One of the primary reasons sleep training is recommended to parents is to break the ‘habit’ of breastfeeding to sleep. Between the suggestion that feeding to sleep is a crutch, and the idea that it can lead to dental problems, parents are both shamed and fear mongered into stopping something that may be working both for them and for their baby. Add to this the fact that there is information circulating online about whether or not feeding to sleep can cause dental issues, and you have a recipe for disaster if you’re a parent whose child routinely nurses to sleep.
First, I think it’s important to know that everyone wakes at night. This is why the concept of “linking sleep cycles” exists (even though I don’t believe this is something that can be ‘fixed’ or ‘taught’). Sleep is our most vulnerable state and we are biologically designed to wake periodically to assess the safety of our environment.
The biggest factor in differentiating between day and night is exposure to light. This is what sets an infant’s circadian rhythm, which begins to develop around six weeks of age and is usually set between three and six months (Yates, 2018). Darkness at night supports consolidates sleep, and exposure to light can interfere with this.
There are a lot of challenges with modern day sleep training. But, as someone who advocates for sleep solutions that do not include the ‘traditional’ methods, you might be surprised to hear me say that the biggest challenge with sleep training is not the crying in and of itself. Instead, the biggest problems with sleep training are
As many millennial parents can attest, the authoritarian parenting of our childhood has made it difficult for many of us to regulate our own emotions and respond in a supportive and nurturing way to our children’s emotions. Just think of how easily triggered we are by our children’s tantrums, and even further, their resistance when we ask for something to be done? Tell me you were expected to be ‘seen and not heard’ as a child without telling me
One of the things I love about a non-sleep training approach to sleep is that it allows space to consider all of the external factors that may be influencing a child’s sleep. In our house, this has been so critical to helping our family get better sleep. For my middle son, in particular, we have […]
Hard truth: Some of the information presented by the sleep training industry sounds so logical, that at one point in time, I even believed it myself. The problem is, much of it is based on just nothing at all. Take this little doozy, about the ‘crutch’ you’re creating by supporting your child at bedtime. The […]
When I was a first time mom, the parenting landscape looked a lot different than it does today. Responsive parenting was not mainstream, and there was a lot of pressure to follow certain ‘rules’. When my baby was 6 months old, we did the only thing we were told we could do about our “sleep […]
If you’ve worried about whether your newborn needs to be on a schedule, you’ve probably come across the most commonly recommended schedule: the infamous ‘eat, play, sleep’, or EASY (eat, awake time, sleep, you time) routine. This typically fits best if you already have an easygoing (no pun intended!) baby, who likely would have fallen […]
If you can believe it, these words actually came out of someone’s mouth 😱 It won’t surprise you that this golden tidbit 🙄came from the sleep trainer we used, during a takeover on an account I follow. Skipping your sunscreen once isn’t 𝙙𝙖𝙣𝙜𝙚𝙧𝙤𝙪𝙨, but it may have undesirable side effects. Drinking and cutting your own […]
