Marc Weissbluth

Not a fan of the author's tone. His recommendations come across as absolutes, which I think betrays an overly rigid attitude towards parenting. If someone tries tell me his way is THE WAY and all other ways are crap, I immediately distrust him. Still, I gave it two stars because there are ideas worth trying in here (particularly the idea that you need to start settling your baby within 1-2 hours of wakefulness). I just wish the author had a gentler approach and was more open minded. Parenting a newborn is hard and I don't need to read stuff where the implication is "If you're not doing exactly what I say, you're doing it wrong."… (mere)

I think this will be the last book on sleep that I read---mostly because I don't think that there are any left(#overacheiver?). I only read the parts that I felt were related to my current child's age.

In terms of sleeping, this was one of the better ones. It explained more of the science of sleep than others and it gave specific tips and schedules for you.

However,

-Weissbluth's tone is very self-satisfied. It's reminiscent of Babywise(do yourself a favor and google the Wikipedia page on that one) in some ways. He's also a fan of crying it and takes the position of "there aren't any studies that show the harm of crying it out" which is probably true, but are there any that prove a benefit?
-He also seems to step outside of his expertise(why do they always do that?). Telling parents they need therapy doesn't really seem to connect to the sleep problem and fixing sleep will probably do more to fix the relationship, anyway. SAD doesn't really have much to do with sleep either.
-Also... page 396 irritated me(I'm sleep-deprived). Blaming child abuse, infanticide, and obesity on parental mismanagement of sleep is not helpful to over-worked parents who are trying the best that they can.

So, it wasn't a perfect book. But I hope it works.… (mere)

I picked Weissbluth's book up and I couldn't get past the negative tone -- every explanation and diagnosis is about "parental failure to X". I suspect there is useful information here, especially for people at the end of their rope, but it is couched in surprisingly dismissive language. I thought it was universally known to people involved in childrearing and with power over adults that narrating and normalizing positive replacement behaviors you want to see is more effective than focusing attention on misbehavior, but apparently that is less universal than I had thought. Not finishing this one.… (mere)