Personally, I love The Baby Whisperer. For our family, her philosophy and techniques worked. While the author, the late English nanny extraodonaire Tracy Hogg, is very much for breastfeeding and understanding why your baby is crying, not sleeping, or feeding well, much of her practical advise differs widely from La Leche League's recommendations in The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding on which I just wrote a review. She advocates Parent Directed Feeding while listening to the baby's cues and sleeping separately from your baby. Getting your baby to sleep through the night is a goal she helps to attain, whereas it is not and should not be a goal for the first couple of years according to LLL's book.
Her basic premise is that mom and the baby need to work with a schedule that works for both of them (the whole family really), so that everyone's needs are met. To do that, she suggests E.A.S.Y. (Eat, Activity, Sleep, Your time) which involves not nursing/feeding or other props to sleep, but rather using other natural cues.
She does not advocate a strict schedule that must be maintained at the expense of the baby, rather a routine so that everyone involved knows what usually comes next and helps everyone feel calm and secure. She also helps you to understand "Banguage" or Baby-Language to understand the different types of crying how you can best soothe for the different senarios. She also addresses breastfeeding, working moms, starting solids, baby's emotional needs, and much more.
I think both The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding (and other attachment parenting philosophies) as well as The Baby Whisperer books (philosophies advocating routines etc - NOT "Ferberizing" or "crying it out" methods) are both great, which is obviously why I recommend both books. I think that different things work for different families.
The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems By Teaching You to Ask the Right Questions is available to my current Bradley Method students for loan one week at a time.
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