If you have not already done so, please read Blog Posts 1 through 5 that describe how sleep is important and beneficial. I will post specific information for parents and children based on my book, “Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child.” Please do not be put off by my book’s length. This is a reference book. Read only the topic of interest to you.
Some parents come to this work with a plan already in place. This mother read the book before her daughter was born, committed to healthy sleep habits from the start, and still found herself spending four or more hours a day locked in the nursery, contact napping out of desperation, and feeling completely lost. Having the right information is necessary. It is not always sufficient. What this account shows is what it looks like to apply the information correctly across a sequence of real, messy obstacles — and what the accumulation of those adjustments produces.
“Dr. Weissbluth has completely transformed our child’s sleep. I first read his book while I was pregnant and felt strongly about building healthy sleep habits for our baby from the start.
Around the 8-week mark, we hit a few bumps. His guidance helped us understand that offering a ‘dream feed’ was actually contributing to issues like frequent night wakings and disrupted sleep. Once we stopped the dream feed and started waking her at a consistent time each morning, she seemed noticeably happier.
She also displayed colic-like behavior and had acid reflux making her sleep a bit challenging, but this subsided around four months. At that point, Dr. Weissbluth’s approach helped us begin the sleep training process. She didn’t tolerate being put down ‘drowsy but awake,’ so in those early months, we focused on keeping her wake intervals short and watching for her drowsy signs — not overtired signs. This made a big difference in helping her get solid naps during the day and fall asleep earlier at night.
We started the extinction method around 18 to 19 weeks. It was tough at first, and although she began sleeping through the night — 12 or more hours — she still cried for 30 or more minutes at bedtime. I wanted to help her improve even more.
Then, around 5 months, we hit another challenge — she refused to nap in her crib and would only contact nap. It wasn’t sustainable. I felt completely lost and isolated with how much time I was spending trying to get her to sleep and being locked away in her nursery for four or more hours a day. That’s when we tried the nap drill, as recommended by Dr. Weissbluth. It was a total game changer. After a few challenging days, she got the hang of self-soothing.
Now she naps independently and goes to sleep at night on her own. I’m no longer spending hours rocking her or contact napping just to get her down. I have my life back — and more importantly, my baby is so much happier. Where it used to take forever to get her to sleep, she now does it on her own with minimal fuss. I’m incredibly grateful to Dr. Weissbluth and his book for changing both of our lives. We’ll carry these lessons with us for all of our future children.”
What This Progression Illustrates
Three separate adjustments drove the improvement here, and each one addressed a different mechanism.
The dream feed was a well-intentioned intervention that was fragmenting sleep rather than extending it. Stopping it — combined with a consistent morning wake time to anchor the circadian rhythm — produced a happier baby almost immediately. This is one of the more counterintuitive findings in infant sleep: a feeding added to help a baby sleep longer can, in some cases, be the thing disrupting the sleep it was meant to protect.
The early months with colic and reflux required a specific adjustment in how to read readiness for sleep. With a baby who could not tolerate drowsy-but-awake placement, the practical solution was to shorten the intervals of wakefulness and catch the drowsy period earlier — before discomfort or over-tiredness compounded the difficulty. Watching for drowsy signs rather than overtired signs is the critical distinction. By the time fatigue signs are visible, the drowsy period has passed.
The nap refusal at 5 months is a pattern that appears in many consultations. A baby who was falling asleep through contact gradually stops accepting the crib — not because anything has changed neurologically, but because the association between sleep and being held has solidified. Contact napping is self-reinforcing: it works in the moment, which is exactly why it stops working on its own. The nap drill broke the pattern by giving the baby the opportunity — and the mild necessity — to develop the self-soothing that made independent napping possible.
Four hours a day in the nursery is not a small thing. The isolation this mother described — the feeling of her life contracting to the dimensions of the nursing chair — is one of the clearest indicators that a sleep approach has become unsustainable. What replaced it was a baby who goes down on her own and a mother who has her evenings back. Both matter.
— Marc Weissbluth, M.D.
