Twelve Hours' Sleep by Twelve Weeks Old: A Step-by-Step Plan for Baby Sleep Success

This book was recommended to me by a family member who used this method with her 3 children. She claimed it worked. I was skeptical but I gave it a try. I mean come on, 12 hours?! But it works. I’ve now used this method with both of my kids and it 100% works. I gift this to every single friend who is expecting! MINIMAL CIO!!! (5 mins or less!) My first child had really bad colic between week 6-12 and I was a new mom gaining my footing on motherhood. I had him sleeping through the night by 14 weeks. He’s now 5 and still sleeps 10-12 hours through the night. For my second, it was an absolute breeze. She was sleeping through the night by 12 weeks. The key to my success was 1. She was a great eater (can’t credit myself for that one) and 2. I implemented the nighttime routine the very night we got home from the hospital. Essentially I created a 5 step night time routine and kept the lights low during night time feedings. This allowed for an extremely easy transition when it was time to implement the method as explained in this book. My youngest is now 13 months and still sleeps 12 hours through the night. It’s sooo nice for me and my husband to have “us time” before bed and then be able to sleep through the entire night. 10/10!! So thankful for this book. It seriously works if you follow it to a T! Read BEFORE your baby gets here so you don’t build bad habits.

It takes patience and discipline to do the routine. But do it for a few weeks BY THE BOOK and it pays off for months and months and months. It will save your sanity and make everyone, especially baby, very happy and well rested. The number one question you get with a new baby is, "How does he/she sleep?" Everyone asks. Why?? Because most babies don't. That means most parents don't. People are amazed when I tell them our kid sleeps 12 hours every night and has a routine. They think it is impossible or magic or something. They tell us we are just "lucky" and "must have gotten a good one" because they can't believe it. Nope. We followed this book as directed. Not luck, not magic, a routine. When we followed this book to a 'T', it worked exactly as described. My little guy is one year old now and he still sleeps from 7 pm to 7 am EVERY DAY, and has since he was 9 weeks old. Literally he has only had 3 or 4 nights in his life since 9 weeks that he has not slept 12 hours straight. There are a lot of negative reviews for this book. I've read many of them now. I can't fathom that. Really people? All I can say is there are a ton of people out there that have very very strong feelings about co-sleeping, about breast feeding constantly, and people that can't be disciplined, or have the willpower to stick to the routine that ARE SIMPLY HATING on people that have used this book's methods successfully. I think some of them are stay at home mom's that took pride in the difficulty and think other's should have to "earn their stripes" too. I don't understand why they think suffering is the good route though. People that claim the baby will be mal-nourished, or throw out the "these authors aren't doctors" criticism are not only mis-informed on the actual plan, but they are being very over-dramatic and un-educated on the needs of the baby. It is funny how quickly people criticize authors for "not being experts" and turn around and give terrible, non-informed, even less expert opinions. You feed your baby the same amount, just not every hour all hours of the night. You funnel the feedings away from night and into day, then eventually just to 4 times daily. Many humans eat 4 times daily. It isn't dangerous or unhealthy. Yes, the babies stomach is smaller, but it is still proportionate to the baby, it doesn't mean they have to eat constantly. Of course your baby would eat every hour all night if you offered it milk, it doesn't mean it needs to. It would eat every 10 minutes if that is the routine you offer it. Why would you though? If you are worried about your milk drying up, you are not following the plan. The plan says to still pump if you need to. If you are so dramatic to claim this would cause depression or anxiety, you are wrong, it causes the opposite! My baby is always happy, very well developed, hitting all his milestones, and is happy to go to bed at night every night with this routine. Our whole family is well-rested, energetic and loving life because of this book. It is simple if you just do it and stick to it. Save your sleep, your sanity and make the whole family happy. Use this book! For all those haters that are saying it is impossible and unrealistic, they should meet my wonderful little boy (just not between 7 PM and 7 AM because he will be blissfully sleeping). There is seriously no product on earth I would endorse more.

Why I recommend this book · Easy read. I read in a couple of hours with breaks in between to care for the babies. · It starts with what to do from day 1 to eliminate habits that may be hard to break later down the road. But can also be useful to a mother at any stage of sleep training your children. · Discusses habits that may lead to a child not sleeping through the night · Discusses age and weights of when a child is ready to sleep through the night. I really like this since my twins are preemies. It was nice to know when they weigh 10lbs then you can try these methods vs. when they are blank age try these methods. · Discusses schedules and nap times. · Lastly, because it works! It has worked great for both of my twins. Both sleep through the night without waking every single night and can sleep for 12 hour stretches. They are happy well rested babies! I have read and heard the horror stories of one baby sleeping through the night and the other baby being a wake the whole night! As I said earlier you may have to tweak some things (as with any book) to make the "plan" work best for your family. For example: my babies can easily sleep the 12 hours but I wake them after 9 hours of sleep to feed them and put them back down for the other 3. I do this so when the nanny (our moms) walks in the house she will have an easier transition and so I can have some mommy time with them before I go to work. So we put the babies to bed at 9pm and wake them at 6am to feed them. When they are done feeding we put them back to bed until 9am. Another tweak to the plan is we feed the babies less and more often this the book's schedule recommends. Right now we are feeding ours twins every 3 hours/ 4oz/6 times a day... the book says 8oz bottles 4 times a day. Our babies can't finish an 8oz bottle in one feeding and if they drink much more than 4oz at time they spit it all up. This is still a total of 24 ounces. The last tweak ... the book suggests a 1 hour nap in the morning and a 2 hour nap in the afternoon. We do three 1 hour naps instead. So they are still having 3 hours of nap time a day. But three 1 hour naps just works better with our feeding schedule and the twins wouldn't nap much longer than 1 hour when we tried to do a 2 hour nap. So as a wrap up this book is great but you may have to tweak some of the tips for your children! As a first time mom it really helped me to get an idea of schedules, sleeping patterns, and naps. Again my twins sleep through the night every single night! So I recommend this book! Hope this book helps someone like it helped me!

This is an absolute must buy!! I am recommending it to every mom I meet. So easy to read got it done in 5ish hrs. My baby (3 months old) slept from 8pm-6am no feed at 6am back to sleep pretty easily until we woke her up at 8:30am after just 6 days of this schedule and I didnt even follow it to the t as we had company and were out some of the days and i did give in here and there so i think that is proof this really works! Some of the reviews are about breastfeeding moms but I know two exclusively breast feeding moms who only do 4 feeds a day and it works for them just fine and one of them is the one who recommended i try this method. I do combi feed as i have a low supply but as long as you work pumping into the schedule it it will work just fine to keep up your supply. There were definitely some growing pains and a cranky baby the first few days but you work through it and have a clear direction of what to do and how to cope with confidence vs trying all sorts of stuff you read online. And its not at all a harsh method as other reviewers have said you only let them cry for 5min at a time and you are next to them comforting them the whole time. But like they’re going to cry no matter what method you go for if not they don’t learn to self soothe and wont sleep through if you’re constantly giving in straight away. Highly highly recommend!

Backstory: We had a fire in our building when our baby was 3 weeks old. We ran for our lives and we were in temporary accommodation for almost 5 months. All this turmoil really affected our baby, in addition to her tummy cramps and colic issues that kept her awake and crying from 6pm to 6am most nights in her first 8 weeks. With the fire etc., we got a lot of new night sleep problems, resulting in her refusing to sleep anywhere else but on me. Not next to me. On me 😳 The book: All this has gotten really exhausting and we were looking for solutions so a colleague recommended this 12h sleep by 12 weeks book. She has 4 kids, 2 of them are twins and she said it worked for all of them and it was a life saver. I ordered the book, got it and forgot about it… until after a couple of weeks of no sleep at night and my back being completely broken, I started reading it as an act of sheer desparation. After reading it, I was sure it will not work but at that point, we were willing to try anything. The method: We started when our daughter turned 8 weeks old. She is exclusively bottle fed from the start as I had no milk. I imagine the method is much harder for breastfed babies but the author offers some solutions. We only ever did step 1 - feeding every 4 hours during daytime and bedtime routine (it's nothing complicated or much different from before, she just goes to sleep at approximately the same time, dark and quiet room etc...). All this is really not a problem because it's a normal rhythm for her so half an hour up/down is not a big deal. At night, she already ate only once, very rarely twice at 8 weeks of age, so that part wasn’t a challenge either. We did not have a nursery in our temporary apartment so she sleept with me in one of the bedrooms. She still doesn't sleep in her crib and we mostly bed share but that’s fine. We never even tried the step where the baby falls asleep on her own in the crib with the door closed etc., because leaving a child to cry for 3-5 minutes seems too Spartan for us and we’re against any type of cry-it-out methods. The results: After almost two weeks of using only the step 1 from the method, the results already seemed incredible to me! Every night she slept at least 6 hours in one stretch before the first(and often last)night feeding which was only a dream before. No more crying the whole night, no more sleeping on me. By the age of 3 months she was sleeping through the night. We chose an interval from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., so before starting with solids at about 6 months, she ate during the day at around 8 a.m., 12 p.m., 4 p.m., 8 p.m., and we only had to wake her up once, otherwise it's all natural to her and we don't complicate things if she eats 15-30 min earlier/later. When she started solids, we started giving her the bottle as soon as she woke up and before going to bed. We also added some snacks but mostly kept the structure of the established routine. We took everything in the book with a grain of salt and adjust it to our needs but we still got the desired results. All in all, we expected this method to be much harder and that it will take much longer to have any results but we were thrilled after two weeks already. Our baby is 11 months old now, she mostly sleeps through the night and wakes up sometimes once to feed but goes back to sleep right away(when healthy and not teething, of course). We realized that the routine is super helpful for her and for us. It’s also(non-intentionally)very alligned with the routine that she will have in the Kindergarten that she starts in 2 months. All in all, we deem this book and method(or at least step 1)a miracle as it really helped our baby with her sleeping in a natural and non-forced way so I recommend it to every new parent. It definitely saved our lives in especially dire circumstances.

Easy and a quick read

It was well written and insightful I took away a couple of things, however it’s not in my personality to parent/sleep train in this style. It’s worth a read and take some points from it

Tengo dos bebés de casi 4 meses , cómo todos los padres al principio que puedan dormir es un reto pero aplique lo que el libro dice y si funciona, adicional que lo puedes leer rápido y muy sencillo de entender