The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night.

Book review by Annmarie G. Klyzub, CLA, Editor Published by Contemporary Books, 2002

When I first received Elizbeth Pantley's The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night, I was truly excited. I had been dealing with a toddler who refused to fall asleep on his own or in his own bed for that matter. To top it off, he religiously comes into my husband's and my bed in the middle of the night. While we are all for co-sleeping, the time had come for us to have some alone time! So I dove into the pages.

Pantley's parenting expertise is gleaned from her experience as current president of Better Beginnings (a family resource and education company), an author of numerous child-rearing books, and as a mother of four children. She brings this knowledge to her current book. The main focus of this book is to get your child to sleep through the night without subjecting them to old practices such as letting the baby cry it out.

She presents a very comprehensive plan. She begins with a safety checklist. Acknowledging the need for a good nights sleep, Pantley says that safety comes first. She relates a few tales in which parents made safety mistakes regarding the sleeping arrangements of their babies. These include unsafe mattresses and leaving a baby to sleep in a car. She spends an entire chapter providing priceless information to parents.

Pantley also makes a point to educate the reader about sleep itself. She keeps the information short and to the point for all the sleep deprived parents reading the book. Information is included on how adults sleep, how babies sleep, and how much sleep is needed.

To test her no-cry plan, Pantley has a panel of sixty "test mommies" who devised their personal sleep plans based on Pantley's theories. Their reactions--good and bad--are sprinkled throughout the book. The statistics for success were 42 percent sleeping through the night by day ten, 53 percent sleeping through the night by day twenty, and 92 percent sleeping through the night by day sixty. Pantley promises, at the least, there will be improvements in your baby's sleeping patterns if you try her techniques.

Pantley touches on many topics--breastfeeding, co-sleeping, bottlefeeding, smells, diaper changes, and sounds, to name a few. She tries to cover all possible aspects of sleeping, or lack thereof. Pantley's technique revolves around making a "personal sleep plan" for your baby, which she has divided into two sections: newborn and four months of age to two years. She also gives sample forms of the plan as well as a log to record your baby's sleep patterns. Pantley also provides a checklist section to ensure her techniques are being followed.

One interesting technique she suggests is making a sleep book for your baby. This involves making a "book" of pictures that pertain to sleep (from magazines, photos, and so on). The book should show your bedtime routine. She suggests using this book every night before starting the actual routine. Pantley also instructs how to make the second book in her technique--a book all about baby. The end of the book shows the goal--sleeping, weaning, no pacifier, and so on. Thus, these ideas are useful for more than just sleeping.

Overall I believe that Pantley has compiled a gentle, useful resource for helping parents regain some sense of normalcy in their sleeping patterns. She is true to her promise of being gentle, which is a plus. This book is a godsend simply in its juxtaposition to the many other "remedies" on the market.

As for me, we started making a book, but we're too tired.

--Annmarie G. Klyzub is the Editor of Special Delivery, a Certified Labor Assistant, and mom to four children. She runs Birth Blessings, a labor assistant service, and is president of the local birth group, Birth Partners. Her almost three-year-old still shares her bed, mainly because both she and her husband are too tired to move him in the middle of the night.