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.
For many parents I talk to, this first month of 2022 has felt like a whole year of stress and overwhelm all on its own. To be truthful, we’ve been feeling that way in our house as well. When life is hard, when sleep is hard, when our children’s behavior is hard, the most important thing we can do is focus on self-regulation. That’s you, the parent, regulating your own emotions so you can show up in a calm, well-regulated state to support your baby or toddler.
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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.