Foreword Compassionate, courageous, and creative, The Happy Sleeper is a book for every parent of a young child to savor in its magnificent exploration of effective strategies for helping children get to bed smoothly and sleep well through the night. Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright have written a user-friendly, scientifically informed, practical guide that provides the information and intention you need to cultivate healthy sleeping habits not only for your child but for yourself as well! Why is sleep so important? It is during sleep that we secrete the growth hormones our bodies need to grow and replenish themselves well. Sleep also allows our body and brain to rest and recover from the day''s activities. Recent studies have revealed, too, that during sleep our brains in effect clean themselves up-removing unhelpful by-products of the day''s neural activity-so that we can function well when we''re awake. Given all of this, it''s no surprise that babies and children need so many hours of sleep as they grow. Infants and toddlers sleep half their day or more! In childhood the amount of optimal sleep gradually decreases, but school-age children still need roughly 10 hours of sleep. Even as adults, we should spend about a third of our time sleeping! Without the proper amount and quality of sleep, science reveals, we will have difficulty focusing, remembering, and calming our emotions. When we haven''t slept well we don''t learn or operate as effectively because our brain hasn''t had the necessary sleep time to optimize its functioning.

Even more, without proper sleep, our immune system does not function well, and so we can become vulnerable to infectious diseases. And our metabolic system doesn''t function optimally, so we can be prone to overeat and not process food well, putting us at risk for obesity and diabetes. For each of these reasons, sleep is one of the most important "activities" we humans participate in. And as parents, helping our children develop good sleep hygiene is one of the most important contributions we can make to their well-being. In this fabulous guide, you''ll learn to take important findings from sleep research and combine them with a crucial working knowledge of attachment research so that you''ll optimize not only your children''s sleep habits, but also their attachment to you. Attachment is all about providing security for your children through anticipating their inner needs, making them feel safe, and communicating with them in a soothing manner. Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright are brilliant sleep whisperers with decades of experience helping parents cultivate secure attachment while simultaneously shaping healthy sleep habits. That''s exactly the combination studies suggest is the win-win-win of effective parenting: give your children the relationship security they need while also providing them the structure they require to sleep well and thrive.

And all this while you, too, get some important rest. You''ll learn in these pages what science and clinical wisdom have to tell us about how to keep the relationship with your child filled with compassionate communication while also structuring healthy sleep strategies. You''ll discover how you can nurture emotional understanding between you and your child while at the same time implementing behavioral strategies that ensure they get the sleep they need. The authors provide you with a framework that will leave you feeling confident in the positive outcome of your approach. This is a plan that works. Parenting is one of the most challenging roles one can play in life. It''s tricky to know when to hold our children close and when to let them venture out on their own to learn important skills, such as the self-soothing techniques that will help them be Happy Sleepers for the rest of their lives. Having this book as your companion, you will gain the clarity and conviction necessary to build a secure relationship with your child and, in turn, to help them build a secure relationship with themselves and their broader community.

Read on, connect with compassion, creativity, and courage, and sleep well! -DANIEL J. SIEGEL, MD Introduction Your baby already knows how to sleep. Our clients are always shocked when they hear this. They''ve been breaking a sweat rocking their baby into a deep slumber, waking up every 2 hours to feed throughout the night, or wringing their hands in frustration with a wide-eyed, nap-resistant toddler. But it''s true. Sleep is a basic action that babies are naturally born to do. Their bodies crave healthy sleep, and their brains are wired for it. By 5 or 6 months of age, almost all babies are capable of sleeping well without much assistance from Mom or Dad.

So why do so many families struggle at night? The answer is that most parents do what works today, don''t notice when it''s no longer needed tomorrow, and then keep pushing even harder when it''s become a hindrance the day after that. They work overtime with all kinds of fanfare and tricks to put their babies to bed. We''ve heard it all: parents feeding, rocking, and bouncing on a yoga ball for 45 minutes every night, lying down with kids, re-tucking, and refilling water glasses endlessly-one couple even told us they found themselves putting on a full music show with guitars, singing, and lights every night before bedtime. Over time, parents'' "helping ways" overshadow their baby''s natural sleep abilities. Children get confused as to whether they or their parents are doing the soothing, and parents aren''t sure when and how much to back off so their little ones can take over the job. The Happy Sleeper is the guide to doing just that. We will give you a clear, easy-to-follow system for transferring the role of independent sleep to your baby or child, as we''ve done for thousands of families in our practice. If you''re consistent in how you apply the methods in this book, your baby or child''s sleep will improve dramatically within one to two weeks.

Good Sleep Is in Their Genes Kids don''t need to be trained to sleep; they''re built to sleep. Think about it: sleep is like other areas of development, and you know how quickly your baby learns. Within a year, a baby can sit, pull to stand, and maybe take her first steps. She understands language and soon she''ll speak in sentences. Almost overnight, she''s a master in all realms. So why should sleep be any different? For many babies, skills in other domains grow and improve, but sleep skills stall or regress. But over and over in our practice, we see that it is. Children take off in their motor, social, cognitive, and language skills, while sleep skills stall and even decline as the months go on.

It''s a common course for little kids-they show robust, thriving development in all other domains but actually regress in their ability to sleep. In the early months, this happens when a soothing technique like nursing or rocking to sleep works and becomes your go-to habit (and we don''t blame you!). The problem is that while newborns often need these soothing devices, they outgrow this need quickly as their natural self-soothing abilities grow-sometimes within a matter of days or weeks. With toddlers and kids, the same idea applies. We know that they can sleep, but milestones and life transitions (learning to climb out of the crib, starting preschool, or having nightmares) rock the boat just enough to warrant a new trick (like lying down with them until they doze off) that kids quickly become reliant on. As parents get stuck in a habit of soothing their little one to sleep, it masks the child''s natural abilities and makes it look as if she can''t sleep on her own. Imagine your child was capable of walking, but you still carried her everywhere instead of letting her practice this new skill! This overhelping is the crux of family sleep problems. Eventually parents become exasperated, while baby''s sleep potential has actually been stifled.

Why We Wrote This Book We wrote this book to help solve a dilemma. Over and over in our parenting groups, we''ve seen moms and dads work diligently to be responsive and nurturing around sleep, only to become frustrated, exhausted, and confused as their baby''s sleep gets worse instead of better. These parents feel stuck, and many reach the end of their rope and turn to a harsh, shut-the-door-and-don''t-go-in approach. We know that sleep is a natural, hardwired function that shouldn''t be so difficult. As clinicians who follow science and new thinking on child development, we realized why sleep was stumping so many families-it''s the same overhelping or "helicopter parenting" dilemma that parents find themselves in elsewhere. Logic tells us (and research confirms) that overhelping doesn''t work: When we do things for our babies and kids that they are capable of doing for themselves, it keeps them from developing to their potential (in this case, their sleep potential). The problem is that, as parents, we don''t know how to stop overhelping, while still being warm and supportive to our kids. The topic of baby sleep needs a fresh perspective.

It''s been bogged down in old-school notions like "training" and misunderstandings of basic concepts like attachment. In this book, we take an integrated approach that is sensitive, simple, and truly effective. We don''t want anyone suffering sleep deprivation unnecessarily, nor do we ever want a baby to feel alone or fearful. Happily, neither of these ever needs to happen. Our methods are based on two logical, research-based ideas. One: babies and little kids need warmth, sensitivity, and a sense that the world is a safe place. Two: they thrive best (and sleep best) when they have structure, routine, and c.