Customer Reviews

The Baby Book: How to Enjoy Year One

5 star:		(52)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Rachel's routine's are a great alternative to Gina Ford. They are more flexible and easier to maintain.

The sleep training helped my son sleep through the night from two weeks and he thrives on the routine.

I recommend this book to all new parents I meet!

I totally loved this book. As a second time parent, it gave me valuable, gentle guidance on setting sleep routines, feeding times and controlled crying. Rachel speaks a lot of common sense and promotes a more traditional, loving approach then other books. She favours plenty of walks for babies, sleeping outside wrapped up rather then in darkened nurseries and prayers at bedtime.

Her approach is gentler then other books, but she still recognises that babies thrive on routine, need to feel loved and that parents do not need to feel bullied and pressured into following ideas they may not be comfortable with.

Anyone who follows her approach will have a happy, thriving baby and relaxed confident parents.

This book has been an excellent guide for us as first time parents. It explains and gently guides you through situations, helping explain emotional changes and the challenges you face. The routine guides are invaluable. They are very flexible so there is room for movement but they give you a great structure to work your day around. You couldn't choose a more practical and friendly guide to help you through the first year.

I was a bit suspicious of reading this book because everyone seemed to be talking about it but I am so pleased that I bought it because this IS the book to own for new mothers and fathers. Containing excellent advice, it is easy to read and beautifully written and seems to cover everything that you might possibly need to know about the first year of your baby's life. This includes essential stuff like establishing a routine that works for you and retaining a life/ensuring a balance including time with your partner, foods that help a baby, breastfeeding versus bottle feeding, the first few days after coming home, sleep patterns and what to do when you are exhausted. The author has a lovely way of gently encouraging you also rather than dictating 'you must do this, in this way' and seems to understand what problems might lie ahead before they have even happened and offers excellent, constructive advice for the modern working mother and father.

I can't recommend this book strongly enough as it will help you in the first year and you will wonder how you managed without it.

This book is full of really useful information on the practical aspects of caring for a new baby and for that I was grateful BUT.. like another reviewer said, it gave me totally unrealistic expectations of what my baby would be. The routine guides contain such gems as "your baby should sleep until..." - yes, well, please tell her that! The shortfalls I found were in patchy guidelines on what to do with a baby who didn't do what Rachel said she should. In methods of sleep training, she says, if you've a baby of more than 3 months, you can do these things... so what do I do with a 4 week old please? Ultimately, I felt I'd failed in following these, and if I'd succeeded, I'd have had a baby who conformed to the routines and life would've been easy. This really put on the pressure. Congratulations to all those who followed this successfully, I am envious! But it didn't help me any.

This book enabled me to drop the night feed so my little boy was sleeping through the night at 5 weeks!! The daily routines are really easy to follow and leave plenty of you time. There is also a good section for Dads too which my husband liked as it advocated time for him. It gives advice on what to get before the baby is born and the basics for example how to put on a babygro and how to swaddle them. It is not very long and I have found it much easier to use than other popular baby books.

Our baby is 3 months old and having fallen into the trap of allowing him to fall asleep on us we decided a baby book might help us to choose how to train him to sleep. We found Rachels book on Amazon, ordered it and the next day it arrived ! Straight forward and easy to read, most of what Rachel is saying is common sense that we all know it's just reassuring to see it on paper. The chapter on routines ad feeding were really good ad the part we are using at the moment is the sleep training. Although we felt really cruel letting him cry, after 4 days his shouting time has reduced from an hour to half an hour. After eight days he now goes down at 7 shouts for about 10 minutes before settling himself. And guess what ? We now have our evenings to ourselves !

As a Grandma to be with family living abroad I brought this book for my son and dautgher_in_law, I had already brought another book and on reading it found it a bit fearsome.

I saw Rachel on Lorraine Kelly's show and thought what a lovely gentle person she was, this prompted me to buy this book.

What a difference, having read them both I know which I would choose Rachel's advice is gentle and encouraging and so sensible

a must for all new Mum's and first time Grandma like me who hopes to be of help when our little ones are born

I have a three week old boy. I read this prior to his birth. It set me up with entirely unrealistic expectations. Yes, the routines are more flexible that Ford's, but they are still regimented, and frankly, no tiny newborn is going to go four hours between feeds. I tried the routines and watched my son scream with hunger. Even the three hourly routine she suggests for premature babies was too much. I spoke to my midwife about his waking and crying, and she pointed out that newborns stomachs are the size of walnuts: there's no way they can go four hours. And as for the sleep training, well, some people may be able to leave a newborn to scream, but i couldn't. Now, I'm not a full on attachment parent, but at the same time it strikes me that any mum can come up with her own routine based on her child without having to follow a strict regime, and this IS strict. It might suit some babies, but not mine.

That said, the basic sections on how to wind, bath etc were clearly written and fairly useful for a first timer. But I won't be using the routines. There are kinder ways of dealing with a child. And for the first few months of life, what's so wrong with NOT having a regime? I feel a lot happier now i've stopped trying to follow her instructions.

I bought this book along with Gina Ford and the Baby Whisperer and read them all before my baby boy was born. He is now 8 weeks old and I have ditched Gina and refer to Rachel's book everyday now because the way it is written is much less stressful, the routines are much simpler and have more leaway in the timings. The Baby Whisperer is useful but does not follow set routines which I would like to do for my baby.
The best thing about Rachel is that if you go to her website you can arrange to e-mail her, have a phone consultation or even a home visit. I had a phone consultation with her last night and it was the best thing I have done. She gave advice on how to adjust the routine to suit my very hungry baby, was so lovely and calm and instilled confidence that I was doing really well and all the right things.
I would highly recommend this book with the availability of direct consultation with the very calm and experienced author.