Your 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 More
I 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.
Read More
Put 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.
Read More
So many of my clients have heard comments like these on a regular basis. It makes them feel alone, isolated, and even doubt themselves.
So do I really need to teach my baby to self-soothe?
The good news is that you do not need to leave your baby to cry to teach them anything! And in fact, leaving a baby to cry is the exact opposite of how you help them calm down.
Though advice to leave a baby to cry to teach self-soothing is common, It’s incredibly outdated. So much sleep and parenting advice misses the very real neuroscience that disproves this concept as well as the important role of responsiveness in development.
Read More