The Complete Sleep Guide For Contented Babies and Toddlers

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In 2004 Gina recognised that, despite the wealth of parenting information available, many mothers still felt isolated. In an effort to fill the gap, Gina launched ContentedBaby.com and, in the process, created a wonderful, supportive and dynamic on-line community. It must be noted that Gina Ford has no children but worked as maternity 'nurse', i.e. looked after other people's babies and therefore had no desire, need, or innate instinct to form a long term attachment with the baby. Instead she would have been keen on babies making her as little work as possible. The same is true of most other 'baby gurus'. She also mentions the importance of bedtime routines throughout the book. As we know, bedtime routine are incredibly important as they provide consistency and a cue to sleep for babies (and children). Bedtime routines can also decrease night wakings. Gina Ford does not provide any advice on good components of bedtime routines besides bathing and feeding your baby. Her main concern is how to schedule your baby’s feedings around bedtime. By following nine different routines that match your baby’s natural rhythms, this method claims to avoid the issues that bring on endless tears such as hunger and tiredness. But, most of all, it is a form of restitution: she is giving mothers the experience her mother did not have. "A lot of my success is that I mother the mothers because when you're feeling frightened, or alone, or unsure, you don't want to sit and analyse; you want someone to come along and say, 'This is the plan. If it doesn't work, we'll try something else.' That's when you want someone to take control."

How to do it: Follow the 10 different routines, as outlined in the book, from birth to 12 months. The routines include hour-by-hour and week-by-week guidance on sleep times, feeds and bedtime rituals. But Ford is not someone who believes in dwelling on the past. "I don't think about my childhood too much. What's the point? But I'm sure that a lot of the way I behave nowadays is to do with my childhood."I was determined to do it right, and I remember feeling so frustrated when Barnaby didn’t quite fit into her daily plan. Gina Ford is a name that often splits many parent's opinions. For many, the parenting guru’s method are considered controversial, but it promises to ultimately provide what most new parents dream of – a baby who sleeps through the night. I found that the early feeding schedules in this book were not able to satisfy our baby, and so I breastfed more on-demand (my doc's rec) for the first 6 months, instead of implementing Gina Ford's schedules. That said, after 3 months, I began to "concentrate" a little more on the schedules with the feedings, but still didn't keep exclusively to them: if my baby was hungry in between, I just breast-fed her a bit.

For each new baby, I dug out that Gina Ford roadmap and by the fifth kid I pretty much knew it off by heart. She paints a grim picture of what can happen after the arrival of a baby. "Father comes home from work; he has had a stressful day at the bank or the building society; the kid's screaming its head off; the wife looks a mess; he thinks, 'My God, what happened to that sexy, bubbly woman I married three years ago? Look at this old hag: she's got droopy tits, she's got wrinkles.' She throws the six-month-old at him and all she can go on about is what a rotten day she's had. Six boys in the space of nine years, with different personalities, needs, bodies, temperaments, all squeezed into one basement room.I got to see what worked well, and what didn’t work well, in a real, tender, dirty-dishes-and-shouty-parents-and-wet-beds kind of proximity. Ford was the only child of a single mother, born 42 years ago on a farm in south-east Scotland. Her father left the family soon after her birth, so she and her mother were desperately short of money. "We were so poor we didn't realise we were poor," she says. "To me, working-class people were posh. We were like peasants compared with them."

When he reaches stage two, where he is settling within 10 minutes for several nights, you should try leaving him to self-settle using the crying down method. It is important to understand that crying down is not the same as controlled crying. Crying down usually lasts around five to ten minutes at which point it will turn into fussing before he drifts off to sleep. It will also help with the self-settling if your baby gets used to being happy in his bed if you put him in it for short spells during the day, when he is fully awake, with a small book or toy to look at, whilst you stay close by, talking and reassuring him. There is a strange idea amongst baby gurus like Gina Ford that babies are manipulative and have to be shown that they must do what they are told by their parents from the get go. That just seems like such a tragic way to start the most important relationships that baby will have: being dominated and their voice ignored at every turn. The idea that too much attention to a baby's wants and needs amounts to coddling and will 'spoil' the child is quite a modern invention and not one borne out by experience. It takes anywhere from a few days to several weeks for babies to learn to settle themselves to sleep without crying. Once you are confident that you are getting your baby’s daytime sleeping and feeding right, the following method will help comfort and reassure your baby whilst also teaching him how to self-settle: Well, I think that The Contented Little Baby Book is really like a best practice manual, written by someone who has done the job of caring for many, many babies – and she is telling you what generally works.The idea is that your baby should be able to sleep through the night by eight to 10 weeks. Plus, this method allows you to plan your day around your baby’s feeds and naps, giving you time to do whatever you need to or catch up on sleep. It's worth noting however that the NHS recommends starting a routine after three months. Whether you see Gina Ford as the Great Satan or as the Patron Saint of Modern Mothers, hardly any parents are neutral about her. For first-timers there is no escaping The Contented Little Baby Book. On five separate occasions, my partner and I were told that we "must" use it by zealous, if well-meaning, other parents (we did not take their advice). Now comes her new book, Potty Training in One Week (to some parents this title may seem as plausible as World Peace in One Week). Here are a few things you can do to make bedtime a better experience for both you and your little one: