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.
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 MorePut your baby down drowsy but awake is a common piece of sleep advice, but is it really something you need to do? Many parents are warned against soothing their baby to sleep in favor of teaching them to fall asleep independently. The problem is that babies don’t often cooperate, especially very young babies, and many parents’ struggle. Everyone says it’s an essential skill in forming healthy sleep habits, so when baby won’t cooperate, it’s easy to feel like a failure.
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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.