Personally I've found Gina Ford and Tracey Hogg both to have their good and bad points. Hogg was no help at all when things were hysterical at the beginning for us (advice of what to do when you get home with your baby- give a house tour, not terribly helpful or realistic- I had a lovely and totally unrealistic impression of what having a newborn would be like after reading her book) but neither do I agree with the crying out method of Ford or that all naps should be in the cot (when do you ever go out in Ford's routine? She puts a 45 min walk into the middle of the afternoon but other than that I can't see where you'd meet other people, shop, cook etc). I like Hogg's section on body language and I think Ford says some very helpful things about feeding when you're bottle feeding (most other books mention it as an after-thought as it's assumed you're breastfeeding.)
I think a lot of it has to do with knowing what sort of people you are and your baby is. We get very upset without some kind of structure, we both like a rough routine so trying not to have one made us both unable to function rationally- we got upset and angry with each other and felt totally out of control. With a vague 4 hour routine we have felt better able to deal with everything and when it doesn't work we don't beat ourselves up about it but just go with it. Some of Ford's advice has been much more relevant to us because we are routine based and I have to admit that from tomorrow we're going to try an adaptation of one of her routines as we have realised that his crying after 7 is because he's overtired and it's got so bad that he then won't sleep until 1am because he's too wired to sleep BUT Elliott will only sleep 11 hours a day anyway and he's 11lbs and has started sleeping longer after midnight and between feeds so on one hand her routine as she has it won't fit him sleep-wise as he won't sleep more than 11 hours and on the other I think it is reasonable that being his weight we can expect him to go a fair way through the night like she says. My friend has a little girl who is 3 days older than Elliott and she's only 8lbs, sleeps 16 hours a day and has reflux yet the routine would have her doing the same thing as Elliott when they obviously have very different needs at the moment so I think some adaptation is needed- all books deal with an average baby and no one has an average baby!
Elliott seems happier when we are in a vague routine too- today it got thrown out by him sleeping too much during the day yesterday and he's been upset and all over the place all day today as a consequence. Right from the beginning he tended to do things at similar times before we'd even started a routine so I think character-wise he's well suited to structure. I'm not going to do anything that feels like forcing him though, I kind of want to find a happy state where it's neither baby led or parent led but a happy family led thing because if you're not happy baby won't be happy and vice versa really and it seems to me like you have one school that think the baby should rule and one that says the parent should when neither is totally healthy.
I don't know- just my thoughts on the matter so far! I think the really important thing is not to get too upset about it all one way or another and to do what feels right for you. I can see how not fitting Ford's routine if you tried it could make you depressed but likewise not having any routine as my HVs would have it was making both my husband and I too stressed to cope which wouldn't have done him any good at all- it's just a case of knowing all of you and finding the best solution for all and not worrying if that's different to everyone else.
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