The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night

Thanks to Elizabeth Pantley, I realized there is a gentle, loving way to teach my daughter to sleep without a single tear! After a few nights of following our sleep plan, my daughter started sleeping through the night. This was accomplished without ONE single tear!!!!

Unlike in other books, there is no strict format to follow. You can adapt the ideas to fit your child and at your own pace. No more feeling guilty for not just letting her cry it out and being tired all the time. No more guilt about not following the very rigid programs in some other "sleep books."

Thanks for all the sweet dreams, Elizabeth!


Very good book, but can require alot of patience   June 16, 2002
Reader14 (Boulder, CO USA)
441 out of 475 found this review helpful

This is a very helpful book which includes some of the more useful information included in Wiesbluth and Ferber. I believe her approach can work for most parents with time and patience, though some babies may require months of committed effort.

Let me preface the rest of this review by stating up front that I personally don't think it's permanently harmful if there are some tears shed (by either Moms or babies :-) in the process of helping babies learn how to sleep through the night... That said, even though that's my perspective I loved Elizabeth Pantley's inclusive, compassionate, unjudgemental tone.

I really wish this book had been available when my first daughter was a baby. By the time she was 7 months old and still waking up every hour, I was nearly incapacitated with sleep deprivation. My husband was that one who said that things had to change and that we needed to cry it out. I begged for a few weeks to do some research and ended up reading several sleep books including both Weisbluth's Healthy Sleep Habits Happy Child and Ferber's book. I thought both books were very well written and contained some excellent information about babies and sleep. Given what I had learned from these books, I put together my own sleep program that was similar to much of Pantleys except that I let my daughter do some crying when she was first put down to sleep for the night. It took about two weeks but she dropped to 2 wakings a night and started being able to nap on her own. But the best was that either my husband or I could put her to bed with a brief routine and she'd drift off to sleep with a smile on her face and wake up the same way. All in all I considered it a success, except that I just hated that two week period when she would cry when she was put down.

So when I had my second daughter I was determined to use what I had learned the first time around to avoid some of the bad habits I had practiced with my oldest and get her to sleep with no crying. Things were much better, she was a great napper, but I was still having trouble getting her to sleep without having a nipple in her mouth, and she was getting up every two hours at night. So I bought Elizabeth's Pantley's book.

As I said earlier, I wish it had been around with my first daughter. I think she culled some of the best information about sleep from some of the other books and I loved her organized approach to finding out what works best for your child. I really wanted to get to the point that we had with our eldest where we could just put her in bed and she would drift off peacefully on her own.

I faithfully followed the program for a month and I was seeing some progress. However the progress was very slow I found it challenging to work the program with a toddler who was already feeling somewhat abandoned. She has a phased approach to getting a child to sleep on their own where you comfort the baby until they are almost asleep, put them in bed, if they get upset comfort some more and repeat the cycle until they are asleep. At least with my daughter, it was taking a huge amount of time to get her down for naps and bed. Time that my toddler had to be quiet in order to not get the baby worked up. I think I could have stuck it out if I hadn't had a toddler who also needed me, but after a month I threw in the towel. I went back to letting her cry to learn how to get to sleep. The difference between this time and three years ago though was that this time it only took a fairly easy three nights. I think the difference was probably due to the month I had been working the Pantley method.

In conclusion, there's great information in here for everyone. If you have the time and patience, I believe the program can work. But I found it difficult to work the whole program while simultaneously tending to a toddler.

Happy sleeping everyone! I wish all of you sleep deprived mommies and daddies who might be reading this sweet dreams and know that whatever you decide to do, take care of yourself, things do get better.


Are you comparing sleep books?   October 1, 2002
179 out of 184 found this review helpful

OK, I admit it. I bought all of them. Here's how they compare:

Ferber: Advocates crying to sleep with parent soothing on a time schedule. Put your baby in the crib. Come back to pat and say soothing words at 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, etc. Increase the times every night. Hopefully your baby will stop crying and go to sleep. Lots of scientific discussion about sleep.

Weissbluth: Advocates crying to sleep without parent soothing. Open-ended time - no limit. You are "leaving him alone to forget the expectation to be picked up." Has a section on children over 7 years old.

Mindell: Advocates crying to sleep with parent soothing, on a schedule similar to Ferber but with more frequent checks on the baby.

Pantley: Advocates using gentle techniques to avoid crying. Focus on understanding why baby is waking and fixing problems with routines, new associations, and gradual changes in patterns. Supportive of breastfeeding and co-sleeping as well as crib sleeping and bottle feeding.


A Practical (and effective!)Guide for sleep-deprived parents   October 31, 2003
kimberly beck (Sterling, MA USA)
164 out of 167 found this review helpful

As a mom of three, including a very high needs infant and then twins, I know sleep deprivation! As a Childbirth Educator and Doula, I have a fairly extensive knowledge of typical infant sleep cycles and behavior. But as any sleep deprived parent can attest, you can be so overwhelmed, exhausted, and desperate for sleep that you are tempted to try anything and need some support and guidance. The two most common suggestions parents are given are to let the baby "cry it out" or to "just deal with it and know this too will eventually pass", neither of which validates the feelings of these desperate parents or gives them practical ideas for trying to meet both their needs and those of their baby, and often, makes them feel worse either because they can't stand to let their baby cry nor feel they can continue to go on being exhausted and sleep deprived, they want and need help NOW.

This book is that help. I bought the No-Cry Sleep Solution when my twin son and daughter were about 9 months old. I was exclusively breastfeeding them and attachment parenting them and did not want to stop that parenting style, but was desperate for sleep. Elizabeth's book was informative, easy to read, easy to follow, and most importantly comprehensive. She does not advocate for any one method of helping babies and parents to sleep, but rather gives weary, exhausted, and overwhelmed parents useful information about what reasonable expectations for sleep are, emphasizes safety, and then gives them easy to use tools they can use to identify sleep issues and many techniques they can choose from to try to bring more sleep to everyone, regardless of sleep arrangements or feeding style! I especially like her sleep logs and analysis tools. Within a few weeks of reading her book we were all sleeping better and I was less stressed as I was able to understand the reasons behind the waking and address them without tears for me or my babies! And yes, we are now all sleeping all night!
I highly recommend this book if you are looking for ways to gently and lovingly help your baby (and yourself) learn to sleep better!


not good for seriously exhausted parents.   January 27, 2005
first-time mom (mn)
158 out of 168 found this review helpful

At 3 months, my son was sleeping 7pm-4am, waking up to feed, then back down until 7-8am. Then the holidays hit, and everything fell apart. Suddenly he was waking up no less than 12-15 times between 10pm-6am. After 10 days of getting less than 4 hours of (interrupted) sleep each night, my husband and I determined we needed to take action to help the poor kid get back on track. We bought three books - Ferber, "Healthy Sleep Habits" and this one.

Of course we wanted to follow the no-cry solution. Who wants to put their child (and themselves) through the misery of cry it out? I truly believed that cry it out was the wrong thing to do and was positive this plan would work. My husband and I committed to the program and agreed we'd follow it "as long as it takes."

It took all of our energy to read the book cover-to-cover, put together a sleep log and then lay out our sleep plan. The author instructs you to have "patience" and to celebrate even the smallest improvements. What she doesn't really acknowledge is that, when serious sleep deprivation has you at each others' throats, weeping hysterically at the drop of a hat and feeling resentful towards your poor innocent baby, "patience" is something nearly impossible to come by.

After 4 weeks of working with our sleep plan - following the guidelines 'round-the-clock - our son was still waking up 6-8 times a night and napping poorly during the day. This was an improvement over waking a dozen times a night, but still he had huge dark circles under his eyes, startled easily, cried at nothing. He was miserable. We all were.

Despite the 300 other reviews here that say basically "if you really love your baby, you won't let him cry it out" ... I LOVE MY BABY. And we finally decided to let him cry it out. And now? Now I have a happy, well-rested baby. And we have our sanity back.

This book has some good ideas. I'm sure that if my son were waking up only 2-4 times a night, I would have been able to stick with the plan as long as necessary to make it work. But when my child was waking up every 45-60 minutes all night long, night after night, I finally decided that - for our entire family's sake - we required a more radical, doctor-approved intervention.

My point in writing this review is not to defend my actions. It's to offer a different viewpoint amongst the crowd and to bear witness for other exhausted parents ... if this doesn't work for you, YOU ARE NOT A BAD OR SELFISH PARENT. Choose the method that fits your situation and follow it to the letter. And congratulations for wanting to help your baby get the restorative sleep he or she desperately needs.