Book #43: On Becoming Babywise by Gary Ezzo and Robert Bucknam

I've had plenty of people tell me, "You HAVE to read Babywise!" So I found it at the library and read/skimmed through it. (I'll be honest, I have a hard time reading these baby books all the way through, because they don't REALLY apply to me yet and I'm not really all that interested in parenting techniques--yet.) The basic premise of the book is that parents can and should set sleeping schedules for their babies, even from when they're just a few weeks old, and that makes things much, much easier for both the parents and the babies. It all seems very logical and I do think I want to do SOMETHING like this once baby boy is born. I'll probably check it out from the library again once I'm in Durham and read it more carefully once we're close to the due date.

The tone of this book was super obnoxious, though. The authors took that all-too-familiar-and-tempting road for parenting books to be overly condemning of any other parenting techniques and overly confident in the benefits of their own. The end of every section seems to go back to something like, "Remember, it's your responsibility to make sure your baby gets enough sleep. You can do it! Blah blah blah blah." Really not that appealing to me. But I do think the information is good.