The Discontented Little Baby Book

Many parents are given the impression that it’s their responsibility to teach babies to sleep, and that their parenting style or whether or not they are breastfeeding may have caused sleep problems. They might also feel that if they don’t do something, they will allow bad sleep habits to take root, which will affect the child as the years pass and

The safest place for your baby to sleep during the day is in the same part of the house you

We’ve all got used to the idea that life with a baby has to be hard now so that it will be better for

Interestingly, 40 per cent of adults of any age will tell you, if asked, that they’ve had regular symptoms of insomnia over the previous month, whether it be difficulty falling asleep, waking frequently and finding it difficult to get back to sleep, waking up early, waking up feeling unrefreshed or a combination of all of these.

You are the expert on your baby. You are uniquely positioned to experiment,

Left to their own devices, parents and caregivers learn to read cues by pattern recognition. Each baby’s system of communication is unique, and meaningful only in the context of the events in her little world. You contextualise your baby’s communications, and build up a picture over time, experimenting with your responses in a sensible way so that

So they step out of the shadows, they dispense admiration, they croon like old divinities bestowing blessings.

Daylight, however, is not the only environmental cue that helps to set the baby’s circadian clock to align with day and night. Babies also need the activities of daily living to help calibrate their circadian clocks: conversation, footsteps, siblings’ noisy play, clanging of cooking utensils, taps running, toilets flushing, cupboard doors banging,

From the dawn of time and still in nomadic and hunter-gatherer cultures, humans got up in the night to kindle the fire for instance, or to check the weather or the animals, or to respond to worrying signs of predators.