Putting Down the Books

By Megan

I cleaned out and organized my desk on Saturday, unearthing, among many other long lost treasures, my dog-eared copy of Paul Weissbluth’s Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. Bean gaped over my shoulder at it, as if she were looking at the Ghost of Christmas Past, and then she looked up at me with a smile and said, “Guess we don’t need THAT anymore, Mama.”

“We really don’t, huh? We’ve don’t have a non-sleepin’ baby anymore, do we?”

“Nope,” she said with conviction, “We’ve got ourselves a good-sleepin’ boy.”

And we do. We’ve got a nearly two-year-old little ball of cuteness who knows when he’s tired and will even ASK to be put to bed on occasion. A boy who cuddles peacefully in my arms for a while each night and then happily gets into his crib, snuggles his car and his stuffed blue puppy close, smiles, whispers Nigh-nigh, and goes to sleep without complaint. He sleeps all night and wakes in the morning calling “Mama? Dada? CAR!” and then greets us with well-rested smiles and giggles.

All of this is in stark contrast to where we HAVE been with Peabody, sleep-wise. We struggled with him, and he with us, for many long and painful (and exhausting) months; that’s when I came to own the Weissbluth book and several others. But while I won’t discount the wisdom and information I’ve gleaned from these expert authors, I do have to admit that the huge amount of progress we’ve made with Peabody and his sleep comes mostly from putting down the books and other sources of advice and using my own instincts and abilities to make sleeping GOOD for my son. Honestly, I’d read and tried just about every popular “method” out there to get him sleeping enough and sleeping well, when finally I just got tired of being twisted in knots over it and put everything aside except my baby and me.

Miraculously, the less I researched and worried and tried to manipulate the situation into “perfection,” the more and better my boy slept. It’s amazing how letting go and following my own instincts and routines almost resolved 95% of the problems I’d been consumed with since Peabody was born. And this is probably the most important lesson I’ve learned so far as a parent: Relax and connect with YOUR child and the answers will show themselves to you over time. Stressing and obsessing won’t solve anything, and more often than not they’ll make issues worse. Advice from the experts can be extremely helpful, but they don’t know your baby as you do, so always make room for your own instinct as the guiding force over every other source.

Can you think of some examples where you’ve struggled with a tough parenting situation and solved it by putting down the books and picking up your child?

3 Responses to Putting Down the Books
  1. Carrie
    July 30, 2010 | 9:42 pm

    Great advice! I know before I had Zachary, a TON of my friends recommended Babywise, so I read it & thought, Hmmm, this sounds good, but I don’t know… Then I asked a lady with 6 kids if SHE did babywise & she basically told me that she ‘fed them when they were hungry, and held them when they cried, etc.’ – but I think to a new mom that is super confusing, I just remember thinking, “But how will I know???”. Anyway…I tried to do Babywise with my son and it went horribly!!! Nursing, sleeping, everything went terribly. I gave up on the ‘rules’ and starting nursing & letting him sleep when/where HE wanted, and it started going better! Now he is 2 1/2 and my daughter is 7 months, and I have fed her on demand from birth & let her sleep where & when she wanted to, and she is VERY healthy, and on a much better ‘schedule’ than I ever could have designed! ๐Ÿ™‚ So…not sure if that’s what you were asking, but that’s my experience! ๐Ÿ™‚

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