Feeding your newborn every 2 hours? No wonder you aren't sleeping.

Parents of newborns, your problems have been solved.

There is a “new” method of teaching your baby to sleep through the night that practically guarantees it will happen within a week. If that doesn’t excite the mother of a newborn I don’t know anything that will.

This Holy Grail comes in the form of a book by two American pediatricians, Dr Lewis Jassey and Dr Jonathan Jassey (FYI they are brothers). They say they have come across the ultimate way to get your baby to sleep through the night.

With a recent study by Australian academics showing that new mothers were getting dangerously low levels of sleep even by 18 weeks you can imagine an “ultimate way” might just be the best discovery since disposable nappies.

The book The Newborn Sleep Book promotes what they say is a “new” method of timing newborn feeds to help stretch out your baby during the night.

Now before I undermine their obvious years of medical experience (backed up by my quasi-diploma awarded by the school of “Why-the-f..k-don’t-my-kids-sleep?”) let me explain.

The doctors’ plan is to stretch out your baby’s breastmilk or formula feeds to four-hour intervals during the day.

They say this will “train a baby’s hunger receptors to acclimate to a specific schedule”.

It is obviously important to make sure your baby gets fed the appropriate amount of food needed for healthy weight gain and development – but the idea is that they then won’t get hungry at what the Doctors call “inconvenient times— like 2 a.m.”.

Now if your baby is anything like my three kids - who were in need of almost continuous feeding whether it be for comfort or hunger - the book recommends extending each feeding time by fifteen minutes a day to build up to those magical four hourly feeds.

US News Network Fox News looked at the program and spoke to one mum, Alyssa Russomondo who put the method to the test. She told Fox News, “the most challenging part was stretching out the feedings. When we were trying to get it to four hours we would try taking him for a walk in the stroller to calm him down and just distract him for a little bit".

The Docs say that the big proviso is for parents to be okay with their baby’s crying and to realise it isn’t always about hunger. “We don’t want them to realize that every time they’re crying they need to have a bottle or a breast shoved into their own mouth. Their stomach can get used to being fed so frequently and start to expect that,” they said.

The method claims to have a 90% success rate and for new mum Alissa it worked. Her little guy was sleeping seven to eight hours a night within two weeks. Which is obviously great for her.

But the main thing the rest of us need to remember is that it probably isn’t going to work for everyone.

I’m guessing that those parents who tried the method are also those who feel comfortable with this type of scheduled feeding – and let's be honest that’s not everyone. Despite the publisher hype about it being a new method there is nothing original about spacing out feeding. As early as the 1930’s babies were fed on an inflexible four-hour strict schedule.

And more recently it has been made popular by maternity nurse, Gina Ford, whose controversial books have sold in the millions.

What works for one family often doesn’t work for another. I know I would have struggled with allowing any of my kids to cry when they were just weeks old when I knew that feeding them would soothe the wails.

But I was also fairly hopeless at following the Tresillian guidelines and am the mum whose seven-year old still wakes up several times a night.. So I wouldn’t call my parenting advise gospel.

If this works for you – go for it. If you don’t feel comfortable with it then just go with the flow and find what does feel right for you.
Because as they tell me kids will sleep through sometime...won’t they?

So, would you try this to get a few more hours sleep?

And seeing as though they will be sleeping so much, perhaps you could try some nap time art like this parent, CLICK THROUGH the gallery:

Want more? Try:

Why doctors don’t want this woman to breastfeed her daughter.

“I’m all for breastfeeding in public. But not here.”

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