Product Description

This book could be your salvation! 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. Sleep-starved nights, inconsolable crying, feeding on demand - stories that make the prospect of bringing a tiny baby home for the first time daunting for any proud new parent. Fully updated and with helpful input from clients, readers and mothers who simply love her routines, "The New Contented Little Baby Book" gives reassuring and practical advice to new parents that works from one of the UK's most respected and most talked about maternity nurses. Her secret is simple and amazing - a strategy developed through years of research and experience. When put into practice, 'Gina babies': sleep through the night from an early age; feed regularly and well from either breast or bottle; and are less likely to suffer from colic. And parents are calm and contented too!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #127 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
If you are still struggling to get your newborn to sleep through the night, still getting up throughout the night to feed the little one, or perhaps you are feeling as if no end is in sight, you need to read Gina Ford's The Contented Little Baby Book. It may be the only thing you need to bring peace back into your frazzled existence with your tiny baby, or babies.

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

Review
'Gina Ford is the Delia Smith of parenting...while Delia tells you how to make the perfect omelette, Gina Ford in her baby-care manual The Contented Little Baby Book, draws on 30 years' experience to tell you how to nurture the perfectly happy baby.', YOU Magazine .'for me she was an absolute godsend', Kate Winslet, Baby & You ."It is hard to overestimate the good she has done...How to reward this great benefactor of mankind?...My wife takes the view that only sainthood will do.", Peter Osborne, Political Editor, The Spectator .'"I devoured it (Contented Little Baby Book) in one sitting. It was hilarious. The claim that a baby of five months could be trained to sleep from 7am to 7pm made me laugh out loud. Little did I realise that this was the start of my conversion to the gospel according to St Gina. That Gina Ford would soon acquire an almost divine status in my life....I look back on my BGE (Before Gina Era) and think of how many of my babies has cried and cried as I ever more desperately struggled to get them to sleep....My only regret, of course, is that Gina did not write her book years ago, when my older children were born. I look in the mirror and wonder what a difference that would have made to the bags under my eyes. If motherhood had always been as easy as it seems this time, I might not have had five children - but 10. Maybe Ruth Kelly's secrets is that she has a copy of St Gina."', Martine Oborne, Evening Standard

You Magazine (Mail on Sunday)
`Gina Ford is the Delia Smith of parenting...'

Customer Reviews

A childcare book by a childless spinster. Excellent!
Gina Ford's understanding of the neurobiological impact of her "teachings" is almost as good as my understanding of the trade cycle. I am quite certain that all babies submitted to her Stalinist regime stop crying. Wouldn't you if noone ever came to comfort you? But what are such children being taught about their parents' ability to "hold" them emotionally? And about emotion in general?

DO NOT READ THIS BOOK
I strongly recommend that you do NOT read this book unless you only wanted to read it to criticise it.

Enough to push a sleep deprived and anxious new mother over the edge!
I bought this book with good intentions when I discovered I was pregnant with my first child. I recall reading it before my son was born and thought it had some invaluable pieces of advice with regards to a potential sleep routine. However, my son arrived and decided he was not going to sleep, as and when I (or Gina Ford) dictated to him. This book is so riged and regimented, and I so tired, anxious and nervous that I found myself becoming completely neurotic and determined to force a routine onto a 4-week old baby, that quite simply he wasn't ready or prepared to accept. I worringly became obsessed by no 'chinks' of light seeping through the curtains that i placed blankets over the windows and left them there for weeks!! I sat inside the house and became totally focused on getting my son to sleep for 30-45mins at 9.15am that the joys of being a first time mother were passing me by! This book may appeal to many, for a whole host of different reasons, but to those of you of a similar disposition to myself (twitchy and anxious) then it really is enough to push you over the edge when the rigid routine is not achieved. Each baby is unique with his or her own individual needs and this is something that Miss. Ford fails to acknowledge or advise upon in her much acclaimed book. Once I was feeling less anxious I threw this book into the bin, never to be looked at by me again!