
We all know that having a baby means your nights of solid sleep are, invariably, long gone – whoever came up with that stupid phrase “sleeping like a baby” couldn’t have been more wrong. However, thanks to a good baby routine book and a certain amount of OCD on my behalf, I used to be one of those mums who could say “all night” when asked how long my baby slept, or “he self settles” when asked if I had any problems with getting him to sleep.
Nowadays? Not so much.
Fast-forward just over a year and our little guy has decided he’ll be the one dictating when and if he sleeps. After a few months of sleep deprivation, my husband and I are a little beside ourselves.

I know we’re just two of a large number of parents out there who regularly go through issues with their child’s sleep. Indeed, research has shown that a new baby typically results in 400-750 hours of lost sleep for parents in the first year. What’s more, this sleep deprivation can continue well into the kindergarten and school years.
So, to say I was excited to read that there’s a book which claims to be scientifically designed to send children to sleep within minutes is an understatement. Written by Swedish author and psychologist Carl-Johan Forssen Ehrlin, The Rabbit Who Wants To Fall Asleep promises desperate parents everywhere a quiet night's kip and has hurtled to the top of Amazon's bestsellers list.
The 22-page book is all about ‘a perfect combination of sentence structure and soporific words’. It follows the journey of Roger the Rabbit, the Sleep Snail and Uncle Yawn as they try to help the rabbit go to sleep. The characters tell him to "think slowly, breath slowly and calm, slow and calm” and “let your whole body be heavy, so heavy it feels like it falls... just like a leaf, that falls down, slowly down, down... Your eyelids are so heavy."
