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Gina’s method is to strip the baby down a layer and then put baby onto her play mat to kick around and wake herself up. Now that I've read it I think I may well burn it, lest it fall into the hands of a mother who would be quite fine with her new baby without being told _every second of every day_ what she should be making her child (and herself) do. By creating routines that match a growing baby's innate natural rhythms, Gina prevents the hunger, overtiredness and colic that can lead to excessive crying. When my first child was born he started crying and cried for 4 weeks until someone gave me this book and I started following Gina’s routine. It’s important to focus on your partner now and again and remember how you got yourselves into this big mess, right?
A quote from the “Daily Telegraph”, but this cry could equally have come from the thousands of mothers who have put Gina Ford’s kind but firm routines into practice and put some calm back into their lives. Other books push the advice on you, but this one feels more like suggestions being offered by a friend. It is a guide and you don’t need to lose your fucking mind if you cannot follow it exactly or you slip a little. The routines are incompatible with breastfeeding for most people but mothers are not warned about this.The claim that a baby of five months could be trained to sleep from 7am to 7pm made me laugh out loud. GF insists on many occassions throughout the book that "her babies" all slept through the night/didn't get colic/blah and therefore her methods are proved correct. Rather, the schedules should be taken as guidelines about how each day can be structured, including showing how self-care for moms is still possible to fit in to each day.
He would not breastfeed and when I was in hospital (2002) the midwives (one of whom described my newborn as “a little bugger”) put me on a routine (not my baby, me) of hand expressing every 2hrs (round the clock) in addition to demand feeding my baby using a bottle in an effort to keep up my milk production for when baby learnt to breastfeed. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed.
If you are looking for a very concrete schedule with specific times and detailed instructions, then this is the perfect book for you. I'm sure that there are some people who had babies with sleeping problems who have found this book a godsend. Now it turns out that my uncle and aunt actually used routines from the Contented Little Baby Book way back when my cousins were babies. perhaps this process has worked for her, but I can say with strong certainty that for almost all parents, this exact scheduling advice is not helpful in any way.
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