Rating: 
Summary: 100 stars! An AP Mom's best friend!
Review: I am about as AP as they come (co-sleeping, slinging, breastfeeding, etc) but my baby's lack of sleep was starting to affect my health and well-being. After more than a year of getting up every 2 hours I was getting desperate for some sleep. I own all the best AP books, but none gave me what I needed to help my baby sleep-until this one. I followed the suggestions exactly and used the logs and guides to create a sleep plan that I was comfortable with and that was very gentle for my baby. Within three weeks he was sleeping 6 straight hours! I love the friendly reassuring tone of this book. The author gives constant reassurance and comfort along with sleep ideas. I'm feeling so much better now and I'm a better mother because I'm getting my sleep. And now we can try for another baby and since I have the newborn section of this book to follow we won't go through another year of sleepless nights!
Rating: 
Summary: What About Working Mothers?
Review: After 7 months of not sleeping through the night, I could not wait to get my hands on this book. I read The No-Cry Sleep Soluition and tried to follow the new bedtime plan. The problem is that a major part of the plan is the daytime schedule. As much as I would love to be home with my child all day to get her nap routine and early bedtime in place, I CAN'T! My daycare tries the best they can, but if she doesn't stick to the schedule they don't force it. And since we don't get home until 6:30 pm every night, a bedtime before 8:00 pm is out of the question.Elizabeth Pantley's ideas sound great, but they don't work for parents who have to work full time.
Rating:
Summary: This book changed my life.
Review: The No Cry Sleep Solution is the best book on the topic of helping your child to sleep that I have read to date. It answered many of my questions and concerns about infant sleep habits and gave me clear and practical guidelines for helping my daughter sleep. Now she naps better, sleeps better throughout the night, and bedtime is a relaxed and cozy time for us. This book is perfect for parents who do not want to sleep train their children through cry-it-out methods. It offers gentle, sensible guidlines to ease your baby or toddler into better sleep associations. It is well written, clear, and has a loving attitude. It is a big relief after books written by so called "Sleep Experts." It is a must have for anyone struggling with sleep issues.
Rating:
Summary: Helps your baby to sleep - Gently and Lovingly!
Review: This book delivers everything it promises. It provides many different solutions and helps you put together your own personal plan towards better sleep. The first chapter covers important safety information. It has checklists to help you be sure your baby is safe. Chapter Two outlines Basic Sleep Facts - things you need to know to understand why your baby isn't sleeping now. Not too scientific, but gives ample information. The third chapter contains logs you fill out for one day and night to help you see exactly where you are right now and to help determine your issues and guide you as you create your sleep plan. The fourth chapter is the bulk of the book - tons and tons of Solutions that you review and choose from. There are ideas for every family (breastfeeding, bottlefeeding, pacifiers, cribs, cradles, family-beds, newborns to about three year olds, everything is covered) Chapter 5 helps you create your own plan from the ideas. Chapter 6 is an encouraging guide to read as you go through your first 10 days. Chapter 7 and 8 are a follow up log and lots of information to help you Analyze your plan and make the adjustments that you need to tweak your plan to make it work even better. Part Two of the book is a section on helping ADULTS sleep better and some more encouragement and "pep talks" that really do help you get through the challenge of working through your baby's sleep issues. The tone of the entire book is friendly and comforting. It's easy to read, sensitive and caring. I found so much to love about this book. I think every parent of a baby and every professional who works with parents of babies should have this valuable book in their library.
Rating:
Summary: A realistic no-cry approach
Review: A great book for both preventing sleep problems, and finding realistic solutions to existing ones. The book has one section for newborn babies, birth to four-months, and one for older children. For the reviewer concerned about the cover photo of a child sleeping on a pillow, the book begins with a section devoted to safety including the dangers of pillows, blankets and many other things. The author is sensitive both to parents who co-sleep, and those who use a crib in a non-judgemental way. She gives good advice for both without being preachy. The book is written in a very honest compassionate way, from the authors own sleepless experience, and that of many others she has helped. She has conducted much personal research prior to writing this book, including a test group of sixty families with sleepless children. As the title states, this is NOT a book about letting a child "Cry it Out". It is not a specific program but a collection of sound advice and ideas which are sure to help. Parents are also taught to have realistic expectations for the childs age, and how to determine if there is a problem or not.
I'm sure there are more indepth books on sleep available, but this one was concise and suited our situation nicely.
Rating: 
Summary: Some helpful suggestions, but still not sleeping
Review: I eagerly anticipated this book and read it cover to cover twice before implementing any of the suggestions. After faithfully following my plan for 25 days my daughter was still waking up every 2-3 hours. So I revised my plan and tried again. Unfortunately, we experienced very little change. I appreciated all the options and suggestions and some have made it easier for me to cope. But in the long run, I still have a very wakeful child and will probably do some modified version of crying to get her to sleep more. My daughter is extremely strong willed and she has had a lot of change in her young life (we've moved twice in 4 months). This method may work better in a family without so much upheval.
Rating:
Summary: Try this book!
Review: I am so thankful for this book! Elizabeth Pantley is a mother. A mother who had a child that did not know how to fall asleep by himself. A mother who did not want to feel powerless - making her child "cry it out" all alone. A mother who wanted to feel empowered! A mother who wanted to parent her child - to teach him to fall asleep on his own - gently and gradually. After all, he had learned that falling asleep was wonderful and comforting in his mother's arms - the cold turkey approach of "cry it out" seemed so cruel. She knew that there had to be a better way. She researched, experimented, worked with other moms, and is sharing the "No Cry Sleep Solution" with all of us sleep-deprived mommies, whether our babies are newborns or toddlers. This is not a book for those who want a quick fix. Mrs. Pantley helps you to develop a plan based on your own situation, and to work with your child to gradually help them fall asleep on their own. I needed this book for my 4th child. At 4-1/2 months old, she would only nap in my arms and woke to nurse every 1-2 hours at night. Only one week after reading this book, we are both sleeping longer and my baby is actually happy when she wakes up from a nap. I am so comfortable with this approach to helping your baby sleep that I would recommend it to anyone and everyone with a child.
Rating:
Summary: What a blessing!
Review: I love this book! I don't at all believe in the cry it out method with babies. I just don't believe it's good at all for them. They cry for a reason--it's their only way to communicate. This book is great and gives lots of good suggestions--not just a couple. So if one doesn't work, you'll have other things to try. You can customize your own getting to sleep plan. Since using these methods, my baby now sleeps six-seven hours a night.
Rating: 
Summary: Very good book, but can require alot of patience
Review: This is a very helpful book which includes some of the more useful information included in Wiesbluth and Ferber. I believe her approach can work for most parents with time and patience, though some babies may require months of committed effort. Let me preface the rest of this review by stating up front that I personally don't think it's permanently harmful if there are some tears shed (by either Moms or babies :-) in the process of helping babies learn how to sleep through the night... That said, even though that's my perspective I loved Elizabeth Pantley's inclusive, compassionate, unjudgemental tone. I really wish this book had been available when my first daughter was a baby. By the time she was 7 months old and still waking up every hour, I was nearly incapacitated with sleep deprivation. My husband was that one who said that things had to change and that we needed to cry it out. I begged for a few weeks to do some research and ended up reading several sleep books including both Weisbluth's Healthy Sleep Habits Happy Child and Ferber's book. I thought both books were very well written and contained some excellent information about babies and sleep. Given what I had learned from these books, I put together my own sleep program that was similar to much of Pantleys except that I let my daughter do some crying when she was first put down to sleep for the night. It took about two weeks but she dropped to 2 wakings a night and started being able to nap on her own. But the best was that either my husband or I could put her to bed with a brief routine and she'd drift off to sleep with a smile on her face and wake up the same way. All in all I considered it a success, except that I just hated that two week period when she would cry when she was put down. So when I had my second daughter I was determined to use what I had learned the first time around to avoid some of the bad habits I had practiced with my oldest and get her to sleep with no crying. Things were much better, she was a great napper, but I was still having trouble getting her to sleep without having a nipple in her mouth, and she was getting up every two hours at night. So I bought Elizabeth's Pantley's book. As I said earlier, I wish it had been around with my first daughter. I think she culled some of the best information about sleep from some of the other books and I loved her organized approach to finding out what works best for your child. I really wanted to get to the point that we had with our eldest where we could just put her in bed and she would drift off peacefully on her own. I faithfully followed the program for a month and I was seeing some progress. However the progress was very slow I found it challenging to work the program with a toddler who was already feeling somewhat abandoned. She has a phased approach to getting a child to sleep on their own where you comfort the baby until they are almost asleep, put them in bed, if they get upset comfort some more and repeat the cycle until they are asleep. At least with my daughter, it was taking a huge amount of time to get her down for naps and bed. Time that my toddler had to be quiet in order to not get the baby worked up. I think I could have stuck it out if I hadn't had a toddler who also needed me, but after a month I threw in the towel. I went back to letting her cry to learn how to get to sleep. The difference between this time and three years ago though was that this time it only took a fairly easy three nights. I think the difference was probably due to the month I had been working the Pantley method. In conclusion, there's great information in here for everyone. If you have the time and patience, I believe the program can work. But I found it difficult to work the whole program while simultaneously tending to a toddler. Happy sleeping everyone! I wish all of you sleep deprived mommies and daddies who might be reading this sweet dreams and know that whatever you decide to do, take care of yourself, things do get better.
Rating:
Summary: Highly Readable, Extremely Practical!
Review: Elizabeth is a warm, genuine AP mom and that clearly comes across in her book. She writes in a conversational parent-to-parent style. Yet, at the same time, the book is filled with her years of research, study, observation and practical experience as a mother and parent educator. And, in true AP style, she states that her book is not a one-size-fits-all, but affirms that each parent is the expert on their own child and presents time-proven solutions that can be customized or adapted to fit your family situation. Using anecdotes, worksheets, and her warm and inclusive style of parent education, the book feels more like a conversation between your best AP friends at the park! The book is well-organized with stars next to the ideas that have worked best for a majority of families. I found it very readable, and with none of the condescending style that many "experts" use when dealing with parents. Additionally, Ms. Pantley has produced a book that will make the definitive shower gift instead of that dratted Ferber book!
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