Good Nights: The Happy Parents' Guide to the Family Bed (and a Peaceful Night's Sleep!)

by Jay Gordon and Maria Goodavage

Book Overview

Your baby sleeps in your bed, and you love it. Except for those nagging worries about safety. ("She's so small, I'm so big ") And what your relatives are saying. ("She'll never leave your bed ") And that little foot that always ends up on your face.

Worry no more Good Nights puts your concerns about the family bed to rest, with fun and easy-to-use guidance on safety, coping with criticism, and even keeping the spark in your marriage...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312275188
• ISBN13: 9780312275181
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

So helpful

Until I read this book, I was very unconfident in our family's co-sleeping situation. It seemed like everyone in the world except us had babies sleeping through the night in cribs from very early on. I'd read The Family Bed, but it didn't quite do it for me. I even read The No Cry Sleep Solution, but it wasn't right for us either. Since reading Good Nights I've found two other moms who have a family bed, and we have an informal mom's club now! I loaned one the book,and she is almost done, and loves it as much as I did. Mom 3 has ordered her own copy based on what she knows of the book. I can't wait to get mine back!I have been so nourished and bolstered by this book. It contains more excellent information than I ever dreamed was out there. We made our bed safer using the chapter on safety guidelines. After reading the chapter on all the new scientific findings about hte family bed, I'm much more confident that we're doing the right thing. Even naps are getting much easier thanks to this book!I loved the style of the author. Kind of like a wise and funny friend. Some of the anecdotes were a riot. The advice was sage and sound. Everything was very gentle, the book was very easy to get through, even though there were lots of scientific paper citations. I didn't even notice them until the end! I highly reccomend this book to any parent whose baby spends nights in their bed. It seems to have something for every "level" of co-sleeper.

We are so grateful for this book!

A few weeks ago I bought Good Nights. At that time my DH and I were sharing our bed with our 5 yr old and our 18 month old. Between the bouncing of the bed anytime anyone moved and the tight quarters and my little guy's night nursing every two hours, sleep quality was poor. I'd wake up every morning so tired, and my little guy would be out of sorts often, and my DH had a back ache from sleeping in wierd positions just to have room. My 5 year old said he never wanted to leave the family bed. We all loved it, but I had come to the point where it was time to move on! I'm no good to anyone when I'm that sleep deprived. I know that probably sounds awful to a lot of hardcore attachment parenters, but it was too much to take any more.I read the book, and as they say, I laughed and I cried. I felt very affirmed for having slept beside our guys for so long, and I felt relieved; finally there was a book with tons and tons of practical information on how to deal with the not so perfect aspects of co-sleeping. (Love the title of the chapter on solutions to common family bed sleep problems -- "The Sandman Cometh.") The chapter on helping a child wean from the family bed was a tremendous help to us. It gave us so many ideas for moving Ty to his own space that we were able to transition him to his own ROOM by using a few of the tips. Room, yes room! We got him bunk beds (Dr. Gordon and his co-author say it's the number one successful method family bedders have used!) for his previously unused bedroom. He was very excited and slept in there from the first night! After a week or so he got a little scared after watching a Scooby Doo movie, and wanted to return to our room for one night. By then we'd set up a bed beside ours, and we welcomed him back for what we hoped was only one night. Dr. Gordon says to realize kids will sometimes come back for a night or a part of the night, and to welcome them. I agree. If we'd pushed him out, it would have been like the forbidden fruit. The next night he was back in his room. I followed another tip in the chapter and when he was apprehensive about going to sleep, I promised to do some work in the family room right next door to his room (our BABY was now sleeping through the night most of the time and I could do this! - more on this in a minute) and this was very comforting to him. Next time I checked, it was sleep city in his room. Since then, he hasn't revisited. All he asks is that I lie in bed with him after shutting out the light after booktime, so I can be with him as his eyes adjust!As far as Zach, we did end up using the 10 Nights method. I couldn't really do that when Ty was in the room, because I knew it would mean some crying. But it really worked for us! By night 8, Zach was snoozing for five hours straight. He is now happily sleeping through the night in our bed. It is SO much easier this way, and everyone is so much better rested. My DH no longer has back aches! This is all like some kind of miracle. (I felt awfu

Extremely Helpful!!!!!

This book is a great introduction to the family bed. It includes guidelines for safe co-sleeping, scientific and medical reasons why cosleeping is so good for baby, enjoying a great sex life even during the famiy bed years, and a section on 'trouble shooting' that includes a great explanation of why "crying it out" is a terrible thing to do to babies. It also covers transitioning a baby/child to their own bed and a great section on dealing with criticism from others. It is very "breastfeeding positive" and approaches breastfeeding as the "normal" way to feed babies/toddlers. Some folks have raised a concern over the chapter on helping an older baby/child sleep through the night. This book did include Dr. Jay's "10 nights" plan to get a baby/child over 12 months of age to sleep through the night [for 7 hours]. It is *extremely* well done and the authors make it very clear that they would prefer you just leave the child to his/her own time table and relax about the whole thing. They state clearly that they are only offering this as an alternative for families that are seriously considering 'cry it out' out of desperation and they give a great explanation of why this method is FAR preferable to the Cry It Out stuff.The plan is VERY gentle - the baby/child is never left alone, parents maintain physical and voice contact with baby [first by nursing, after 3 nights cut out nursing but use holding/cuddling, on 7th night don't pick up but touch and rub back while talking soothingly to child, etc]. I think this plan is very in keeping with what is reasonable for a child over 12 months - and very gentle and Attachment Parenting oriented. "Good Nights" is VERY clear that family bed, breastfeeding and constant physical contact for babies are extremely beneficial and desirable and "sleep training" of any kind is strongly discouraged for all children but absolutely discouraged for a baby under 1 year of age. The book also recognizes that children have different temperaments and that parents MUST be able to work with their child's temperament and that this plan might not work for all children and should be _immediately_ abandoned if it seems to be having a detrimental effect on a child. This book is absolutely great and extremely AP.I know several families that have used Dr. Jay's sleep plan with their children and it has worked very, very well for them and for their children. I think it is a very gentle way to encourage less night waking for families who truly are desperate with frequent night waking toddlers. I am extremely reluctant to use any kind of sleep training with my night waking children [I doubt I ever will], but if I did, I would feel good as an AP parent using Dr. Jay's steps.This book is perfect for any family considering Co-Sleeping and would also be wonderful for any family who is rethinking a decision to solitary sleep and/or "cry it out".

Grandma Approves!

I was tickled when I found this book while browsing for sleep books for the youngest of my five children, who is about to have a baby. Back when she and her siblings were babies, they shared a bed with my my husband and I, and our family ended up incredibly close. I'm not saying the closeness was because of what people now call the family bed but it was a vital part of our children's young lives, to be able to sleep next to their loved ones and not have to be alone in a crib somewhere else. My mother told me I shared the bed with my parents when I was a baby in Ireland, so on it goes. My other children who have children have all brought them into bed as babies. My youngest wants to, but she is getting alot of pressure from people in her future mom's class not to do this. So I got her this book and I read it first, and it's charming and so very helpful, kind, caring, funny, fully of tips I wish I'd had when they my own were little. She read some of it while I was visiting and she laughed and underlined and gave me such a hard hug I thought I'd pop. She brought it to her future moms group and showed them the first chapter full of scientific evidence that shows the powerful positive effects of letting your baby sleep next to you. The teacher said she was going to have to get a copy. She said the chapter on safety was "worth the price of admission." Now that's saying something, considering how she is one of those Ferber people. The book isn't preachy, as someone else who wrote a review mentioned, and that and it's sense of humor will probably help it break through alot of barriers with people like my daughter's teacher.If you're wondering, my children left our bed fairly easily when it was time for another baby to move in. They all loved sleeping in the same room together after that until they became old enough to separate the girls from the boys. It was like a big reward for them to get to sleep in the big kids room. The book Good Nights also has a whole chapter on the process of helping a child move out of your bed, and I think parents will find this very helpful, as I know it can be an issue. I hope it was alright to mention my personal experiences with this topic in a review. I haven't done reviewing before, but I think that personal experience in my case as a reader of the book is very important to the review.Thank you.

Laura Dern is right --

As one of my favorite actresses says on the cover of "Good Nights," "This is a fun, wonderful book every new parent should have." She is 100 percent right! Any new or future parent who is concerned about sleep should read this book. When I was pregnant I never thought I'd let our baby sleep with us but after she came into the world it seemed like the most natural, best thing to do, especially after we tried and tried the bassinette and she would immediately wake up and cry every time and wouldn't go back to sleep. We've all been sleeping so much better since doing the family bed, but I've taken so much grief for our decision to not do the crib/cry it out methods. This book is so supportive that I got teary a few times reading it. There's everything from strong scientific arguments in favor of the family bed to advice on how to keep it safe and how to deal with critics. My husband's favorite chapter is the one on how to keep the sizzle in your sex life -- it's given us some good ideas for fun new places to try to be intimate AWAY from the baby of course!