Secrets of the Baby Whisperer: How to Calm, Connect, and Communicate with Your Baby

There is no *one* book out there that will give you all the answers you need on your specific baby situation, but in my baby care library, this is the resource I turn to the most.

All of Hogg's suggestions are practical and compassionate, but what I like most about her book is her approach to sleep. Babies are not left to cry it out, nor are they picked up and rocked when they cry at bedtime.

First, it's all about the "window," that brief period of time when baby is drowsy enough to fall asleep, but not over-tired and fussy. It will take time to get good at noticing the window approaching, but you'll get there. Second, it's about minimizing the distractions and potential wake-up alerts in the baby's sleeping environment. Lastly, it's about coming in to baby when she cries, but instead of picking her up, being as comforting as possible with as little effort as possible. Hogg frowns on "over-parenting." If baby is soothed with your hand on her chest, why pick her up and rock her? The minimalist approach offers less opportunity for baby to develop undesirable sleep associations. The idea is to let baby learn how to fall asleep on her own, but to let her know that if she has night-time needs, they will be met.

My 5 month old daughter falls alseep on her own now, as long as I respect her "window" and if I miss it, I can get her to sleep in her crib after about 5 to 10 minutes of swaddling and holding her, but putting her down when her eyes are almost closed. At first she would wake up during the transition from my arms to the crib, but after about a week, she got used to going to bed this way.

I highly recommend this book. This book can't take sole credit for all of my daughter's good behavior, but it is responsible for a large portion of it. :) Good luck to you, parents! We have the most important job in the world, and remember, you are always doing better than you think you are.

"I wish I could tell my new-mom self a lot of things: That the moment you stop letting expert voices drown out your own instincts is the moment you embrace parenthood. That your kids will tell you what they need. That those needs will never, ever fit into a predictable schedule. That the needs will change by the day, and that the sooner you embrace that truth, the happier you'll be." - Heidi Stevens

I wish I'd known then what I know now. This book should have been called "Lies of a Glorified Nanny: How to Frustrate, Alienate and Malnourish Your Baby." Much of its advice is scientifically and psychologically wrong: it goes directly against the recommendations of the AAP and contradicts many facts about child development. So parents must ask: even if these methods "work" for your baby, are they HEALTHY? The answer is no. You can get the same results from much better books (like Weissbluth and Pantley). I am not a fan of "attachment parenting" either, which is at the opposite extreme, but at least that method ensures that all your baby's needs are met, unlike this one. My baby had failure to thrive while following this book's feeding routine, and other reviewers have also said their babies had failure to thrive while on it. NOT GOOD! All the bad advice in this book turned an already difficult situation (colic + PPD) into an absolute nightmare.

Most babies unless they're colicky will adapt to pretty much anything, which is what I think accounts for the rave reviews of this book. A coworker gave me this book and raved about it. I had a very positive opinion of it while pregnant, and used Hogg's "E.A.S.Y. routine" for about 3 months after our baby was born. Unfortunately, she had acid reflux (causing extreme colic) and I had post-partum depression. I believe that following the advice in this book made things much worse than they otherwise would have been.

I naively believed that a book like this wouldn't be published if it contained irresponsible information in it that could be harmful to babies. Now I know better; the #1 baby book in the U.S. from 1894-1940 had strict instructions not to kiss or cuddle your baby, or play with them before 4 months old, and other such bad advice. The premise of Hogg's book sounds great, and the things she first writes about, such as treating your baby like a person, and slowing down to focus on baby care, are things everyone can agree on. That along with her friendly "British nanny" writing style, and high praise from famous people, are likely to make a new parent mistakenly think that the rest of her advice is sound.

So here's a word of wisdom born of experience (especially for the research-aholics out there like me): Don't get totally gung-ho or self-righteous about any one parenting method or "plan" before your baby is born (or even after)! Every baby and every family is different, and a mix of approaches is usually what people end up doing. I shouldn't have been hung up on following this or any other "methodology" out there. I should have trusted my own instincts more and been more flexible. I am sure, looking back, that if I hadn't gotten so caught up in trying to follow any particular prescribed method, our whole family would have enjoyed those first few months together more. So I take responsibility for how I allowed this book to negatively affect our family. But for the benefit of people who are considering reading this book, I want to point out some of the wrong things in this book that I didn't know when I read it.

1) The author has no baby care credentials other than being a nanny. The only reason she got to publish a book is that she became a popular nanny for some famous actors in Hollywood. Her other so-called credentials are fabricated. She left her two young daughters back in England to move here, which to me is more than enough of a reason to reject her parenting advice. Her life and her book make it clear that she views child-rearing as a "disruption." She claims that "by taking the proper steps, babies don't have to be disruptive. You should be able to lead a normal life." ("Cries and Whispers," Newsweek 2001 - available on their website). This false premise that you can live like you did before having a baby is, I think, the foundation for all the wrong things in the book. It's not possible to do that without either neglecting or having someone else take care of your baby. She is also contradicting herself because in the book she stresses the need to be prepared for way your life will radically change with a baby.

2) Hogg says that you must "start as you mean to go on"--that you must put your baby on the routine you want them to have when they are older. If you "coddle" your baby by letting them sleep on you, eat more frequently, etc. you will not be able to get them into a more manageable routine when they are older. Of course having no experience with children, this made total sense to me. But it is absolutely untrue as anyone with a knowledge of child development will tell you. Newborns are VERY different from 3 month olds. And babies are VERY different from 1 and 2 year olds. Their needs are completely different, and their habits are completely different. Not giving your newborn a routine does NOT mean they can't get on a routine when they are older. She calls this lack of routine "accidental parenting," but when it comes to the health and happiness of a newborn, being an "accidental" parent is far better than using the E.A.S.Y. routine.

3) The E.A.S.Y. routine. The basis of it is to feed your baby only every 3 hours, although the details are a lot more complicated than that and certainly not easy. The main problems with it are:
- It is totally unnecessary. Numerous scientific studies show that infant sleep patterns are not related to food at all. The timing of feedings does NOT matter to babies' developing sleep patterns! The E.A.S.Y. routine--which was developed by Hogg in her role as a NANNY, not a parent--is only for the adults' benefit, so they can have a predictable schedule. And even that can backfire, since a lot of babies will eat a lot of food in a couple of hours and then sleep for 4-5 hours, which is better for the parents than if they were waking every 3 hours.
- It is NOT intuitive. I spent lots of unnecessary time and energy keeping logs/charts/schedules etc to try to follow it. She actually had to write a second book in order to clarify it because so many readers were confused about it --[[ASIN:0743488946 The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems: Sleeping, Feeding, and Behavior--Beyond the Basics from Infancy Through Toddlerhood]]--and yes, I read that one too! In that one, she even admits that the E.A.S.Y. routine isn't actually easy, because so many parents had problems with it.
- It can really cause problems with a colicky baby, and/or if you are breastfeeding. With colicky babies, sometimes the only soothing thing for them is suckling, which in her book isn't allowed between feedings (and neither are swings). You're supposed to start the routine when the baby is three days old, but sometimes breastmilk doesn't come in for over a week! My milk never really came in, and if I hadn't been trying to keep to a strict routine, especially as far apart as 3 hours, it probably would have helped my milk production. Scheduled breastfeeding can interfere with the initiation of milk. I never got more than 2 oz at a time. Three different lactation nurses at three different visits said that the baby and I were doing everything right. I was pumping frequently with a hospital machine. I tried everything one can try, including that special tea, except simply feeding her more often. I ended up having to stop trying to breastfeed after 4 weeks, and go to hypoallergenic formula (and during those 4 weeks, as I mentioned above, she had "failure to thrive," as did a lot of other reviewer's babies. That is a serious thing!

Some kind of routine is not a bad thing, but wait till your baby is at least 6 weeks old, and then transition to one gradually. There is a good one in [[ASIN:0399532919 The Baby Sleep Solution: A Proven Program to Teach Your Baby to Sleep Twelve Hours aNight]]; just ignore the 4 hour feeding part as it's not necessary or healthy (as established above).

4) Hogg says that it's imperative to respond immediately to babies whenever they cry, no matter what. If you don't do this, you are being a bad parent, and breaking your baby's trust in you. She stresses this repeatedly throughout the book. Well, after reading information from the AAP, and talking to our pediatrician, my counselor and other parents, I finally figured out that this was totally false--even pediatricians know it's not true. It felt like the weight of the universe had been lifted off my shoulders! I've never liked the "cry-it-out" approach. But Hogg's advice is too extreme on the other end of the spectrum, and just as bad. With a colicky baby, they are going to cry almost no matter what you do; with ours it was about every 30 minutes. And if you can't get a break, you get no sleep, which impairs your parenting ability, and in many cases (about 40% of women) also your mental health. Believing that every cry had to be attended to immediately caused me to be much more stressed and anxious and guilty than I would otherwise have been. This is in no small part because she gives a bunch of other advice that is likely to cause a baby to cry (unless they're very mellow), such as only feeding every 3 hours, having them only ever sleep in a crib, and putting them down as soon as they stop crying. It's a very stressful Catch-22. The scene of my weeks-old baby lying in her crib screaming, when I could have just picked her up and let her lie with me and nursed her and she would have stopped, plays in my mind as I write this.

5) Speaking of crying, Hogg's soothing methods did not work at all for us. They were just frustrating and exhausting. Just like so many other things, what works for one baby might not work for another baby, and despite Hogg's claims, her methods clearly don't work for all babies. And they are really odd. Like, you're not supposed to rock backward and forward. You're supposed to use very specific sounds and pats (not rubs) in a certain pattern. Looking back I see how silly it is. Who comes up with this stuff? Oh yeah, people like Hogg trying to make a buck.

6) The section on interpreting a baby's cries didn't help either, and it's certainly not unique, since a lot of other better books say the same things about how to interpret crying. (If you really want to correctly interpret your baby's cries, get the DVD set [[ASIN:B000PDZ9SU Dunstan Baby Language--Learn the universal language of newborn babies]]. I started using it at the tail end of when it works--for babies up to 3 months old--but I remember the surprised look on my baby's face when I gave her exactly what she needed right away!)

7) Hogg compartmentalizes babies into various "types" like Angel, Grumpy, etc. This never sat well with me. I don't like the idea of pigeon-holing a child like that, especially not so early on when they're still developing and they could be very different in a year or so. I couldn't in the least tell what personality my baby had, because she was just in pain most of the time! And it's not even necessary; you will naturally pick up what works best with your baby without having to sequester them into a category and then read a chart on how to handle babies in that category. Hogg also says this personality in your baby is what they will have throughout their lifetime. But that is certainly not true either. I'd have labeled my baby Grumpy, whereas at 2 1/2 she'd be in the Angel category if I had to choose. And everyone who knows her always comments on how happy and easygoing she is.

8) Overall, this book gives the impression that you have no internal resources for caring for a child and that you need detailed schedules and charts to follow for every aspect of life with a baby. Obviously some aspects of basic baby care do have to be learned and aren't instinctive. But Hogg's book goes beyond basic baby care and advises many things that are unnecessary at best and damaging at worst. This can easily make new parents feel less confident and more guilty and anxious, which they probably feel too much of already without a book adding to it. She may have written that parents should follow their instincts, but the fact that she felt the need to give such overly detailed instructions shows that she didn't really think parents actually do have instincts. The small bits of sound advice in the book are nothing more than stuff that any good parent could tell you, and that you'd probably do naturally anyway; basic common-sense stuff.

P.S. For a basic, non-gimmicky baby care reference guide, get the wonderful [[ASIN:1889392200 Baby 411, 2nd Edition: Clear Answers & Smart Advice for Your Baby's First Year (Baby 411: Clear Answers and Smart Advice for Your Baby's First Year)]]. And pediatricians (whose nurses are always available for phone calls) are wonderful resources for any and all baby care questions you may have.

A friend recently recommended this book to me. I'm expecting my third baby after a six-year gap, so I was looking for a quick refresher. I wish I had had this book with my firstborn. I think my son would have been sleeping through the night much sooner. The author takes a very common sense approach to caring for babies and dealing with any problems that may arise due to inexperience. A great book for new (and experienced) mothers!

I've been very helped by this book -- love the emphasis on respecting your baby and learning how to interpret her cries, sounds and other cues. Hogg recommends a consistent routine of Eat, Activity, Sleep, You (your time to rest or get things done) and has chapters giving helpful advice and tips for each phase of the cycle (although I disagreed with much of her thoughts on breast feeding versus formula). My baby has thrived on having a routine, and I've been helped by knowing where we are in the cycle. Her "flexible routine" doesn't take all the guesswork out of parenting, but it makes caring for baby a lot less stressful. Her discussion of different baby types are helpful too. Some friends who have a baby who cries a lot were encouraged by the idea that their baby was "Spirited" (one of Hogg's categories) versus "colicky" or "finnicky" or "difficult." Definitely worth the purchase price.

I know this takes some flack from breastfeeding advocates, but I was a breastfeeding mom and I never felt like she was discouraging me from doing it, just by being diplomatic and saying formula is an option too, I mean she's trying to advise ALL moms, not just one group. I loved this book as a new mom, I happened to be on my own and out of my own town while my husband had to work super long hours, and this book kept me sane in those early weeks when newborns seem like aliens, the lack of schedule makes you feel out of control, and new motherhood makes everything you thought you knew seem irrelevant. I think I read different parts of it up to 3 times while I nursed or baby slept on me. Much of it doesn't really apply until baby is probably 10-12 weeks, but I found reading it sooner helped me already have her game plan in mind. I'm not an expert or academic in babies, I'm just a first time mom that can testify to using Tracy's method and having great results. I got advice from other sources as well, and I should probably give a little credit to my daughter, but using this book as a guide we got her into her own room at 4 months with just one midnight feed, and she was sleeping 12-13 hours solid through the night by around 5.5 months and taking 3 long naps a day. She dropped to 2- 2 hour naps at around 9 months, and then to 1 around 18 mos., all while still to this day at almost 2.5 yrs sleeping uninterrupted for 12-13 hours at night. Again, I can't say if we're just lucky because she's our first so I have nothing to compare to, but I would definitely give at least half the credit to Tracy's methods. We're about to have a second baby and I plan to reread the book again, and I'm hopeful that her methods work just as well this time around.

Condescending and unqualified credentials... Distasteful approach to proselytize the reader.

I found Tracy Hogg's approach the best so far, it gives clear guidance while allowing flexibility as she acknowledges that every baby and every family are different and therefore any advice needs to be tailored to each specific case. I could not bring myself to follow any variation of the cry-out-method or Ferberizing but I really needed to get some sleep, so I tried the Pantley method (Elizabeth Pantley) which claims to be the opposite of the CIO but I felt it was a total flop and would take months to encourage a baby to fall asleep without the breast/rocking/patting. On the other hand by following Tracy Hogg's advice I was able to get my baby to fall asleep on his own within a week without inflicting lots of crying or anxiety on him.
I am a breastfeeding mother and I feel Hogg respects and encourages breastfeeding but is also respectful of those who choose not to breastfeed, after all her book is not about advocating a particular feeding method but about understanding your baby and helping all the family have a good night sleep, a calm and happy time with the baby and for each (mother, father, baby) to thrive as individuals.

The Baby Whisperer has truly been a lifesaver. My husband and I are proud parents of a 20 week old son whom I had jokingly dubbed "H.M." (High Maintenance). He is my third child and my husband's first. I thought I knew a thing or two about babies but this little one had me chained to my rocking chair for 8 weeks until I went back to work. My daughter (aged 25) has been my babysitter from the time he was 8 weeks old until present so she has been strapped to the rocking chair for the last 12 weeks. Our little man simply refused to sleep unless he was being held. At night, he slept in his bouncy seat (if you want to call it that) and then when he was about 13 weeks old, he started sleeping in Mom and Dad's bed. As you can imagine, neither my husband nor I could get a good night's sleep with my husband worrying about rolling on him and me being pushed to the very edge of the bed. The little guy had a crib but the last time he slept in it was when he was 1 week old. I desperately started searching the internet for help. I ended up on a forum that recommended BabyWise by Gary Ezzo. After reading all of the reviews, I decided to buy it. One of the BabyWise reviewers recommended The Baby Whisperer so I bought it too. I figured with both books being highly rated that one of them would work for us. I liked the BabyWise book but I wasn't looking forward to making my baby `cry it out'. If you are dedicated to attachment parenting (which is what I was doing unknowingly), you won't like The Baby Whisperer. If you believe parents should let their baby `cry it out', you won't like The Baby Whisperer. Tracy Hogg offers something else...an E-A-S-Y solution (Eating/Activity/Sleep/You). She recommends putting your baby on a schedule - not a rigid schedule but the baby should eat first, then have an awake time, then sleep and while sleeping the parents actually get "YOU" time. She urges parents to treat their baby as a little human being...with respect. For example, talk to your baby like this: "Are you getting sleepy? I can tell you're tired. Are you ready for naptime? Let's go put you to sleep." You can use any phrase you want to but you need to say the same thing every time you lay him down. She recommends that you watch for sleepy signs (yawning, rubbing eyes etc.) and then put him in his crib while still awake (recommended by Ezzo as well) but instead of letting the baby cry it out, you pat the baby on his back to comfort him while making a "SH-SH-SH" sound. If he won't stop crying then you pick him up and comfort him until he's quiet and then you lay him back down again telling the baby "You're alright. It's night-night time." or whatever phrase you like. You do this over and over again until the baby lies down without crying. It takes patience and consistency but there's a great payoff. And I think it's much better than letting your baby cry for 15 to 20 minutes or more nonstop. We put our baby on the E-A-S-Y plan 8 days ago. Since we were starting the E-A-S-Y method with a 4 month old with ingrained habits, I knew it wasn't going to be easy but surprisingly, it only took him 5 days to be completely trained and he now takes three 2-hour daytime naps and is sleeping in his crib all night (he wakes up once or twice during the night but once given a pacifier he goes right back to sleep). By the way, both Gary Ezzo and Tracy Hogg say that it takes on average 3 to 5 days to change a baby's sleeping habits or feeding habits. You just have to be patient and consistent. I love this book. I have ordered The Baby Whisperer for a friend who just had a baby 3 days ago and also ordered it for two of my expecting friends. I sure wish I had read it before my baby was born.

This book should not be allowed on shelves, and would not be if children's advice books were required to be reviewed by *real* experts (researchers and professionals, not self-proclaimed "experts" that use their unsupported techniques on babies and when they get results they like call themselves experts).

Tracy Hogg makes statement after statement in this book that is not research based, often completely against what the research says, and sometimes directly harmful to a child compared to what research says. I don't know how she can sleep at night knowing she is harming thousands of children with this book, unless she is ignorant to the recent research (and then she is just plain irresponsible).

Examples of her nonsense:

- She tells readers not to feed / hold / give a pacifier to / do any sort of comforting to a baby longer than "needed" because a baby needs to learn to self-soothe. Scientific fact: babies are unable to self-soothe. This is the job of the parent. Babies have no self-regulatory system developed yet (see any neurological development research), and are wholly reliant on the parent. The parent is the regulatory system. If the parent is not regulating the baby because he/she is told the baby needs to "learn to self-regulate", the baby will have no regulatory system and will not learn what soothing is at all. They will not then be able to take over this capacity once the neurological capacities are online because they are not familiar with what it is. Babies that are not soothed have higher cortisol levels, develop more anxiety, and over the long-term become more anxious people or more detached people (they learn to shut down). These are not regulatory systems, these are adaptations and coping mechanisms due to a failed regulatory system.

- She says not to do many things that are natural and innate for both parents and child (rocking, nursing, co-sleeping, etc) because it will "spoil" them. She also calls it "accidental parenting" when parents use these tactics to soothe babies, as if they are lacking self awareness. Truth: research, scientific, and psychological professionals say that it is impossible to spoil a baby. A baby is not a toddler and its brain has not grown the capacity to have an agenda nor understand the motivations of the parent. It simply needs comforting. Research says the single most important task of a parent is to respond to the baby within a very short time span. A baby cannot be "spoiled" by having this need met repetitively, it is actually a requirement for the next stage of brain development. Research shows physical comforting is as important and sometimes more important to healthy development than being fed.
Furthermore, things like rocking and nursing are innately comforting, which is why they work and why parents use them. It is not by ignorant "accident" that the parent stumbled upon these effective soothing mechanisms.

- She tells readers to get the baby out of the bed and into the crib to learn independence. Scientific truth: children learn to become independent by receiving desired comfort and knowing that they are safe and cared for at an innate level (see any attachment research). Babies do not need to learn independence and in fact distance creates the opposite effect. Research shows that over the long term children who are held close become more independent, self-sufficient adults. As well as better communicators. There may be other reasons that a parent may choose a crib, but the need to establish independence during infancy is a fallacy.

- She says to let the baby cry because it needs to exercise its lungs and to learn to use its voice. Scientific fact: babies do not need to cry to exercise lungs, breathing and intaking oxygen accomplishes this. Similarly, needing to cry to learn to use its voice is nonsense. Crying and not being responded to would teach the child that its voice is unheard. Studies show these children grow up to not feel safe to communicate with parents, and this extends to how they communicate in the world.

The list goes on but I hope you get what I mean...

The only potentially valuable parts of this book I would say is a 2-page spread that helps parents to distinguish different babies' cries, as well as her pick-up put-down method which may be helpful in some instances. I say "potentially" because I don't know the research on babies' cries and if her chart is actually correct, and given her track record I am hesitant to trust it. There is also no research that I can find on the long-term effects of her pick-up put-down method so I am also hesitant to trust it. While it promotes the soothing presence of the parent which is much better than cry-it-out methods, it is still a crying method and may frustrate the child and create distrust over the long-term.

Just because her methods get babies to be quiet and go to sleep (so she says, there is no research though), does not mean it leads to a long-term healthy child. Be careful what you follow and the credentials of who this "expert" is.
Also as always, child rearing depends on your values. If you want your child to be more detached, self-reliant, not come to you with problems, not trust the world, not feel connected to others, not feel compassionate toward others... then some of these methods would work for you. I personally think there is too much of that in this world (not helped by people throughout the 1900s following bad non-researched sleep training advice).
So far I have found The No-Cry Sleep Solution and Good Nights to be more personally helpful and consistent with research.

(Note: I recognize I have not provided any of the specific research here, but I assure you it is prevalent and urge you to look it up if your are doubtful. If I had time to collect and condense all the research, I would write a book. As a reviewer that is not my job, that is the job of authors like Tracy Hogg.)

I wasn't really having much trouble with my 2 month old son (he has been an easy baby who sleeps 6 hours straight and then another 4), but I bought this book on a recommendation from a friend. I liked the parts about reading your baby's cues. However, after reading it, I found myself second-guessing everything I did for him and losing all the confidence had built up caring for him as a first-time mom.

I breastfeed him and I tried spacing out his feedings to every 3 hours like she recommends and giving him the pacifier in between to comfort him. Now he hates the binky and won't take it anymore, even when he's calm. Worse yet, my husband tried to give him a bottle of pumped milk (which he has been taking 3-4 times a week for a month now) and he screamed like we were going to kill him. I think he hates plastic nipples now causes he associates them with going hungry. I have to go back to work in 3 weeks and I don't know what to do now.

My suggestion? Throw away your parenting strategy books, buy a good medical/development guide (I like Mayo Clinic's), and trust your instincts.