Facts About On Becoming Babywise Book

By Annabelle Holman


Parents, especially first-time parents, do not always know the best way to care for their child. Every child is different and might have its own needs when it comes to certain things, including sleeping. Gary Ezzo and Robert Bucknam are the authors who wrote the controversial book On Becoming Babywise, which is supposed to be about giving an infant the gift of sleep.

The book was originally published by Multnomah Books, but is self-published through Parent-Wise Solutions, the publishing company of Ezzo himself. More than 200,000 copies have been purchased. Ezzo is an evangelical Christian adviser and Bucknam, a pediatrician. This was initially used as a church-based resource with information on how to raise an infant.

In this publication, an infant care program is suggested. This program, the others say, will make the baby sleep throughout the night from the young age of seven to nine weeks and beyond. As many people know, infants typically wake up numerous times during the night and early morning hours needing to be fed. With this program, the emphasis is on parental control of the baby's sleep, feeding and play schedule instead of allowing the child to make the choice of when it wants to sleep, play and eat.

The ideas behind this book is what has attracted some criticism. This has come from both parents and professionals. The concern is that people are being taught to rear the infant based on the advice given in the book, which could ultimately lead to a higher likelihood of malnutrition, failure and emotional disorders.

Bucknam was recruited by Ezzo to make the book more secular. The newer edition with both writers was officially released in the first half of the 1990s. It was followed by four editions that published between the years of 1995 and 2007. This work talks about an infant management plan, based on the play, sleeping and feed cycles of infants, called parent-directed feeding or PDF.

In this book, there are directions related to caring for infants from birth up to six months old. It primarily covers topics of feeding and infant sleep. There is emphasis placed on parental control with infant training. According to the work, a baby is not to define the center of the household. Rather, they are just welcomed add-ons to the household who should follow with the order of the house. The things discussed in this book are not radical or new and might even be considered restatement of what Evangelical parents and even secular parents have been doing all along.

Both authors have said they stand in the middle ground between assigning a strict schedule for feeding time and feeding according to the demands of the baby. They also do not support co-sleeping. The advice offered in this is much like that seen in other publications.

Most of the criticism comes from professionals in the medical industry. These individuals say this is filled with incorrect information related to the feeding, growth, development and sleep pattern of infants. Still, there are people who might find this work resourceful. Everyone has his or her own opinion about how a child should be raised. It is worth noting that all children are different and will respond in their own way to various forms of rearing.




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