Its 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.
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.
Bedsharing 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.
All parents are capable of nurturing babies and toddlers at bedtime! However, many families find themselves in a place where only one parent is doing bedtime. Whether this is a pattern formed from habit or your baby has strong preferences, you can gently shift the pattern so that both parents are involved in bedtime.
Read MoreI get a lot of questions about bedtime routines. They are a popular and important part of supporting sleep, but there’s a lot of confusion around what’s helpful when it comes to a good bedtime routine.
Simply saying start a bedtime routine and do x, y, and z every night isn’t helpful. Children are unique and they don’t all respond to the same routine in the same way. I think it’s more helpful to understand the ideas behind a bedtime routine then to tell you a formula for one.
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In an ideal world, parents talk through major parenting decisions and values ahead of baby’s arrival. However, we don’t live in an ideal world. It’s hard to know all the things you should discuss, and even when you do, it’s hard to know how you’ll feel once baby is here. The reality of your emotions and experiences can be hard to predict.