The Newborn Sleep Book: A Simple, Proven Method for Training Your New Baby to Sleep Through the Night - Softcover

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Dr. Lewis Jassey opened his own pediatric practice in 2001 and has appeared on NBC’s Today show.

Dr. Jonathan Jassey has been a highly regarded pediatrician in the same practice for over eight years, and has received both the “Patients’ Choice Award” and the coveted “Most Compassionate Doctor” recognition.

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PREFACE

Let There Be Sleep!

Why Sleep Train?

As pediatricians with more than thirty years of combined experience, we’ve helped countless parents sleep train their newborns, with great success—regardless of whether they were first-time parents, skeptical about the process or eagerly on board from the start. To address the desires and concerns of parents who approach sleep training from different angles, we’ve written a few letters to them (feel free to read them all or just the one that best applies to you and your family).

Letter to the First-Time Mom

Hi First-Time Mom!

Congratulations on the new addition to your family and welcome to the most exciting, amusing, difficult, mystifying and downright rewarding adventure you could ever hope to have on this earth.

One of the first questions we ask new moms and dads we see in our practice is: “Do you want your baby to sleep through the night?”

Since you’re reading this book, your answer is probably “Yes,” or at least “Maybe . . . as long as it’s safe” or something similar. Or perhaps it’s “Yes! Good Lord, yes!” Those are the most common reactions we get.

But some parents look at us like it’s a trick question. Like they’re thinking:

“This is a test. Infants aren’t supposed to sleep through the night, they need to be fed constantly, like a parking meter, and if we act like we don’t know that, Dr. Jassey is going to report us to child services.”

Well, it’s not a trick question. It’s not a test. It’s more a politely rhetorical question, a transition question from which we can flow into our signature spiel, where we explain our sleep training method, “the Jassey Way.”

The reason that this question is not totally rhetorical is that some parents actually answer “No!”

We rarely see them, but some parents do think that having a baby that doesn’t sleep through the night, and being miserably tired all the time as a result, is sometimes just an inevitable part of parenting. And that that’s all there is to it.

But the truth is, we want all parents to answer our question with a “Yes. Yes, I want my baby to sleep through the night.” And there’s a simple reason for that.

Our job is to look after the well-being of the child, and in that capacity, we’re responsible for giving parents all of the tools they need to promote and protect that child’s well-being. And one of the most important tools parents can have is being well rested themselves. Being well rested helps parents to be not only more alert, but happier. It makes them better parents.

That’s the one-line argument for sleep training, new mom:

A happier, more alert parent is a better parent.

So we’d prefer that your newborn not keep you up all night. Because the only way you can consistently get the good night’s sleep you need to be the best parent you can be is for your baby to get a good night’s sleep, too.

So please—let there be sleep!

Sincerely,
Lewis and Jonathan Jassey

Letter to the Experienced Mom

Hi Experienced Mom,

If your previous child (or children) did not sleep through the night, and left you tired and possibly unhappy much of the time as a result, then we probably don’t have to convince you of the merits of sleep training. The concept sells itself!

But if your previous child was one of the rare, miracle babies that slept through the night almost automatically, then there’s probably not much we could say to convince you that this next child will be any different. You’re probably going to want to ride that hot streak. We’re realists. We know how it is. We’ve seen it all before.

But we do beseech you to keep this book handy, because we assure you: Siblings rarely take after each other in their ability to sleep through the night without training. And there may soon come a time when you rise up and finally exclaim: “Let there be sleep!”

Be warned!

Sincerely,
Lewis and Jonathan Jassey

Letter to the Mom Who Thinks Sleep Training May Be Harmful

Dear Mom Who Would Consider Sleep Training, But Thinks It May Be Harmful to Her Baby,

We understand your concern, because there’s a lot of misinformation out there. Some so-called experts theorize that babies aren’t “meant” to sleep overnight, period; that they need to be fed on a twenty-four-hour cycle. Others will tell you that babies can only be sleep trained at a certain age, and that it’s asking too much of them physically and mentally before then.

These claims are just not true. They might be completely well intentioned, but they’re also unfounded.

As we’ll address in more detail in the following pages, there is no established evidence that infants need to feed overnight to maintain healthy weight gain or development, or that being trained to sleep overnight puts at risk a baby’s long-term health.

In reality, the arguments against baby sleep training are emotional, not rational.

Have you ever had a friend who’s afraid of flying? You show them all the irrefutable statistics proving that air travel is the safest mode of transportation available, but while they’re happy to get in a car, going up in the sky in a jet remains out of the question. Even they admit their fear is not rational; it’s purely emotional.

We can look at baby sleep training in much the same way. All objective evidence points to it being safe.

So please, do yourself—and your child—a favor. Let there be sleep!

Sincerely,
Lewis and Jonathan Jassey

Why Choose This Book?

You can’t eat sushi. You can’t smoke. You can’t smoke marijuana. You can’t smoke crack. You can’t jump on trampolines. It’s basically a giant list of things you can’t do.

—Father-to-be Seth Rogen, describing a baby book to mother-to-be Katherine Heigl, in Knocked Up

A Brief History of Baby Care

Did you know that human beings have been having babies for about two hundred thousand years? It’s true; for as long as people, in our present biological form, have existed, we’ve been having babies. And since we, as a species, began speaking languages only around a hundred thousand years ago, that means that we were having babies for around a hundred thousand years before any caveman or -woman could even have dreamed of composing a baby book.

But you wouldn’t know it from reading these books today. Too many baby care books, baby sleep books included, tend to treat infants as if they’re delicate Fabergé eggs balancing on slanted rooftops; if Mommy or Daddy even look in the wrong direction, baby will come tumbling down and shatter to pieces. The way these books tell it, the fact that the human race has reproduced, let alone prospered as long as it has is nothing short of a miracle.

Okay, we exaggerate. But we agree with Seth Rogen’s character in the 2007 movie Knocked Up—because someone has to lighten the mood here in the Land of Baby Care Literature. That’s also why we had the Eagles classic “Take It Easy” in our heads while writing much of this book. Because the happy truth is that your baby is a supremely resilient little creature. You think your MacBook Air can take a good licking? You think a Bugaboo stroller is an indomitable fortress? These things are impressive, but could they have survived during, say, the Stone Age?

Babies...