Help Your Baby to Sleep
Sleep is something all new parents want, both for themselves and their babies. This book offers background information and practical steps to help you establish a routine with your baby that will look after his or her needs – and yours, too.New parents are given all sorts of conflicting advice on how best to get their baby to sleep through the night. For example, should he/she sleep in your bed, in your room beside your bed or in another room altogether? Should you leave your baby when he/she wakes or cries?Penney Hames tackles every issue, including cot death, and talks about each technique. She examines the need for routine, a comfortable sleep environment and a baby’s sleep patterns at different ages and stages. She also explores research into how a child’s sleep pattern might reflect its character, well-being, health, and even intelligence, thereby debunking myths and extracting the truth. Two-colour with black and white pictures.The main message Penney Hames gives is that parents should make their own minds up and she offers advice on where to get help with addresses of sleep clinics and other support agencies.
Читать Help Your Baby to Sleep онлайн беплатно
Help Your Baby to Sleep
Penney Hames
Thorsons/National Childbirth Trust Publishing
Thorsons is an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in collaboration with National Childbirth Trust Publishing 1998
© NCT Publishing 1998, 2002
Original photography: Anne Green-Armytage, © 2002 NCT Publishing Additional photography: Michael Bassett here and here.
Penney Hames asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780722536087
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2016 ISBN 9780007405008 Version: 2016-09-09
For Richard. Beany and Richard (Junior), with love
Contents
1 What do we Know About Sleep?
3 What does your Baby need for a Good Nightâs Sleep?
9 Coping with Feelings, Gaining Support
Sleepless babies are all too common. One small paragraph in New Generation, the Journal of the National Childbirth Trust, which asked for parentsâ experiences for this book elicited dozens of replies. Then, talking to an astonishing array of professionals and researchers who have devised, through their widely differing disciplines, effective approaches or remedies for the sleeplessness of babies led me on to dozens more women. And women who had heard about the book on the grapevine of my local National Childbirth Trust branch, also called. Find me a parent and Iâll show you someone with an opinion about babiesâ sleep.
The problem with any subject worth its salt is that right-minded, sensitive people can believe any number of threateningly different things. I believe that an author ought to listen to all these different opinions, try to see the value in each, and while rejecting none, chart a clear course for each reader, irrespective of how that reader prefers to travel.
So much for the theory. Iâm sure that my own persuasions are written large in between the lines of this book. Nevertheless I hope that Help Your Baby to Sleep has accomplished three things: first, to acknowledge that no one approach is right for everybody; second, to accept that complex emotional ties may make the supposedly simple act of leaving your baby to sleep heart-wrenchingly difficult, and that is not simply something to overcome, but an awareness that may suggest a different approach; and third, to express the ambivalence and complexity of a vast range of attitudes, through the words of parents.
I hope you find in it something that speaks to you.
Penney Hames
Oh sleep! It is a gentle thing, beloved from pole to pole
Coleridge, âThe Ancient Marinerâ
Why does my Baby Sleep so Much?
Babies have a lot to learn, and quickly. But itâs hard to reflect on anything when thereâs a lot going on. This is one of the reasons that babies sleep so much. Putting the world into some sort of order takes a bit of peace and quiet. While he is asleep your babyâs brain can organize the vast array of experiences he has when heâs awake. At the same time, chemicals in the brain and body are renewing themselves ready for more activity. As new parents we also have a lot to learn, and we also need our sleep to help us do it. Without sufficient sleep everyone suffers.
How Much Sleep does a Baby Need?
Most of us come to parenthood better prepared for the birth than for life with our baby. Charlie felt unsure and desperate for sleep when Elisa was tiny:
âElisaâs two weeks and three days and she doesnât have a routine yet. Her best night was when she slept for three hours and then fed for one-and-a-half hours. Iâd really like her to feed and then sleep for four hours.â
It can be a fraught time. You donât know what to expect, everyone else seems to have it sussed, and you are just so tired ⦠Sometimes itâs helpful if you know about the average baby so that you stop expecting your baby to sleep for longer or more regularly than most babies manage. When Charlie found out that Elisaâs little-and-often-never-at-the-same-time-twice approach to sleep was the standard new baby format, she began to relax.
