For No-Cry Solutions for Common Parenting Challenges, Check with Elizabeth Pantley

I first encountered the gentle guidance of Elizabeth Pantley when I added The No-Cry Sleep Solution to the stack of books on baby sleep that grew beside my bed during Violet's infancy. As Violet grew, but the length of her sleep sessions did not, I thumbed desperately through its pages in search of a remedy to her restlessness. While in reading it I never discovered the silver bullet I'd hoped to find (I'm not sure there is such thing as a compassionate quick fix for sleep at those stages), what I did take away was what I really needed: reassurance that someday my baby would sleep longer than three quarters of an hour, without our resorting to strategies we weren't comfortable with.

Pantley's approach is the antithesis to perhaps better-known "baby-trainers" like Ferber and Weissbluth - worse yet, Ezzo - who are adamant that every baby is the same and should sleep on the same schedule. Instead, Pantley understands that babies are individuals, and should be respected and responded to as such, even at night. Since she also recognizes that prolonged sleep deprivation can be painful (putting it mildly) for parents, she proposes a plan for helping ease little ones into sleeping longer stretches in a way that the whole family can live with.

Fortunately for the child-centered set, Pantley has provided additional advice on tough topics in her other books: The No-Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers and Preschoolers; The No-Cry Potty Training Solution; The No-Cry Discipline Solution; and her latest - The No-Cry Nap Solution: Guaranteed Gentle Ways to Solve All Your Naptime Problems. Each of these volumes adds a much-needed AP perspective to conventional parenting literature; I look forward to adding several to my own bookshelf.