Marc Weissbluth Quotes.

1. "...please remember that leaving your baby alone protesting for more fun with you while you get dressed is not the same things as abandonment. Similarly, leaving your baby alone protesting for more fun when she needs to sleep is not neglect."
- Marc Weissbluth, Healthy Sleep Habits

2. "Remember, sleep training means starting to respect your baby’s need to sleep when he is a newborn by anticipating when he will need to sleep (within one to two hours of wakefulness), learning to recognize drowsy signs, and developing a bedtime routine. Then your baby will not become overtired."
- Marc Weissbluth, Healthy Sleep Habits

3. "If the sleep disruption is repeated night after night, the actual measured impairments do not remain constant. Instead, there is an escalating accumulation of sleepiness that produces in adults continuing increases in headaches, gastrointestinal complaints, forgetfulness, reduced concentration, fatigue, emotional ups and downs, difficulty in staying awake during the daytime, irritability, and difficulty awakening. Not only do the adults describe themselves as more sleepy and mentally exhausted, they also feel more stressed. The stress may be a direct consequence of partial sleep deprivation or it may result from the challenge of coping with increasing amounts of daytime sleepiness. Think how hard it would be to concentrate or be motivated if you were struggling every day to stay awake. If children have"
- Marc Weissbluth, Healthy Sleep Habits

4. "As your child’s biological rhythms evolve for day sleep, your general goal is to synchronize your soothing-to-sleep activities with her internal timing mechanism for sleep. This is no different from being sensitive to her need to be fed or changed. Many"
- Marc Weissbluth, Healthy Sleep Habits

5. "Sometimes at about 3 months of age, after the extreme fussiness/colic has dissipated, or in a baby who had common fussiness/crying, a child who had been sleeping well begins waking at night or crying at night and during the day. The parents also may note heightened activity with wild screaming spells. These children have accumulated a sleep debt and decided that they would rather play with their parents than be placed in a dark, quiet, and boring room. Parents who do not recognize the new sleep debt might believe that this new night waking represents hunger due to a growth spurt or insufficient breast milk. But when these parents begin to focus on establishing a healthy night-sleep schedule, when they put these babies in their cribs when the babies need to sleep, and when they shield their babies from overstimulation, the frequent night waking stops. If"
- Marc Weissbluth, Healthy Sleep Habits

6. "You see, infant bonding was thought to take place only during a critical period, very much like the imprinting of baby geese, who will follow any large, moving object they see at a specific time in their development. The fact is that there is no scientific evidence that a similar critical period exists for human babies, and there is no evidence that lack of bonding at a specific time right at birth effects subsequent behavior in either infant or mother."
- Marc Weissbluth, Healthy Sleep Habits

7. "Popular distortions of attachment theory claimed that a twenty-four-hour parent—meaning one who attends to every cry day and night—would produce a more securely attached child than would a selfish parent who ignores a cry at night so she can get some sleep. Accumulated scientific data do not support these claims. In fact, published research on children between seven and twenty-seven months of age has shown that when parents are instructed not to attend to their children’s protest crying (the technique called extinction), over time measurements of infant security significantly improved and all the mothers become less anxious"
- Marc Weissbluth, Healthy Sleep Habits

8. "In other words, children who slept longer during the day had longer attention spans."
- Marc Weissbluth, Healthy Sleep Habits

9. "SLEEP TRAINING DOES NOT EQUAL CRY IT OUT Sleep training involves several general principles to use the natural development of sleep/wake rhythms as an aid to help your child learn to sleep. • Respect your baby’s need to sleep. • Start early to plan for or anticipate for when your baby will need to sleep, similar to anticipating when your baby will need to feed. • Maintain brief intervals of wakefulness, this is the one- to two-hour window. • Learn to recognize drowsy cues (see this page), though they may be absent in 20 percent of extremely fussy/colicky babies. Drowsy cues or sleepy signs signal that your baby is becoming sleepy; this is when you should begin your soothing efforts. • When you put your baby down or lie down with him, he may be drowsy and awake or in a deep sleep. Either way works if you have good timing. • Develop a bedtime routine. • Matching the time when you soothe your baby to sleep to the time when he naturally needs to sleep is the key. For 80 percent of common fussy babies, perfect timing produces no crying. • During the first several weeks, many babies fall asleep while feeding or sucking to soothe even if not hungry. This is natural. It is not necessary to deliberately wake your baby before you put him down to sleep or lie down with him in your bed. Later, your older baby may or may not momentarily and partially awaken as you remove your breast or bottle before falling asleep. Do not force him to a wakeful state before attempting to sleep him."
- Marc Weissbluth, Healthy Sleep Habits

10. "children, it was observed that half fell asleep at 10:00"
- Marc Weissbluth, Healthy Sleep Habits