Dear Prospective Parents,

Step away from that stack of books about childrearing and listen to me. You can go back to honing your parental philosophy in a minute, but first let me tell you the most important thing you need to know about having a baby.

I recently became a dad for the second time. As I’ve been reading (and re-reading) various parenting books, I’ve discovered something that was totally lost on me the first time around. Despite the raging debates about the right way to raise children, all of these books actually agree about two key things: how to soothe a crying infant and how to get them to sleep at night.

Once your baby comes, those are the only two things you’ll care about. Later on, you’ll need some sort of philosophical principles to guide your parenting, but for the first few weeks you’ll only want to know one thing: how do I make this baby stop crying and go to sleep?

As it turns out, this so simple that it could probably be explained in a pamphlet. But here’s the deal: pamphlets don’t often land on the New York Times Best Sellers list. If you know how to make babies stop crying, you can make good money writing a book, so these simple techniques get couched in book-length philosophical treatises instead.

Don’t get me wrong: philosophy is important. I sincerely hope you’ll invest some serious thought into the way you raise your kid. But I can guarantee you that no one has ever held a screaming 2-week-old baby and wished for more philosophy. During those endless nights, you simply want a way to make the noise stop.

Good news, friends — here it is:

How to soothe a crying baby

Dr. Harvey Karp wrote a 352-page book about how to soothe crying babies. My wife and I both read it around the time our first child was born, and we couldn’t get his technique to work at all. Later on, we watched a video where Dr. Karp demonstrated his technique, and after that our troubles went away. My advice: skip the book and just watch this YouTube clip (jump to 0:40 for the good stuff).

Most experts seem to agree that some combination of swaddling and rocking will help your baby calm down, but Dr. Karp’s technique is downright magical. If you do it right, I can pretty much guarantee that your baby will stop crying unless they’re either really hungry or in desperate need of a diaper change.

One thing I’ve learned from baby #2 is that it doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot how you swaddle. Dr. Karp loves his DUDU method, but I’ve found that rolling my little girl up like a burrito tends to work just fine. The main thing is making sure your baby’s arms are secured down by their sides so they don’t flail out of control.

What if you don’t have a blanket handy? (Or, more likely, what if the only blanket you brought with you to the grocery store is now drenched in spit up?) No sweat! Here’s a similar technique that doesn’t require a blanket at all:

I actually find that my current baby occasionally likes Dr. Hamilton’s technique better than Dr. Karp’s. However, my wife has taken to calling it the “Daddy Hold” because her hands are too small to do it comfortably. The main thing is to figure out what works best for you and your baby and do it.

How to get your baby to sleep at night

This one really blows me away. Of all the topics we 21st-century parents love to debate, sleep takes the cake as the most vehement and multifaceted. And it drives me crazy because, even though we think we’re arguing about the best way to teach a kid to sleep, we’re actually arguing about a much more philosophical question: Is it good/bad/okay/etc to let my child cry?

There’s no way I’m touching that question here. Not a chance. Luckily, I don’t have to because, regardless of how you feel about Ferber or Baby Wise or Attachment Parenting, the broad strokes about teaching your kid to sleep stay the same.

Back in 1993, a paper called “Help Me Make It Through the Night” was published in Pediatrics, which is a peer-reviewed medical journal published by the American Academy of Pediatrics. The paper was a result of some research done at the University of Illinois to determine whether infants can be taught to sleep through the night during the first 8 weeks of life. And it worked like gangbusters, folks:

At the end of 8 weeks, 100% of the infants in the test group were sleeping for at least 5 hours at a time.

100%! That’s compared to 23% of the infants in the control group.

And do you wanna know what the treatment was? The researchers gave the prospective parents a two-page handout. (I wasn’t joking when I said this stuff could be explained in a pamphlet!) Sadly, I don’t have access to that handout. I’ve read the paper, and the pamphlet wasn’t included. If anyone knows Teresa Pinilla, PhD, or Leann L. Birch, PhD, please ask them to share!

Thankfully, the paper does give some clues as to what the handout said. Here are some things you should start doing as soon as your baby is born:

Establish a scheduled feed between 10pm and midnight and make sure it happens every single night. Avoid holding, rocking, or nursing your infant to sleep. Make sure nighttime is less stimulating than daytime. When your child makes noise at night, make sure they’re actually complaining before you pick them up. If they’re only whimpering, they might still be asleep, so don’t disturb them. Once your baby is 3 weeks old, start increasing the time between nighttime feedings. If your baby wakes up during the night, don’t automatically assume they’re hungry. The paper suggests reswaddling, patting, diapering, or walking the baby first. If the baby keeps crying, then feed them. The goal is to break the association between waking up and getting fed.

This 5th step was a revelation to me. With our first child, my wife and I always assumed that, if our son cried at night, it was because he was hungry. It’s no surprise, then, that he still wasn’t sleeping through the night when he turned a year old. This time around we’ve been smarter — our daughter is only 6 weeks old and already well on her way to sleeping through the night.

So there you have it, future parents — everything you need to know to get through the first 8 weeks of your child’s life. After that, you’re on your own, so feel free to go back to reading that stack of books — after 8 weeks, things get really interesting!