Any parent who has googled baby sleep has surely come across the suggestion that feeding to sleep is a bad habit, a crutch, a negative association that should be avoided at all costs. As an attachment focused sleep and parent coach, I routinely support my clients to improve their family’s sleep situation while respecting the biological norm of feeding to sleep.
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
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 […]
Swaddling is one of the most common pieces of advice new parents are given, but this dated practice has become more controversial in recent years.
What is Lorem Ipsum? Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also […]
