Marc Weissbluth

Who is Marc Weissbluth?

Married to his wife, Linda, for 48 years, Marc Weissbluth, MD, has been a pediatrician for more than 39 years. He is the founder of The Northwestern Children's Practice in Chicago, although he retired from clinical practice in 2013. There is a separate practice in Chicago that is run by one of his sons, but Dr. Weissbluth has no affiliation with this practice. A leading researcher on sleep and children, he founded the original Sleep Disorders Center at Children’s Memorial Hospital of Chicago in 1982 and is a Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. Dr. Weissbluth discovered that sleep is linked to temperament, that sleeping problems are related to infant colic, and he coined the now-familiar phrase “sleep training” to describe his method for helping children fall asleep. His findings that changing the time when a child is put to bed dramatically decreases the number of night awakenings were published in the prestigious journal, Sleep, in 1982. His landmark seven-year study on the development and disappearance of naps highlighted the importance of daytime sleep.