There’s a lot of opinions on baby sleep. Scroll through Instagram; spend some time on google; talk to your pediatrician; ask a friend or family member….everyone has ideas about how your baby should sleep. The problem is that many of our deeply held beliefs about baby sleep are more cultural belief than biological fact.
Read MoreThe four month sleep regression is tough! And, if you're first time parents, it can hit even harder. Here's some encouragement and advice for you. You are not alone! Suddenly your baby is fussier, fighting sleep, waking more, and needing more support to go back to sleep. You may be wondering if you did something wrong, or if there’s anything you should be doing to get sleep back on track.
Read MorePreparing for a new baby and still struggling with sleep? Whether you are thinking about another baby or already pregnant, it’s normal to have a lot of worries about how you’ll manage sleep with a newborn and your older child. If your child is still a challenging sleeper, it can add additional stress. In my work with parents, I hear a lot of the same questions and concerns.
Read MoreThere’s nothing worse than a little one awake for hours in the middle of the night! You want to sleep, and they are ready to party. While this is normal for babies in the first months before they develop a circadian rhythm, it can also be a common struggle for some older babies and toddlers. Long awake periods in the middle of the night are often referred to as split nights.
Read MoreIts effects on parenting around sleep are powerful, and parents feel that pressure. When you dig into the research on sleep training, however, you find that it isn’t as soundly supported as many parents and professionals believe. In this post, I’m highlighting 10 facts about sleep training research that everyone should know to make informed decisions about how you support sleep for your children.
Read MoreWhat does an intentional end to bedsharing look like? How do you set yourself up for success moving forward? It can be challenging transitioning away from bedsharing without a clear idea of what the journey might look like. Generally you just hear a lot of worst case scenarios and bedsharing blame.
This article features an outline of realistic expectations for your child’s sleep in the first 5 years, updated for 2022. It can be hard to know what healthy sleep patterns even are at each age. This article will cover healthy and developmentally appropriate sleep expectations for infants and toddlers by age. Download this as a PDF for an easy reference.
Read MoreSleep hygiene is our sleep environment, behaviors, and daily patterns that promote good quality sleep. It’s not just what happens in the evening, however. Your whole 24 hours contributes to how well you and your little one sleep at night.
Read MoreYour baby’s sleep is not a reflection of your parenting. Sleep is involuntary and not in anyone’s conscious control. A parent’s role isn’t to force or micro-manage a child’s sleep, but to set up conditions that support sleep. The goal is to create an environment where your child is tired, relaxed, and feels safe and secure in order to sleep well. And well for a baby includes some amount of waking.
Read MoreNaps. Something all parents want and some babies fight! Naps are an area that confuse and frustrate so many parents I talk with. There’s so much misinformation out there, some of which really undermines finding a nap rhythm that works for your family. Below are some of the most common questions I get from parents in my sleep classes and coaching support.
Read MoreBedsharing is a wonderful, biologically normal way to care for your baby at night. It’s also a big controversy in safe sleep. Since many pediatricians only focus on a “just don’t” attitude towards bedsharing, parents are stuck trying to navigate safe sleep messages and the reality of nighttime parenting. In this guide, I’ll answer some of the many questions I hear from parents about sleeping with their baby, cosleeping safety, bedsharing, and many questions that I also asked as a new parent.
Read MoreOne of the most common questions I get this time of year is how do I support sleep during the holidays? Whether it’s travel, hosting family, or just a lot of different events, there is a lot to navigate. You want to enjoy the time without undermining your littles sleep too much, and there can be a lot to consider. Below are some of the most common questions and areas of struggle I hear from parents struggling with what to do about infant and toddler sleeping arrangements during travel.
Read MoreYou are tired. Your little one feeds a lot over night. You aren’t sure if nighttime nursing is a help or making sleep worse. You think you might be ready for night weaning, but you’re not sure if it’s the right thing to do.
Read MoreOlder baby and young toddler sleep is a dynamic time with many developmental changes that can affect sleep. One of these phases that can make sleep more of a challenge is separation anxiety. Understanding separation anxiety, sleep, and ways to support your little one through it can make this phase less of a struggle.
Read MoreFeeding to sleep is a healthy sleep habit. The belief that it is not came from opinion not science. Feeding to sleep is normal, common, and healthy. If you want to feed to sleep do so with confidence. If you think it’s time to change things, that’s ok too.
Read MoreSo many parents reach out to me with concerns about contact naps. Sometimes they are worried about long-term sleep independence. Sometimes it’s more about sustainability. Sometimes is just an overwhelming need to start moving away from all contact sleep. Both my kids have been huge contact sleepers, so I know the struggle!
Read MoreIf you are the nursing parent doing all or most of the nighttime parenting, you may have a whole lot of mixed emotions. You may love the closeness of those quiet, snuggly feeds in the middle of the night or feel touched out. You may love feeling needed while also wanting some more freedom and to share the effort with your partner. You may cope ok with disrupted sleep or be desperately tired.
If you are the other parent in this dynamic, it’s easy to feel helpless. To want to support your partner, but to have no idea how.
Read MoreThere’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.
Here are three shifts you can make to improve sleep while decreasing overwhelm.
Read MoreDepending on your social circles, sleep training is a given, a tool reluctantly used to improve sleep, or something to strongly oppose. In all the controversy surrounding sleep training safety, efficacy, necessity, and whether or not it’s moral, we rarely stop to consider how the concept got started. Sleep training, however, is a relatively new entirely western idea. It is a concept that emerged from changing values, shifting cultural norms, and the beliefs of prominent physicians in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
We live in a sleep training culture. Over the last 200 years, our values and beliefs have shifted leaving few parents and professionals familiar with biologically normative feeding and sleep patterns. Even modern pediatricians have minimal training on developmentally normal sleep and lactation. Modern life makes these norms difficult to support, and the response by our systems has been to push change on babies rather than develop new ways of supporting families.
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