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The first lines we read in Dilys Daws' beautifully recounted and carefully conceptualized account of sleeping difficulties in small children are those taken from the body of the book but reproduced on the cover: 'Sleep problems can tear a family apart'. In these few words we can already detect the author's basic relationship to the subjects of her study: not only her belief that perturbation in a baby's capacity to sleep is intimately connected with relationships within the whole family, but also her profound empathy with the parents of an infant whose inability to sleep has led to his being taken, after health workers, paediatricians and other medical advisors have failed to resolve the problem, to see a specialist such as Dilys Daws. It is evident that all parents will suffer a feeling of narcissistic injury when they are obliged to admit that they have failed in some normal aspect of parenting and now require the help of a stranger to see further into how to handle their own child. While the author is profoundly aware that the baby's sleep perturbation is bound up with psychological perturbation in the parents, she is nevertheless exquisitely attuned to the anxiety and the damaged feelings of self-esteem that the consulting parents experience.
In the first pages she points out that long nights with 'sleepless crying babies [are] among the most undermining troubles a parent has to deal with'. This way of listening already sets the stage for a new approach to the problem. 'The sleep disturbance can then be a jumping-off point for real creative thinking by a family about how they all—parents, baby and other children—interact with each other.' For example, Daws goes on to point out that what happens during the day is, as often as not, as important a factor as are the events preceding the baby's bedtime. Throughout the book we discover that Daws gives practically no advice about how to cope with the sleepless babe, but by sympathizing with the parents' distres