The website for Save our Sleep says this about Tizzy Hall:
“Tizzy Hall is The International Baby Whisperer and bestselling author of the Save Our Sleep® series.
Her program focuses on teaching parents to identify issues that are affecting their baby or toddlers sleep, to interpret their children’s cries and to deal with the inevitable sleep problems when they do arise. Consequently, it gives parents back their own sleep.
Tizzie’s SOS offers a complete service to allay a large range of parenting concerns. In addition to sleep solutions, Tizzie is an experienced consultant in positive discipline methods, dietary and home environmental consulting, potty training, toilet training and cot to bed transitions to name a few. She can also supervise or develop programs to get children on and off bottle-feeding or to eliminate dummy dependency and thumb-sucking. Tizzie’s tried and tested approach will teach you how to deal with the known and the unknown causes of sleep, behavioural and developmental issues in baby’s and toddlers based on many years of experience with young children.”
Tizzy has come under a lot of critisism for her methods recently and the very best article I have seen about this is from the qualified and very experienced breastfeeding counsellor behind Analytical Armadillo.
The article is so long that is is split into two –
Part One , explores restricting breastfeeding frequency, some of Tizzie’s ideas and why I think mums planning on following Tizzie’s advice should be cautious…
Part Two. which explores Tizzie’s recommendation to also limit the duration of feeds.
Here is a little snippet:
“In her book “Save Our Sleep”, Tizzie firstly suggests that feeding “on demand” may be linked to obesity in later life.
“If your baby knows you will keep offering him a snack every couple of hours, he will never feel the need to have a full feed. Putting your baby on a routine gets him into the habit of filling right up when you offer the breast or bottle, because he soon learns it will be quite some time before you make the offer again.”
and
“Teaching bad habits:
If you feed your baby every time he cries, you run the risk of teaching him that the answer to all his emotional ups and downs is to eat, irrespective of whether he is actually hungry. For example, if a baby is tired and crying because he doesn’t know how to put himself to sleep, feeding teaches that he needs to eat in order to fall asleep. If a bored and crying baby is picked up and fed he starts to understand that if he is bored then eating will help.
My problem with this is that as your baby turns into a toddler, his whingeing will see you starting to replace bottles or breastfeeds with a piece of fruit or a biscuit which reinforces the regime of feeding him when he cries. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why we now see a lot of obesity in children and teenagers, and why others eat to solve emotional imbalance.”
What doesn’t get a mention in the “obesity ponderings” is that not breastfeeding has long been linked with increased risk. But that aside really just how healthy is “filling right up”? Don’t recommendations now support responsive feeding regardless of how an infant is fed?
Breastmilk is digested within a couple of hours, so a baby eating every couple of hours isn’t “snacking” – but eating normally. Little and often is actually exactly how humans are supposed to eat, it keeps blood sugars stable and promotes normal metabolism. Paul Mckenna’s whole diet theory is based on adults learning to re-recognise when they are full, but at what point did they forget? Milk is all an infant gets, their tummies are much smaller than ours – yet I wonder how many people reading ensure no food or drink passes their lips unless three hours has passed?
Lynne Daniels, a professor of nutrition at Queensland University of Technology, Australia, and researcher with the Early Prevention of Obesity in CHildren (EPOCH) collaboration, has demonstrated routine fed infants were heavier at 14 months than those fed responsively.
“If the mother is responsive, she is responding to the child’s cues of hunger and not over-riding them. Whereas, if a mother feeds in schedule, she decides whether or not he is hungry.”
You can read the full articles, which are packed with references at www.analyticalarmadillo.co.uk
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