone, she offers solutions that you can start trying right away. Her book is not a quick fix, but rather it provides the tools necessary to nighttime parent your child with love. You *can* start seeing results right away.
I know that my daughter will not be a baby forever, and she will not always need us to make her feel loved and secure. Right now, however, she does need us, and we wanted to offer her comfort and reassurance while still teaching her to sleep on her own. Our family is now rested, and my husband and I are proud that we were responsive to our daughter's needs. Buy this book; you are sure to find solutions that will apply to your baby's sleep problems. We will be purchasing Pantley's other books because we believe in her methods!
Rating - Don't buy the Kindle Edition!
This review is for the Kindle Edition ONLY. I can't tell you how we like the book as we are stuck on the second chapter trying to piece together the figures and re-make the charts we need to fill in.
They totally screwed up the Kindle version. All spacing for diagrams and charts is off rendering them next to unreadable. In some books this wouldn't matter, but in this one they are a key part of the book. There are worksheets you are supposed to photocopy and fill out. I don't know if a Kindle will print out forms from a book or not; it's not in the user's manual and I'm not that computer savvy. Even if I did know how to, again, the spacing on these is all messed up so it wouldn't help anyway. So I have been sitting at my computer trying to guess what these things are supposed to look like so that I can recreate them on in my word processing program and it's been a lot more work than I wanted to sign on for. I think I will check my local library to see if they have a hard copy I can check out and photocopy, which makes me wonder, "Why did I bother buying it on my Kindle then?"
Again, do NOT get it in Kindle version! If you are going to buy it, get a paper copy.
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Customer Reviews for McGraw-Hill,0071381392,639785400233,9780071381390,0071381392,618.928498 |
