The Good Sleeper: The Essential Guide to Sleep for Your Baby--and You

The Good Sleeper: The Essential Guide to Sleep for Your Baby--and You

by Janet Krone Kennedy PhD
The Good Sleeper: The Essential Guide to Sleep for Your Baby--and You

The Good Sleeper: The Essential Guide to Sleep for Your Baby--and You

by Janet Krone Kennedy PhD

Paperback

$22.99 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Qualifies for Free Shipping
    Usually ships within 6 days
  • PICK UP IN STORE
    Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Related collections and offers


Overview


A refreshingly straightforward method for training infants to become great sleepers for life, inspired by clinical psychologist Janet Kennedy's popular psychotherapy practice, NYC Sleep Doctor

Cry it out or co-sleep? Bassinet or swing? White noise machine or Bach? How many hours anyway? For something so important, there's too much conflicting information about how best to get your baby to sleep through the night and nap successfully during the day. This book is a straightforward, no-nonsense answer to one of the biggest challenges new parents face when they welcome a brand new baby home. This book is written for exhausted parents, giving them immediate access to the information they need. Reassuring and easy to understand, Dr. Kennedy addresses head-on the fears and misinformation about the long-term effects of crying and takes a bold stand on controversial issues such as co-sleeping and attachment parenting. With polarizing figures and techniques dominating the marketplace—and spawning misinformation across the internet—Dr. Kennedy's methods and practices create an extensively researched and parent-tested approach to sleep training that takes both babies' and parents' needs into account to deliver good nights and days of sleep, and no small dose of peace of mind.

The Good Sleeper
is a practical, empowering—and even entertaining—guide to help parents understand infant sleep. This research-based book will teach parents the basics of sleep science, determine how and when to intervene, and provide tools to solve even the most seemingly impossible sleep problems.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780805099430
Publisher: Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date: 01/20/2015
Pages: 304
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author


Janet Kennedy, Ph.D
is a clinical psychologist who spent eight years at the Manhattan Veterans Affairs Medical Center where she developed the Sleep Disorders Treatment Program. She is the founder of the successful consultation and psychotherapy practice NYC Sleep Doctor, has been featured on CBS This Morning and has been quoted in Parents Magazine, NY Press, Redbook, and the Encyclopedia Britannica website. Dr. Kennedy lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and two children.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

Of all the anxieties that plague expecting parents as the due date approaches, fear of sleep deprivation is among the most intense. Everyone knows that the first several weeks are the most difficult. But it is actually what happens after those weeks that determines how well you and your family will function during the first year and beyond.

My clients often ask about my own children. And, yes, they are great sleepers. I was dedicated to shaping their sleep habits from the start, partly because I needed them to sleep. I am not one of those people who can function without a decent night’s rest.

When I was pregnant with my son, fear of months (or years) of exhaustion inspired me to put together quite a sleep library. At the hospital where I was working, I’d already spent the prior year and a half immersing myself in research to develop a treatment program for adult and geriatric insomnia. While child and adult sleep differ in many ways, certain common principles apply (see Chapter 1). In reading about infant sleep, I was most intrigued by Marc Weissbluth’s model of keeping babies well rested and preventing them from becoming overtired. This became the single most important parenting strategy that my husband and I employed.

We tried to ignore the raised eyebrows of friends and relatives who could not believe how much our son was sleeping. I noticed that what often seemed like common sense to me was counterintuitive to others. But soon it became apparent to them that my “trick” was working, and I started helping friends get their kids’ sleep on track. Pregnant with my daughter, I began thinking about opening a specialty practice to help other new and expecting parents get off on the right foot. I developed a class called Raise a Good Sleeper and later launched my clinical practice, NYC Sleep Doctor, to work with families stuck in a cycle of bad sleep. Since then, I’ve helped hundreds of families make simple changes to improve their sleep, and I’ve supported them through the process of making the difficult ones.

It is my firm belief that good sleepers are not born but raised. In this book you will find the basic information you need to raise a good sleeper. There are plenty of sleep manuals on the market to guide you through the specifics of various sleep-training strategies. The trouble is, there is no one-size-fits-all technique. Every family is a complex mix of individual temperaments and philosophies. The sheer number of options is overwhelming, deterring many parents from even trying to read up on the subject. And parents who do delve into the literature too often give up because they cannot agree on a strategy or because they don’t fully understand the reasoning behind it.

This book is my effort to help people sift through the vast and often confusing information out there and identify strategies that make sense. My goal is to give you a fundamental grasp of infant sleep: how it works, how much is needed, and how to shape good habits. Understanding these principles will help you figure out which strategies will work for you and your family.

In my work, I insist on having parents work together to create a plan. It takes a team effort to stay focused and consistent. I recommend that you read this book together and discuss your priorities and fears before the baby is born. Once he or she arrives, you won’t have time to read, digest, discuss, plan, or do much more than cope. Of course, your best-laid plans will have to be adjusted and calibrated once your baby arrives. But it is well worth doing the advance planning. The quality of your baby’s sleep will have a tremendous impact on your quality of life.

If you did not plan ahead, you certainly aren’t alone. Reading sleep manuals is never high on most expecting parents’ list of priorities. If you and your child are stuck in a cycle of bad sleep, you are probably doing whatever is necessary just to get through each day and night. But your coping strategies might not be improving the situation—and they could be reinforcing the problem. Once you’re mired in it, it’s very hard to decide which strategy will lead you out.

Having a good sleeper is not about luck or genes; it is a part of raising a family, and it requires skill, knowledge, and dedication. It is about developing the confidence to identify problems and get back on track quickly.

My children are great sleepers, but they have hit the same bumps in the road that all children do. We have dealt with colic, crying, bedtime battles, early waking, illness, repeated pacifier replacement, room-sharing issues, overstimulation, and more. Sometimes we have struggled to know how to respond, but when we make a wrong turn, we go back to the basics and change course. This book will give you those basics, too.

The Good Sleeper Approach to Infant Sleep

Since opening my private practice, NYC Sleep Doctor, I have entered new parents’ homes and lives when they are at their most confused and vulnerable. I have listened to hundreds of exasperated couples as they describe their love for a baby whose sleeplessness is threatening their confidence as parents, their sanity, and even their marriage. They describe how lost they feel as they listen to friendly advice and pore over countless books about sleep. But by the end of our 90-minute visit, they have a firm understanding of what they have missed all along: the simple facts of infant sleep and how to use that knowledge to teach their baby to sleep.

It’s not particularly complicated, yet no one seems to have figured out how to explain these concepts and strategies to parents. Pediatricians assess virtually every developmental milestone except sleep. Books, as I will show, are confusing and make promises they can’t deliver on. Friends, family, and “parenting coaches” give advice based on their personal experience, which does little to reassure frightened parents who fear doing psychological or physical damage to their child.

In my practice, I have immersed myself in the world of infant sleep—the science and the psychology of it. When I first started charging fees for my services, I had the usual crisis of confidence: Was I really doing something for these families that they couldn’t do themselves? Wasn’t this information so straightforward that anyone could figure it out? What I found, as enthusiastic reports came back from parents and as their friends started hiring me, was that what seemed common sense to me was not evident to most parents. I also discovered that I could transform the necessary information into common-sense guidelines for my clients.

I spent eight years at the Manhattan Veterans Affairs Medical Center helping patients suffering from arguably the most challenging of sleep issues. Through my experience working with veterans suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder and other serious mental illnesses, I learned how to relate scientific and clinical knowledge to lots of very tough real-life situations. I taught psychology interns how to be concise, responsible writers. I am known among my colleagues and friends as a straight talker—a trait that has gotten me into trouble from time to time but has also been one of my defining professional qualities. My colleagues refer patients to me who need a no-nonsense therapist, one who won’t mince words. My presentations are well edited and concise, focusing on the essential points I need to communicate.

I don’t use jargon, and I don’t try to impress people with fancy explanations of simple concepts. My goal is to be an effective communicator, and I do that by getting to the point. When I treat my patients, when I teach classes about sleep, or when I lecture students or executives, I typically check in and ask: “Does that make sense?” I do this because I care about my audience, whether it be an individual client, a couple, or a room full of students.

Parents often contact me hoping to put the problem in my hands, expecting me to do something magical to make it disappear. From the beginning, I emphasize that the solution is not magical. My job is to help parents unravel the problem, to determine how and when to intervene, and to arm parents with the knowledge and confidence they need to work through the problem themselves. Parents often ask if I do overnight stays. I don’t—and not just because I have my own family. I don’t do overnights because parents have to learn how to manage their child’s sleep on their own.

I have worked with countless babies with uneventful histories or minor issues like colic. But I have also worked with babies who have had a much harder time: deaf babies, babies who have had neonatal heart surgery or long NICU stays, and babies and toddlers who have developmental disabilities and serious medical issues. Obviously, special circumstances can affect the methods. But even in these cases, the basic principles apply.

The first things I look for when I’m working with clients are:

1. The bedtime: The bedtime is almost always too late. Parents fear that putting their babies to bed too early will cause them to wake up early in the morning. The exact opposite is true. An early bedtime is the key to a good night (and reasonable wake-up time).

2. Naps (where, when, and how long): Parents often fear that allowing a baby to sleep during the day will compromise night sleep. Most parents do not understand the importance of naps and nap quality.

3. Short-term survival strategies that are undermining long-term progress: These can include responding immediately when the baby fusses, co-sleeping, excessive baby wearing, or always waiting to put the baby down fully asleep. Once parents understand their child’s process of learning to sleep, they become willing to loosen their grip on survival strategies that are only serving to reinforce the problem.

Another very common problem is the parents’ fear of their babies’ crying or distress. Parents in the United States struggle to foster healthy sleep in their children because they are afraid to allow them to experience distress. They are unable to differentiate between what the child wants and what she needs. Either that, or they simply can’t bear to side with the needs over the wants. It’s a short-term solution (ending distress or crying by “helping” a baby sleep) that creates a long-term problem (a child that cannot rely on himself to fall asleep independently).

Over the years, I have seen this problem play out in countless ways. There are the men who want to be different from their overbearing fathers and will do anything to avoid “causing” their child distress. There are the parents who coslept with their own parents and recall the difficult transition out of the family bed (when they were old enough to remember); they want to avoid cosleeping but feel judged by their families or peers. There are parents who are essentially traumatized by colic or extreme fussiness in their baby or in an older child and feel unable to tolerate any more crying. There are parents who believe that depriving a child of their attention will create long-term personality defects or even sociopathy (much more on this later). There are parents who fear that they simply don’t possess the skills to raise their children effectively, and parents who simply can’t agree on a strategy.

Parenting styles naturally shift over the generations in response to changing mores, as well as medical, educational, scientific, and technological advances. But parenting styles also shift as people embrace or reject the merits of their own childhoods. From the late 1960s through the 1980s, the pendulum seems to have swung toward less involved parenting. Society was more focused on self-exploration and fulfillment. As parents made their personal goals and happiness the priorities, the focus on children became less central.

As those children have become the next generation of parents, they have swung the pendulum back, overcorrecting for what they perceive to have been their own parents’ disengagement. Many parents today feel compelled to be involved in every aspect of their child’s experience, to be omnipresent, to soothe away every discomfort. These are impossible tasks, and they create a lot of problems. Children who cannot tolerate normal discomforts like boredom, sharing, or having a toy jerked away from them by another baby don’t develop the essential life skill that psychologists call distress tolerance. These children believe they are entitled to be entertained and joyful at all times. Of course, it’s important for children to be happy and entertained. But parents’ efforts to prevent or soothe away all discomfort teach children that there is something dangerous about being unhappy.

As parents, we all must accept that a child’s needs come before his or her wants.

I see it as my job to teach parents that one of the primary challenges they will face is accepting that a child’s needs must come before his wants. Clarifying this battle of needs and wants helps parents to understand the challenge at hand. It gives them the courage to begin the task of parenting. It gives them permission to prioritize needs and take care of their child’s best interest, even when the child is protesting. I teach parents about authoritative parenting, which provides the structure to keep the child safe by setting appropriate limits while also allowing the child room to explore and experiment, precisely because he knows that his parents will be there for him if he fails. (Not incidentally, it is this type of parenting that has been found to result in secure attachment and healthy adjustment in the long term.)

The principles and strategies in this book will help you to find a rhythm that brings some sanity to your new life as a parent. The information here will inform your decisions about how to get your baby the sleep she needs while also remaining flexible enough to enjoy your time with your newborn. Countless couples have told me that they wish that someone had explained these things before they became stuck in a cycle of bad sleep. That is precisely what The Good Sleeper will do.

Copyright © 2015 by Janet Krone Kennedy, PhD

Table of Contents

Introduction 1
The Good Sleeper Approach to Infant Sleep 5

1. It's All About Adrenaline 13
Adrenaline and Overfatigue 14
Keeping Your Baby Well Rested 16
Watching the Clock 16
Following Drowsiness Cues 17
Common Myths and Misconceptions 22
Key Points from Chapter 1 23

2. The Early Weeks (0–6 Weeks Old) 24
Where Will Your Baby Sleep? 25
A Hierarchy of Sleep Independence 28
Becoming Your Baby's Sleep Facilitator 31
Responding to Drowsiness Cues 33
White Noise 35
Responding to Night Waking 36
Pacifiers 37
The Onset of Fussiness 38
Coping with Colic 38
Is It Reflux? 43
Avoid Information Overload 44
Key Points from Chapter 2 45

3. The Light at the End of the Newborn Tunnel (6–12 Weeks) 46
The Beginnings of the Body Clock 47
The Sleep and Eating "Schedule" 49
The Sleep Environment 52
Easing into Independent Napping 53
Establishing the Bedtime Routine 55
Lengthening Night Sleep 57
Baby Monitors 60
Transitioning to the Crib 62
Pacifiers 63
Swaddles 63
Challenging Situations: Colic and Reflux 65
Key Points from Chapter 3 67

4. A Schedule Emerges (12–20 Weeks and Beyond) 68
Toning Down the Soothing 70
The Schedule Develops 72
Why So Much Focus on Naps? 75
The Early Bedtime 78
The Schedule Evolves 82
What If You Don't Have a Choice About Nap Times? 85
Key Points from Chapter 4 86

5. Sleeping Through the Night 87
Step 1: Get Your Baby as Rested as Possible 88
Step 2: Create Sleep Cues and Stop Feeding to Sleep 89
Step 3: Teach Your Baby to Fall Asleep in the Crib 90
Step 4: Figure Out Why Your Baby Is Still Waking Up 92
Need Versus Want 93
Step 5: Pick a Strategy: Methodical Step-by-Step or Cut to the Chase 94
Step 6: Weaning from Night Feedings 95
Step 7: Weaning from Night Soothing 98
Step 8: The Final Hurdle: Cry-It-Out 99
Timing 100
Extinction Explained 101
Preparation and Safety 102
The Process 103
Crying with Checks: AKA the "Ferber Method" 105
Crying Without Checks 107
Keeping a Scheduled Feeding 109
Dream Feeding 110
Vomit 112
How to Survive Cry-It-Out 113
Your Baby's Reaction 114
How Long Does It Take? 115
Does It Last? 115
Key Points from Chapter 5 116

6. Getting Unstuck 117
Your Self-Assessment 119
Determining Your Plan of Action 123
Working in Phases 126
Phase 1: Laying the Groundwork 126
Phase 2: It's Time for Crying 134
Nights, Naps, or Both? 135
How to Use Crying at Nap Time 137
What If Crying Doesn't Work? 141
Key Points from Chapter 6 146

7. Tricky Circumstances 147
Space Challenges 148
Siblings 149
Room Sharing 152
Travel 156
Jet Lag 160
Daylight Savings 161
Changes and Derailments 165
Illness 165
Teething 166
Developmental Milestones 167
Developmental Changes to the Sleep Schedule 171
Key Points from Chapter 7 172

8. Child Care 174
Day Care or Nanny? 176
Benefits of Day Care 177
Disadvantages of Day Care 182
Benefits of Hiring a Nanny 184
Disadvantages of Hiring a Nanny 186
What to Look For in a Day Care 187
Talking to Your Nanny About Sleep 190
And Now, Take the Leap 190
Key Points from Chapter 8 191

9. Reality Check 192
You Can't Control Everything 193
You Do Need to Have Some Control 196
Sleep Is Not Always Perfectly Predictable 197
Good Sleepers Make Noise During the Night 199
Taking a Step Back 200
Key Points from Chapter 9 201

10. When the Baby Is Sleeping but the Parents Aren't 203
Having a Baby Is Stressful, Even When Things Go Smoothly 205
Taking Care of Yourself in Increments 206
Getting the Sleep You Need 211
Resetting Your Body Clock 219
Take Care of You 231

Appendix A: Cry-It-Out: Is It Harmful? 233
"Scientists Say . . ." 237
What the Leading Scientists Really Say 241
Research on Cry-It-Out/Extinction 241
The Impact of Sleep Training on Attachment 243
The Truth About Cortisol 244
What About Long-term Effects of Cry-It-Out? 247
Appendix B: The Good Sleeper Primer 252
Appendix C: Sleep Diaries 254
Index of Case Examples 258
Recommended Reading and Viewing 260
References from Appendix A: Cry-It-Out: Is It Harmful? 262
Additional Sources 268
Acknowledgments 275
Index 279

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews