How to help your family get better sleep without sleep training
There’s so much conflicting and confusing information on baby and toddler sleep. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and stuck between what feels right and what everyone says you should do. So often parents feel as though they have two options, sleep train or do nothing and struggle along until time improves things. However, there are a range of gentle, responsive ways to support sleep without sleep training.
Three shifts you can make to improve sleep while decreasing overwhelm.
When you can approach sleep with confidence and attuned to your intuition, you’ll know what choices are right for your family. These shifts open new opportunities for supporting sleep but also can redefine what it means to support healthy sleep.
1. Shift your expectations: from sleep training cultural expectations to developmentally informed expectations
The fact is that much of our parenting advice around sleep relies on outdated ideas about how babies and toddlers should act and sleep, rather than coming from what we know is developmentally normal. The emphasis is on controlling behavior, disconnection, and pushing independence- something at odds with what children need in the early years as well as many parents’ instincts. While we can trace the roots of these ideas to some key figures in the late 1800s/early 1900s, science has come a long way since then.
The unrealistic expectations start early on. I bet you’ve heard some of these:
“Are they sleeping through the night yet?”
“Nursing to sleep is a bad habit.”
“Are they a good sleeper?”
Basically, the idea is that your baby should sleep independently, without needing you, and all night long as early as possible….
Except not only is that not how babies and toddlers sleep, but it’s actually not healthy!
Babies and toddlers are meant to wake at night. It’s normal, common, and healthy. Short sleep cycles, more time in REM sleep, the need for frequent feeds, and the need for touch and connection are some of the many reasons little ones wake at night. Sleeping lightly is protective for babies, especially in the first 6 months. Both deep sleep and REM (lighter, dreaming sleep) are important for growth and development. In fact, REM sleep is when a baby’s brain is busy creating new neural connections and consolidating all the many things they are learning. It’s protective for young babies to have high amounts of REM sleep and sleeping too long and deep is thought to raise the risk of SIDS. Research studies show the majority of babies are waking during the first year and into early toddlerhood.
Supporting your baby to fall asleep is biologically normal and not a bad habit. This includes feeding, rocking, and holding to sleep. The idea the babies should fall asleep independently is purely a cultural view. Little ones are hard wired to need touch, closeness, and connection to feel safe and secure enough to sleep well.
Shifting your expectations will allow you to work with your little one rather than trying to force them into sleep patterns that don’t match their needs. It will allow you to let go of the stress that comes from struggling to meet sleep standards that seem so far out of reach.
2. Shift your focus: from an independence focus to an attachment focus
As mentioned above, the expectation is that we need to get our children as independent as possible as soon as possible. Our culture over focuses on this idea of independence and devalues the importance of nurture. I bet you’ve heard comments along these lines:
“Responding to babies create sleep problems.”
“You need to teach to self-sooth by leaving them to cry.”
“if you respond/carry/hold/nurture you will spoil them.”
Babies don’t need us to push them into independence. They need us to nurture them so that they can grow into independence.
Decades of research on attachment and brain development tells us that consistent, loving, and responsive parenting promotes optimal development. When we respond, we build trust. We show our child that that their needs are valid, someone cares, and the world is a safe place. This message is literally being wired into their brain and will affect their physical, mental, and emotional health throughout their life. Sleep is no exception to the need for nurture!
Babies have physical and emotional needs day and night. Parenting is a relationship, and half that relationship happens at night. Our little ones don’t stop needing us just because it’s time to sleep. Humans are social sleepers so the need to stay connected to you at night is evolutionarily hardwired for survival. Don’t be afraid of nurturing around sleep. Nurturing is a healthy sleep habit.
As for the idea of self-soothing, it’s simply not possible until children are older. To self-soothe, you need to be able to regulate or control your emotions. You need the rational part of your brain to communicate with the emotional and survival parts of your brain. Babies do not have the necessary brain development to regulate their emotional state. Young children need a calm adult to calm down which helps their brain build the pathways for regulation when they are older. You help a baby build this foundation for self-regulation through co-regulation, responding, and modeling.
To truly raise independent children, we need to nurture and respond. Connection supports long-term independence and also sleep in the short and long-term far more than pushing independence. The most important thing we do in the early years is to have a connection, attachment focus.
3. Shift your perspective: from a behavioral lens to a holistic lens.
Our culture has a narrow view of healthy sleep and how to improve it. Behavior is the center focus, and the messages commonly shared reinforce this:
“Ignore their crying and they will sleep through.”
“Follow this schedule. Do x, y, and z and your baby will sleep like mine.”
“Sleep train!”
So much advice around ignoring behaviors, changing behaviors, and strict schedules. Sleep is not primarily behavioral, however, and there are many factors influencing how your little one sleeps.
Sleep is not under your voluntary control. You cannot force someone else to fall asleep any more than you can force yourself to go to sleep.
You can, however, set up good sleep conditions and a lifestyle that supports healthy sleep. This means understanding good sleep hygiene, having routines and sleep timings based around your baby’s individual needs, and understanding what is realistic for their developmental phase and temperament. If you do need or want to change something behavioral, there are many gentle, responsive ways to navigate that change. It also means taking responsibility for your own sleep rather than placing all the blame on your baby’s waking.
Our culture teaches us that all our exhaustion as new parents is due to our baby waking. While it’s certainly a factor, it is not the only (or sometimes even the biggest) factor. So many other factors affect parental sleep such as mental health, stress, expectations, attitudes and beliefs around sleep, mindset, over commitment, support (or lack of), sleep hygiene for parents, nutrition, exercise, and time outdoors. Many of these factors are easier to change than baby’s sleep. In fact, when these holistic factors are overlooked, many parents will still feel exhausted even when baby is sleeping for longer stretches.
Additionally, the single-minded focus on baby sleep puts the burden of change on baby, the most vulnerable member of the family. Nine times out of ten baby’s sleep is normal. It’s not a sleep problem; it’s a societal problem. We need to find ways to balance our baby’s needs with our owns in a sustainable way.
Focusing on behavior as the root of sleep problems misses out on so many opportunities to improve sleep in a way that works with biological norms. Sleep is complex and dynamic. Reducing it to a simple behavioral perspective misses identifying the underlying needs that shape sleep.
Making these 3 shifts means actively taking a different path than many of your friends and families. It can take conscious effort to shift the way we think about and react to the mainstream sleep paradigm. In these shifts, however, there is room for confidence, connection, and knowledge! So, I invite you to shift your expectations, your focus, and your perspective, and to step into a new definition for what it means to support healthy sleep.
And, if you want help, support, and guidance on that journey, reach out. I’m here to help. Click below to get started with a consultation.