_{Disclaimer: I use affiliate links throughout my blog. If you click the link, I may be eligible for some commission but you do not pay anything extra for helping me out in this way. If I have personally used and am promoting that exact product, I will clearly state this, otherwise please assume the link is merely illustrative.}

I have to start by stating the obvious: there is no sleep solution. To claim that there is a definitive way to get your baby to sleep time and time again without fuss or tears, regardless of your child’s own personality or experiences to date is clearly a fallacy, because if it were true, everyone would do it. However, ‘Here are some excellent tips that may or may not help you get your baby to sleep’ just would not sell.

Like many sleep deprived parents (and I do not handle sleep deprivation well, it’s not a good look on me), I turned to the advice of parents before me. In our modern western culture we rarely have the kind of community support group that means we have seen and helped with many babies before our own. For most of us, this is the deep end and we have been chucked in. So, books. Yes we turn to our own parents if we can, but how frustrating is it to hear ‘oh you slept like an angel’ (clearly a lie), ‘I don’t remember’ (it was so bad you blanked it out), or ‘just leave them to cry or they won’t learn to self-soothe’.

The latter, personally, is something I struggled with. Of course I want my baby to learn to go to sleep by himself, but hovering in the next room waiting for 30 seconds or a minute to pass before I could return to my bawling, sobbing so hard he’s making himself sick, infant, was just too much to bear. This could not be right! This could not be the culmination of thousands and thousands of years of evolution, that we have to be abandoned to learn to sleep by ourselves. I felt physically sick myself as I listened to him crying and knew that I could not continue, even if the alternative meant rocking him to sleep until my back gave out or he was a teenager.

Luckily, I had also been reading a few other parenting advice books and a few mentioned attachment parenting, and how recent studies have shown that contrary to the general belief that being left alone makes you strong and independent, the children who are given less support actually turn out more clingy. Those babies who are carried by their mothers, who nurse on demand, and who are responded to as soon as they cry have been shown to actually be the children who grow up more secure in their emotional connections and therefore able to confidently step out into the world of independence. Huzzah, that’s more like it, but how do I get him to sleeeeeep??!

Along comes The No-Cry Sleep Solution, with its time logs and buckets of advice. I have read it a couple of times now, once when J was about 3 months and again at 6 months. Each time, I took away different age-appropriate tactics to try but now, looking back, the most useful advice to my mind was right at the end- to relax about it. It’s really really hard to like a book that is telling you to just savour those moments you have to get up again in the middle of the night to feed your baby, because they won’t be tiny forever and you will miss these moments in ten years, when you’re exhausted (and by the way, J fed every 2 hours, night and day, for the first 9 months of his life. I literally did not sleep more than 2 hours for 9 months.) But now that, miraculously, he has stopped showing signs of wanting to feed quite as often, I do find myself (not missing the 2 hourly feeds, are you mad?!) but more at peace with the idea that he will decide when he is ready to go to sleep alone.

After weeks of rocking, feeding to sleep, singing, carrying, sitting by the side of his crib so he knows he’s not alone while he cries and does not go to sleep, I have made peace with the current situation. Currently, and only currently, he needs the comfort of a feed before bed, the feel of my dressing gown against his cheek, and to spend the night in our bed where he can feel my warmth and kick his daddy. It won’t last forever and now that we are more confident with safely co-sleeping (make sure you heed the safety advice!) I don’t mind sharing with him, because the book is right- it won’t last forever.

Sometimes the author’s advice worked, sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes it worked for two weeks then stopped. Sometimes it was just nice to feel like someone was on my side and giving me something new to try. The logging of sleep patterns and advice from doctors is very reassuring, not to mention the author has the experience of four children of her own and many other mothers helped. Personally my time logs were all incomplete (partly because I was too tired to remember and partly because when I did remember, it was written illegibly, in the dark, obscuring a line I had written earlier.) Mostly, I liked that she acknowledged that babies are not all the same, despite advocating that they all need calm, loving, present support, and shows clearly how different techniques may help different families.

I cannot promise that this book will help you get your baby to sleep independently and through the night, but I still recommend it. It is helpful, it is based on science and personal experience, and most of all it is kind!