What is the Baby Whisperer method? The EASY routine and shush-pat, reviewed

Tracy Hogg's EASY routine and her shush-pat technique still come up constantly in newborn sleep discussions, more than twenty years after her first book. Here is what the method actually is, and where I think it holds up.

Short answer: what is the Baby Whisperer method?

• EASY is a repeating daily cycle: Eat, Activity, Sleep, Your time — roughly every three hours for a newborn.
• It is a routine, not a schedule: the order of events is fixed, the clock times are not.
• The bedtime part is the 4S ritual: set the stage, swaddle, sit with your baby, shush-pat.
• Hogg is against cry it out and against co-sleeping, so she sits somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.
• The weakness is that it is one size fits all. There is no explanation of the biology, no references, and little to fall back on if the techniques do not work for your baby.

Would you like to listen to a podcast episode about this? Is the Baby Whisperer book any good?

This review covers the first two chapters of Top Tips from the Baby Whisperer: Sleep (Tracy Hogg with Melinda Blau, 2009 edition) — the newborn half of the book, which is about half of it by length.

Who was Tracy Hogg, and who is the Baby Whisperer book for?

Tracy Hogg was a British nurse who became a celebrity parenting coach and bestselling author in the United States. Her first book, Secrets of the Baby Whisperer, came out in 2001, co-written with the journalist Melinda Blau; they wrote several more together, and Hogg also had a television show on the Discovery Health channel.

On the spectrum that runs from strict cry it out at one end to attachment parenting at the other, Hogg sits somewhere in the middle. She is against cry it out, and she is also against co-sleeping and several other practices associated with attachment parenting. That middle ground is why her approach appeals to a lot of parents who do not hold strong views at either end.

Her tone, though, is tough love. On the second page she writes that when problems persist, it's usually because of something the parents have done — which is enough to give some parents a nervous breakdown on its own. Elsewhere she answers a mother who wants her eight-week-old asleep by seven and up at seven by saying it is the mother who needs help, not the baby, because babies do not sleep through the night in the early months. And she warns that if you rock, feed, walk or bounce your baby to sleep, or let her fall asleep on your chest, you are using a prop and will pay for it later.

I do not mind that tone — I find it entertaining! It is worth knowing about before you buy the book, though.

What is the EASY routine? (eat, activity, sleep, your time)

The first chapter is entirely about getting your baby onto a structured routine, which Hogg calls EASY: Eat, Activity, Sleep, Your time. The baby feeds, then does some activity, then sleeps — and while she sleeps, you get your own time. Then she wakes and the cycle starts over.

She advises starting this from day one after you get home from hospital, which sounds strict until you notice the distinction she makes. A routine is an order of activities; a schedule tells you when to do what. Hogg wants the order, not the clock. You can have times in mind, but you watch your baby's cues, and the predictability of the sequence matters more than the exact slot.

How long is each part of the EASY cycle?

For a newborn born at a normal weight, around three to three and a half kilograms, the cycle repeats every two and a half to three hours. It is shorter for premature or lower birth weight babies and longer for heavier newborns, and it stretches out gradually until it becomes roughly a four-hour cycle by about four months.

Do the arithmetic and a three-hour cycle gives you about four daytime periods, so four naps in the newborn stage. In practice, because Hogg also tells you to put your baby down earlier if she gets sleepy earlier, this easily turns into five or six naps in the early weeks.

Within one cycle:

• Eat: around 25 to 40 minutes, though it varies a lot. Smaller babies often feed for longer because it takes more effort, and they may need to rest every five or ten minutes. Bottle feeding is usually quicker than breastfeeding, and a strong let-down means a faster feed.
• Activity: roughly 20 to 45 minutes, shorter for smaller and younger babies. For a newborn this is not much: a nappy change, getting dressed, a bath, talking or singing to her, looking at a propped-up book, some music. Most newborns are perfectly content just watching your face. It is also a good window for a walk or for meeting a friend — but in the newborn stage the window is short, so if you do not want your baby sleeping in the pram, do not go far.
• Sleep: Hogg puts a newborn nap at one and a half to two hours. In reality it is sometimes twenty minutes.
• Your time: whatever you want. My practical advice here is to keep a written list, because when the baby finally goes down you do not want to spend half the nap deciding what to do. I found one of my old lists and it was gloriously trivial — wash your hair, buy slippers — but that is exactly the point.

There is a second benefit to a routine that is easy to miss: it makes crying easier to interpret. Babies cry differently when they are hungry, sleepy, too hot, bored or need changing, but telling those cries apart is genuinely hard in the early days. If you know roughly where you are in the cycle, you have a good first guess.

Is eat-play-sleep better than eat-sleep-play?

EASY is an eat-play-sleep routine, and from a sleep coaching point of view the logic is sound: it stops your baby from falling asleep at the breast or bottle, so feeding does not become a sleep association — and feeding to sleep is one of the harder associations to break later on.

But it is often not realistic. Plenty of newborns simply cannot help falling asleep while feeding, and there is not much you can do about it. My daughter was like that. If I tried to wake her she became extremely fussy, and keeping her awake took an enormous amount of effort, so with her I ran an eat-sleep-play routine instead: she fed, she slept, and she was ready to play afterwards. She grew out of it on her own once she became more alert during the day.

You can also protect against the feeding-to-sleep association without inserting a whole activity period. Wake your baby just a little after the feed — swaddling her is often enough — and then put her down. She will be too tired to wake up properly, but that small rousing is usually enough to stop the association from cementing. It is also worth knowing that breast milk contains melatonin, which helps babies fall asleep, so if you are breastfeeding I would use that rather than fight it.

If your newborn will only sleep in your arms, I have written about that separately: my newborn only sleeps when held.

What are cluster feeding and dream feeding?

Two of the more useful tips in the first chapter are both about feeding.

Cluster feeding means adding one or two extra feeds in the run-up to bedtime instead of sticking to the three-hour spacing, so your baby goes into the night as full as possible.

Dream feeding is an extra feed that you give before your baby wakes for it, ideally right before you go to bed yourself. If she goes down at 7 pm and the next feed would fall somewhere before 10 pm, you do not wait for her — you wake her, or feed her while she is still half asleep. Most babies have a strong enough sucking reflex to manage this without properly waking. The point is selfish and entirely reasonable: it buys you a longer first stretch of sleep, instead of being woken half an hour after you finally got to bed.

What is the 4S ritual? (set the stage, swaddle, sit, shush-pat)

Chapter two is troubleshooting, and this is where Hogg describes her bedtime ritual. She also lists what she calls three stages of sleep — the window, the zone and the letting go — which are really three stages before sleep: the window is when your baby first shows signs of sleepiness and it is time to start putting her down, the zone is the glazed look, and the letting go is when she nods off.

Those sleepiness signs are worth knowing: yawning, fussing, fidgeting; some babies open their eyes wide and stare blankly at nothing; some make squeaky noises; most turn away from people and toys, away from stimulation generally. A baby burrowing into your neck as you carry her is doing the same thing.

The 4S ritual itself is narrower than what most people mean by a bedtime routine — it is what you do once you are already ready for bed, not the bath-and-pyjamas part. For the wider version, see bedtime routines 101.

1. Set the stage. Draw the curtains, maybe put on some calming music. She says very little about this. I think there is much more to designing an environment that supports sleep, though it is fair that newborns are less affected by their environment than older babies.
2. Swaddle. Newborns do not control their limbs well, and they distract or wake themselves with their own movements and with the Moro reflex. Swaddling prevents that.
3. Sit with your baby. Hold your swaddled baby upright for a few minutes until you feel her body relax. Do not rock her and do not pace around the room — that is more stimulation, not less. When she relaxes, put her in the cot before she falls asleep and say good night. She does not call it this, but that good night is a sleep cue, and a short lullaby or nursery rhyme works just as well. Then leave the room and see whether she settles herself.
4. Shush-pat — go back, sush and pat your baby only if she starts to cry when you leave.

How do you do the shush-pat method?

Your baby lies on her side in the cot. You shush close to her ear — a loud whisper, not a gentle one — and at the same time pat the middle of her back with a steady, firm, rhythmic motion. You keep going until she calms, then for about another ten minutes, then slow the patting down, stop the shushing, and wait for her to fall asleep.

This is a physical intervention rather than a wait-and-see method, and it does help a lot of babies. It is the most insightful part of the chapter.

Does shush-pat work in a normal cot?

Often, no — and Hogg does not address this. In a standard cot you would have to bend right over the side to get close enough to your baby's ear to shush, with your arms coming in from above at an awkward angle. It is genuinely difficult to sustain for twenty minutes.

The technique is much more practical with a drop-side cot, or with a side-car crib that attaches to your bed: then you can lie in your own bed with your baby next to you and reach her comfortably. Worth thinking about before you commit to the method.

Why is my newborn not sleeping? Tracy Hogg's six causes

Hogg lists six variables that can wreck newborn sleep: lack of routine, an inadequate sleep ritual, accidental parenting, hunger, overstimulation and discomfort.

She then gives tip-offs, signs that point to each cause — and this is where the chapter falls apart for me. The signs point at several causes at once. “My baby doesn't settle down to sleep easily” is listed under lack of routine, inadequate sleep ritual, overstimulation and discomfort. So the signs cannot actually tell you which cause you are dealing with.

That is not surprising when you think about it. There are really only two main sleep problems: your baby has trouble falling asleep, or she has trouble staying asleep. What else is there? A diagnostic structure built on symptoms that broad was never going to narrow anything down.

The content underneath the structure is better than the structure itself:

• Hunger. Rather than feeding more at night, tank her up during the day with cluster feeding and dream feeding. Learn the difference between a hungry cry and a pain cry. She also suggests trying a dummy first, because young babies have a strong sucking instinct and parents often read sucking as hunger when it is not.
• Overstimulation. Sometimes you and the environment cause it; sometimes it is your baby working on a new skill like rolling or babbling. Keep the afternoon calm, swaddle — and if it is developmental and swaddling does not help, you wait it out.
• Discomfort. Reflux, wind, constipation, a wet nappy, too hot, too cold. Deal with the cause first. One piece of her advice here is out of date and should be ignored: she tells parents to elevate the sleeping surface for reflux, and that is not recommended, for safety reasons.

What is accidental parenting? Props and sleep associations

Accidental parenting is Hogg's name for the habits parents fall into to get their baby to sleep, which they never actually intended to keep up. She calls them props: an object or action outside the baby's control that the parent uses to get her to sleep. Today we would call them sleep crutches or unwanted sleep associations — not every sleep association is a problem, only the ones that are not manageable in the long run.

She distinguishes props from comfort items, which the child chooses for herself, like a stuffed animal or a blanket — and which usually do not appear before six months.

Her second form of accidental parenting is rushing in too soon. Babies make noises in their sleep, and they surface briefly between sleep cycles and make noise then too. Going in every time can turn into habitual waking. Learn your baby's cues, and learn what she sounds like when she genuinely needs you.

The third is breaking the bonds of trust. If you have tried cry it out, then switched to something else, and generally been inconsistent, your baby no longer knows what to expect. Hogg's advice is to rebuild trust by responding to her needs first, and only then to work on sleep.

What does the Baby Whisperer get wrong?

Two things, mainly.

It is one size fits all. If shushing and patting does not calm your baby, the book has no answer for you. That is the pattern throughout: one technique per problem, and no plan B.

It does not explain anything. There is almost nothing about the biology of why babies sleep the way they do, or why the advice is supposed to work, and there are no references or studies, so there is no way to check whether any of it is founded in reality. It is a troubleshooting manual, not an explanation.

The flip side is that the same choices make it very short and very easy to read.

Should you read Top Tips from the Baby Whisperer?

If you have very little time and you want somebody to tell you what to do, yes — I can recommend it. The EASY routine is genuinely good, the 4S ritual is a sensible bedtime structure, and cluster feeding and dream feeding are useful tools.

If you want to understand why your baby sleeps the way she does, or if your baby turns out not to respond to these particular techniques, you will need another book alongside it.

One structural note, since it is the first thing people notice: what Hogg describes across these two chapters maps onto what I would call sleep coaching. Designing a schedule is her EASY routine. Addressing the bedtime routine is her 4S ritual. She does not say much about the sleep environment, which I think matters. And she never uses the words sleep training — but the shush-pat technique is one: a very gradual form in which you do not leave your baby to cry but help her fall asleep. It is essentially her pick-up-put-down method for older babies, with a little extra, and she says as much when she suggests shushing and patting while holding your baby if the cot version does not work.

Frequently asked questions

What does EASY stand for in the Baby Whisperer routine?

Eat, Activity, Sleep and Your time. The baby feeds, then does something awake, then sleeps, and the time your baby is asleep is your own. When the baby wakes, the cycle starts again. For a newborn of normal birth weight the cycle repeats roughly every two and a half to three hours, stretching towards four hours by around four months.

Is eat-play-sleep better than eat-sleep-play?

Eat-play-sleep is designed to stop feeding from becoming a sleep association, which is a sensible aim. But many newborns simply cannot stay awake through a feed, and forcing it can leave you with a fussy, overtired baby. Eat-sleep-play is a reasonable alternative: you can break the association by waking your baby just a little after the feed, for example while swaddling, rather than by inserting a whole activity period.

How do you do the shush-pat method?

Your baby lies on her side in the cot. You shush close to her ear as a firm, loud whisper, and at the same time pat the middle of her back with a steady, rhythmic motion. You keep going until she calms down, then for about another ten minutes, then slow the patting and stop the shushing and let her fall asleep.

What is accidental parenting?

Tracy Hogg's term for habits parents adopt to get their baby to sleep that they do not actually want to keep up long term, such as rocking or feeding to sleep. She calls these props; today they are more often called sleep crutches or unwanted sleep associations. Rushing in at the first noise between sleep cycles counts too, because it can turn into habitual waking.

Is Top Tips from the Baby Whisperer worth reading?

It is short, readable and full of practical instructions, so it works well if you want to be told what to do without a lot of theory. It does not explain the biology behind its advice or cite any research, and it offers little for a baby who does not respond to its techniques, so it is a poor fit if you want to understand why something works.

Reference

1. Hogg, T., & Blau, M. (2009). Top Tips from the Baby Whisperer: Sleep. Secrets to getting your baby to sleep through the night. Chapters 1–2.

Still not sure what to change first in your baby's sleep? See what Dreamsense offers in English.

Do you need help with your child’s sleep?

Answer a few questions and I build a personalised sleep plan for your child, and Amie answers your questions 24/7 while you work through it. See my other offers here.