Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Hachette Digital.
To receive special offers, bonus content, and news about our latest ebooks and apps, sign up for our newsletters.
For more about this book and author, visit Bookish.com.
Copyright 2005 by William Sears, Martha Sears, Robert Sears, and James Sears
Cover design by Amy Goldfarb and Leslie Goldman
Cover photograph by Photodisc
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the authors intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the authors rights.
Little, Brown Spark
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104
littlebrownspark.com
First ebook edition: October 2005
Little, Brown Spark is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown Spark name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.
ISBN 978-0-316-05450-8
E3-20181003-JV-PC
Sears Parenting Library
The Baby Book
The Pregnancy Book
The A.D.D. Book
The Attachment Parenting Book
The Baby Sleep Book
The Birth Book
The Breastfeeding Book
The Discipline Book
The Family Nutrition Book
The Fussy Baby Book
The Premature Baby Book
The Successful Child
Parenting.com FAQ Books
Feeding the Picky Eater
The First Three Months
How to Get Your Baby to Sleep
Keeping Your Baby Healthy
Sears Childrens Library
Baby on the Way
Eat Healthy, Feel Great
What Baby Needs
You Can Go to the Potty
VISIT DR. SEARS ONLINE
www.AskDrSears.com
Now you can access thousands of pages of pediatric medical and parenting information. Our comprehensive online resource, personally written by the Doctors Sears, expands on many of the topics discussed in The Baby Sleep Book. We continuously update the health information on our website to provide you with the latest in parenting and health care issues. AskDrSears.com offers valuable insights on such topics as Pregnancy and Childbirth, Infant Feeding, Family Nutrition, Discipline and Behavior, Fussy Babies, and Sleep Problems.
Our website also includes these unique features:
- The Sleep Forum, an interactive forum where parents share their favorite sleep strategies and Dr. Sears adds his comments.
- Dr. Searss Medicine Cabinet, a comprehensive guide to over-the-counter medications, including specific dose information
- Childhood Illnesses, detailed medical information on many common, and not-so-common, child and family illnesses
- Monthly Pediatric Health News Updates
- Seasonal Pediatric Health Alerts
- Valuable month-by-month parenting and medical advice to complement your childs regular checkups
- Frequently Asked Questions answered
- Personal words of encouragement and humor from the daily lives of the Doctors Sears
- The Baby Sleep Book updates. We will post any significant changes to The Baby Sleep Book (and all our books) to provide you with the most accurate and up-to-date medical information.
I am not aware of any physician authorsor should I say families containing physician authorswho better converse with parents and create respectful partnerships with them than Dr. Bill Sears (now along with his sons). In The Baby Sleep Book Dr. Sears, Martha Sears, and their sons Dr. Bob and Dr. Jim make an incredibly useful contribution to our understanding and management of infant and (by association) parent sleep. Years of experience and acquired insight are combined here with a genuinely keen sense of who babies and their families actually are, not who they are supposed to be, a fatal mistake made by authors of most other infant sleep books. Consequently, Dr. Sears reaches just the right balance between what is known to be good for infants and parents from a scientific point of view and what makes sense within individual families. His nonauthoritarian and nonjudgmental approach instills trust and just the right mood for parents to fully understand, appreciate, and apply a tremendously impressive range of useful tips, interesting bits of information full of warmth and humor, and strategies that can be put into play if one particular plan doesnt work. Altogether, the information in The Baby Sleep Book far exceeds the parental help contained in all the other sleep books that are available. Indeed, the Searses book sets a new and very high standard against which all other future infant sleep books will be judged. On behalf of parents and babies everywhere, I am delighted to endorse it enthusiastically.
James J. McKenna, Ph.D., Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Lab, University of Notre Dame
HOW TO READ THIS BOOK
In response to our advisers (sleepless parents), we use , we share what we Searses do in our families and what many people all over the world do when they learn what their babies need and discover how great it is to be able to meet those needs. The rest of the book gives you a deeper understanding of all the sleep tools discussed in the first four chapters, plus additional sleep tools for handling nighttime challenges such as the all-night nurser. We give you the tools to become your own expert in your baby and to help you work out your own style of nighttime parenting.
E ach day in our pediatric practice we hear tired parents say with a sigh, If only our baby would sleep more. In all our years of writing books and practicing pediatrics, our goal has been to do good things for babies and make life easier for parents. We believe that helping babies sleep better is good not only for them but also for their parents. Parents who get enough sleep at night are happier during the day.
Over the years, we have devoted a lot of time and energy to the sleep problems parents in our practice share with us. We have offered these tired parents many suggestions for helping their babies sleep longer, and we have asked them to report back to us about what worked and what didnt. We have also asked parents who have visited our website (