The Best Books on Sleep Training for Your Baby or Child

If you’re looking for a book (or an audiobook if you’re understandably so tired that you don’t have the energy to read!) to help with your baby’s sleep, here's a list of recommendations and things to watch out for when it comes to choosing books to read on the topic of sleep.

The difference between the various types of books

The first thing to take into account when choosing books on the topic of children’s sleep is to make sure you pick one that aligns with the type of approach you’re interested in taking.

This is important because different Sleep Coaches, Consultants, and authors have different ideas and employ completely different strategies around sleep. As a result, you may find the advice contained in books quite varied and, at times, even contradictory. This is one of the many, many reasons parents use a sleep consultant, because of all the confusing advice!

So here's a quick overview of the types of approaches to sleep that you might come across in your research or your reading.

The sleep training approach

Sleep training books have a strict take on routines and primarily rely on the principle that your baby should fall asleep independently. Various techniques fall under the sleep training approach. Examples include:

  • Cry It Out (CIO). This involves placing your baby still awake in their cot or bed and letting them fall asleep without any help or intervention. Some babies may cry until they fall asleep (hence the name), and this can be quite difficult for everyone involved.

  • The Ferber method. When following this method, you may be checking on your baby at set intervals, but you don't jump in to help them fall asleep.

  • The 'chair method'. Here's a more gradual method of sleep training. You place your baby in their cot awake but sit on a chair in the room until they fall asleep. Gradually, night after night, you move the chair further away from the cot.

  • The 'pick up / put down' method. Here you're on hand to provide reassurance to the baby. The idea is that you'll step in to calm them down when needed, but you still let the baby fall asleep by themselves.

There are other methods and approaches, but these are all based on the idea that the parents should not intervene because they want to teach their baby to fall asleep by themselves. Often, sleep training approaches go hand-in-hand with stopping night feeds and have a heavy focus on daytime routines too. This might mean that books and resources that follow these methods may also 'prescribe' specific nap times and lengths.

The sleep coaching approach

The sleep coaching approach, on the other hand, is more holistic. This means that a lot more factors are considered in conjunction with your baby's sleep. For example, sleep coaching also takes into account:

  • Daytime activities and habits.

  • Feeding patterns.

  • Your long-term objectives around sleep.

  • Your baby's temperament and personality (and yours!)

  • Any other existing habits or routines.

The idea here is that, with the support of relevant knowledge and information, you'll make gradual changes that (over time) will improve your child's sleep. While following a sleep coaching approach is a lot gentler for both the parents and the child, you might also find that achieving better sleep can take longer.

So with this difference in mind, let's go through a few books that you might find helpful.

Gina Ford

When it comes to the topic of baby sleep, the first name that comes to mind is Gina Ford. Author of various books, including The New Contented Baby Book (first published in 1999) and The Complete Sleep Guide for Contented Babies and Toddlers, Gina Ford is a famous British author and former maternity nurse. Her ethos is based on creating strict daily routines for both the baby and the parents, where each day is divided up into precise slots.

My personal view on the methods devised by Gina Ford (and any sleep training books that recommend incredibly strict and regimented routines) is that they can be difficult for parents to follow. If your baby doesn't sleep exactly in the way the book predicts, you may blame yourself, feel like you've 'failed', or be left completely unsure as to what to do next.

Speaking more generally about strict methods and approaches, I know first hand about the effect they can have on parents, I've worked with many clients who contacted me with feelings of helplessness, stress, frustration, and inadequacy after trying to implement extremely regimented routines that didn't work for them and their babies.

What I’ve found here isn’t just anecdotal - wider scale studies have found similar findings. Research in the UK studied 354 mothers of babies aged 0-12 months who had used books that prescribed strict routines. The research focussed on the mothers’ experience of using the sleep training books, as well as other factors such as parental mental health and parenting confidence. The findings showed that only 20% of parents found the books helpful. The researchers hypothesised that the 20% of babies who did respond were probably those who would have naturally fallen into whatever pattern the parents established.

As well as this, the study found that for the 80% of parents who found the books unhelpful, they also reported feelings of low parenting confidence and low mood. This is totally understandable - some of these books very confidently describe what babies ‘should’ be doing every day, and how many times they should be waking at night. I think most of us can relate to having feelings of self doubt and questioning ourselves as parents, even at the best of times. Add extreme exhaustion plus underlying worries about whether baby is getting enough sleep into the mix, and you can totally understand why parents could be left feeling really low and lacking confidence when their baby didn’t do as the book said they should.

Are routines good or bad?

Routines aren't good or bad! They're just tools that we can use as long as they help us and do not hinder us or make us feel bad. So if you are someone who tends to like routines, by all means, feel free to give books that follow sleep training approaches, such as Gina Ford's, a go. But please don't blame yourself if it doesn't work in your case. Because if super regimented routines don't work for you, you're definitely not alone. And you are not in the minority - in fact, it's quite the opposite!

I particularly like this little fun animation, which shows that all babies (just like us adults) are different. Our children don't always fall into the patterns that society, the media, and the strangers we bump into at the supermarket want us to believe are true!

My advice to families who are dealing with ‘nap dread’ is always to try and let go of the prescriptive rules and guidance. Try allowing some more ‘out and about’ and ‘accidental’ naps, and find the balance that’s right for you. Do something you enjoy every day - go out for walks with your baby. Visit friends. Attend groups. Have a slice of cake and a coffee in a cafe. Or simply sit in the garden. Enjoy them during this phase of life as much as you can, without worrying too much about strict routines. Now, this may sound a little ‘airy fairy’, but in my experience, when parents let go of the routine, they are able to relax a bit more. When you’re feeling a bit more relaxed, it will be easier to start working on improving sleep (if you want to). No one can sleep in a stressed or frazzled state!

My Favourite Books on Sleep Training…

If you're interested in Holistic Sleep Coaching, I would recommend author Lyndsay Hookway. She's the professional I have done most of my recent training with. Her books include:

By far, these are the books I 100% would recommend you read about baby’s sleep!

Other ‘Gentle’ Sleep Training Books

The Gentle Sleep Book by Sarah Ockwell Smith

Another book I sometimes recommend is The Gentle Sleep Book: Gentle, No-Tears, Sleep Solutions for Parents of Newborns to Five-Year-Olds by Sarah Ockwell Smith. This book is a great antidote for parents who have read about strict sleep training but know in their gut that this isn’t the route that they want to take.

It’s also good for setting expectations for new parents and parents-to-be about what baby sleep can be like. I personally follow the general attachment parenting philosophies that the author describes - she's a big supporter of co-sleeping, and for some of the families who I work with, this can be a fantastic pragmatic solution to helping parents get the sleep they need.

Having said that, my personal opinion is that Sarah Ockwell Smith goes too far the other way compared to Gina Ford. I've spoken to parents who have come away from reading this book feeling guilty and conflicted about working on their child’s sleep in case the changes could damage their bond. When you combine any feelings of guilt with lack of sleep, as well as the overwhelm caused by all the conflicting information out there, it’s understandable why some books could knock parental confidence. So for some families, this might not be the perfect solution.

The Baby Sleep Solution by Lucy Wolfe

A more recent book is Lucy Wolfe's The Baby Sleep Solution (2019). This author is quite popular in Ireland, and what I like about her teaching is that she advocates the Stay And Support methods over the stricter CIO techniques.

However, I feel the way she describes what parents should do is quite harsh. Although she encourages parents to stay with their baby, she doesn’t talk so much about parents tuning in and responding to their children's cues. I recently spoke to someone who had a negative experience following this method. They chose it because it seemed ‘gentle’, but in reality, it ended up feeling anything but.

This is what my client said:

"Two nights ago we attempted a sleep train method - 'Stay and Support', guided by Lucy Wolfe's book The Baby Sleep Solution. Will managed 45 minutes in the nursery with Luca, putting Luca in his cot after his story in the bedtime routine when tired but awake. Then not picking him up, lying on the floor next to the cot at Luca’s level, humming, patting etc. We all ended up in tears and gave up because it was so dreadful. Luca was so upset, as was Will.”

When I spoke to Will, he described it as the worst 45 minutes of his life! I had a 10-minute chat with Sophie and suggested some tweaks they could make to the method to make it fit their family. And here is Sophie's reply from the next day:

"Thanks so much for your phone call earlier and advice. I followed what you recommended and gave Luca a top-up feed between sleeping bag and story. I read him the story on my lap, then put him into his cot awake and laid down next to him. We read it one more time through the cot bars, and he was smiling like it was a fun novelty experience! Then I turned the lights off and hummed his lullaby. After 5 minutes of playing around, he came in to lay next to me. He sang a bit, which is what he does when he's about to go to sleep. Then he just started snoring!!! Incredible! I stayed and hummed for 10 minutes, then left. This is such a huge breakthrough. I feel such a massive sense of achievement!!! Thank you so much. Onwards!!"

This example highlights that for any book, sometimes we can’t follow the exact rules religiously, after all, every child is different. But just some minor tweaks here meant that Luca felt much more secure and comfortable.

Remember, the guidance in books is just that, guidance. You may have to keep tweaking and testing until you hit the right note with your baby. And that’s okay. Never beat yourself up if it doesn’t work to the letter.

Books to help your baby or child sleep (not directly sleep-related!)

If you're open to reading books that don't necessarily only focus on sleep but cover parenting and child development more broadly, there are some really good books out there that I regularly recommend to parents.

While they're not about sleep as such, they can indirectly help with it. Because happier and calmer babies and toddlers means they’re much more likely to sleep at night (makes sense, right!?) Good sleeping is as much about what happens during the day as it is about what happens as night.

We adults are the same, aren’t we? If we have a stressful day, we often find it more difficult to sleep than if we feel relaxed. It’s no different with little ones, too.

My top non-related sleep books include:

Would you like some help to improve your baby's sleep?

If you're currently suffering from sleep deprivation, and no book or method you picked up from the shelves seems to help with your child, firstly, I want to say you are not alone. I speak to many, many parents who have read every book imaginable on sleep coaching and have still struggled to make it work.

Second, I want to tell you that there’s always a way forward for improved sleep.

As a Holistic Sleep Coach, I can help you achieve peaceful and improved sleep - for your child, yourself, and the whole family. Because sometimes, it's just a matter of implementing the right tweaks and modifications to your existing habits and routines, and everything will quickly fall into place.

If you'd like to find out how I can help, please get in touch by arranging a call or sending me an email. I'd love to hear your sleep story and help you improve your child's sleep.