This book is about responsive parenting. It is about how babies thrive when parents are sensitive to their needs - during the day and the night. It looks at baby sleep and shows that babies wake up at night and need help to settle for many good reasons, as frustrating as this may be to their parents.

Sleep training, which aims to teach children to fall asleep independently by leaving them to cry without comfort, sometimes called controlled crying, is the opposite of the authors' approach. It has been popular among parents and widely recommended by health professionals. However, an explosion of new research in early childhood development in recent years has led many to ask: Is sleep training really something we should be doing to our children? The authors present fascinating research into how babies develop and how infant sleep works. They give many examples and recount the experiences of parents. Their methods are adaptable and loving, even if they mean spending more time, more care, and more energy on parents and their babies.