Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

After all, this book promises to teach parents tried and tested methods to get their baby to sleep through the night by the time they are 10 weeks old.

For parents who are craving their first night of unbroken sleep, Ford's book may be the answer.

Ford's methods conjure up the image of a strict and loving old nanny from yesteryear. Her techniques go against the grain of many currently popular parenting philosophies. For example, Ford, an experienced maternity nurse, is against demand feeding, believes in the necessity of waking a sleeping baby in order to establish a daily routine. Her philosophy may not be the norm today, but Ford is confident of her methods based on years of experience handling hundreds of babies.

Providing an hour-by-hour, week-by-week guide on how to get a new baby into a routine, the book includes feeding and sleeping schedules based on a baby's age. The Contented Little Baby Book provides so much information that it may be necessary to keep this paperback book handy for reference should you employ Ford's techniques.

Experienced parents may not benefit from Ford's methods, but first-time parents may learn a lot from her ideas, and for the discerning reader of parenting books, this one is a must have. For the reader who would like to weigh other parenting methods before adopting Ford's techniques, the following books may be of interest: The Baby Book, by William Sears, M.D. and Martha Sears, R.N.; What to Expect in the first year, by Eisenberg, Murkoff and Hathaway; and Your Baby and Child, by Penelope Leach. --Abbe Jacobson

Average Customer Rating:

Useful in part but annoyingly preachy

Customer Rating:

The New Contented Little Baby Book: The Secret to Calm and Confident Parenting Against my better judgment, I bought this book along with several others after one too many sleepless nights and it only made me feel much worse! The routines are extremely regimented (she even gives you a 'slot' for bottle washing and instructs you when to eat!) The tone is also very dictatorial and inflexible and Gina does not even countenance that her instructions may not work for all (the case studies all state that baby x was not playing ball because mummy and daddy had not been following her routines properly). There are also some inconsistencies between advice given in different chapters. If you like being told precisely what to do at all times then this may work for you but if you are in the first few emotional weeks of parenthood and feeling a bit lost then it may well just depress you. My advice would be to buy it with caution as something to dip in and out of from time to time as about 25% of the advice is worthwhile (hence the 3 stars) and difficult to find elsewhere (eg when to wean early, what needs to be sterilised and for how long etc). Once I had stopped seeing it as a 'must follow', I did find it useful to check such things as whether my daughter's nap times were vaguely 'typical' at any one age. NB her weaning book is much better so if you want to sample some Gina then get this one.

Invaluable

Customer Rating:

I bought this book when I was pregnant and it struck a cord straight away. So much of it is common sense but sometimes you just need a steer in the right direction. I wouldn't say I followed the book stringently but found applying the principles invaluable. You should revisit the book (and routines) at least a couple of times because sometimes your baby just hasn't reached the appropriate stage yet and you may miss a bit because you haven't really registered what you read. Everyone comments how contended my 14 month old is, it may be we just struck luckly but I I'm off to buy the contented Toddler years just in case!

DON'T DO IT TO YOURSELF!!!

Customer Rating:

Struggling with the trials of a new baby i turned to Gina Forde for help. I religiously followed her book whilst establishing breast feeding with my little bot. I wish I had never looked near this book. On reflection it nearly drove me to Post Natal Depression. The pressure to sustain and mould you baby was immense. No human is the same, we not meant to be moulded. I did not enjoy being a new mammy during my Gina Forde experience! Give yourself a break. You'll get through it, otherwise why is the world so full of people with more than one baby. No parent is perfect and babies are just being wee babies. I am preganant again and will have this book nowhere near me. To conclude it is my understanding that the writer NEVER was actually a Mum herself??!!!

This book helped me restore my sanity

Customer Rating:

I resisted Gina Ford's books for 4 years having heard so many negative things about them, and being determined to parent in a baby-led way. However my second son was much more difficult to manage than my first. From the early weeks he didn't sleep in the day for more than ten or twenty minutes at a time, he cried out of fatigue during the day, and he liked to graze, feeding and dozing on and off. By four months of this (and also dealing with a four year old who loves his baby brother to bits but was showing some 'challenging' behaviour after the birth!), I was beginning to lose it. After one afternoon when I sat in my kitchen in tears with my husband unable to console me, I went to the library and got out a selection of baby and pre-school books. I thought this book might be able to help with the daytime naps, and might have some useful tips. But when I looked at her routines, I realise they were exactly what my eldest had done, of his own accord. Maybe this makes some sense, I thought. I started the routine a week ago and now feel I am in control of my and my sons' lives. My little one sleeps for a total of 3 hours each day, goes to bed beautifully, only wakes once between 11 and 7 (I'm working on that gradually), and hardly cries. I get time to spend with my eldest alone and give him the attention he craves, meaning his behaviour is improving. My house is clean and tidy and the washing is all done and put away for the first time in weeks. And I have had time to catch up on my emails! Some tips that are helping me make it work: - the lunchtime nap feels like a pain as you can't go out. I resisted this for weeks despite my baby being sleepy at this time, because I had to pick my oldest up from nursery at 1pm. So I put the little one down in his pushchair at 12 with a blanket over the top and leave him alone in a quiet room. He comes out to nursery, still with the blanket over, goes home and then stays asleep for another hour. - you may feel it's harder to use the routines if you've got one or more older children. But if you can get your baby into the habit of taking regular naps, that gives you time with your other kids - exactly what they need. So it's worth persevering. - I use the morning nap to get chores done and the lunchtime one to sit down and eat, then spend time with my eldest. The afternoon nap I spend with my eldest or out for a walk or shopping. All I can say about Gina Ford is - don't knock it till you've tried it! I never thought I would get on with this book, but it has turned me from a neurotic misery to a calm mum with two happier kids (so far!).

A very good frame of reference, but not a "user's guide to babies"

Customer Rating:

We followed the routines (more or less)from about 4 days after our son came home from the hospital, at which point he was clearly beginning to wake up from the shock of being born and respond to the environment around him. 1 year on, he's a happy, healthy little boy who sleeps and eats well, and people who have been around small children longer than we have comment that he is an easy going child who rarely cries unless hungry or tired. But the "more or less" piece of the routine is the key; yes, the book is written like some kind on military manual. You have to overwrite that with your own common sense, and observe your own child to see what works and what doesn't. One tremendously helpful element of Gina's book that I hadn't seen elsewhere (it probably exists, but no-one else mentioned this to me before or after my son was born) - is that babies of 3 months or under can't go for more than 2 hours without needing to sleep. Absolutely true in my experience, but not something that I would necessarily have picked up had I not had that clue while observing my son's reaction. Nor would I necessarily have been clued in to the extent that my son's routine would change as he got older and more able to deal with the new experiences that life was providing him. I've seen and heard a lot of heated reactions to this book. My personal conclusion has been that babies do indeed thrive on routine. If you stop and think about it for a second, that makes sense. They arrive in a world they have no understanding of and are, let's be honest, incapable of navigating by themselves. To imagine that they can establish an effective routine all by themselves is probably a little naive - a gentle nudge by their parents will help them find the routine that works for them. And that's the trick - read the book, apply the routine, assess how your child responds and adjust as you need to. The text is written is a very authoritarian way, possible due to the author's background of dealing with middle class parents who are used to controlling their own lifes and are struggling to deal with the rigours of the new individual in their midst. I found that this book, in combination with the "Baby Whisperer" by Tracy Hogg, allowed me to have the confidence to apply the routine (Gina Ford), observe and try to interpret the reaction (Tracy Hogg) and then adapt as required (both) (although to be fair to Gina Ford, she does include a number of case studies where babies do not fit the routines perfectly, and advises parents on how to adjust accordingly) Parenting is not a perfect science, you will get it wrong from time to time (hopefully not disastrously so), but so long as you can learn from this and remember that - whether it feels that way or not - you're supposed to be the one in control, you will most likely get the right result!