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.
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 MoreAt some point many parents wonder if it’s still normal for their child to wake at night and need them. I hear many parents of toddlers frustrated and concerned that their toddler is still waking. So many parents expect wake ups in the first year but are unprepared for them to continue into the toddler years.
Having a realistic understanding of toddler sleep is just as important as understanding baby sleep norms. Toddlers are complex and dynamic, and their sleep can mirror the ups and downs of their development. It’s normal for toddlers to wake at night.
Read MoreNighttime parenting is hard work. It’s helpful to have some tools to support yourself when your doubting your parenting choices or up in the middle of the night and feeling completely done.
Here are a few tools centering around how we talk to ourselves about nighttime parenting with some specific affirmations and reframing ideas.
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.
Read MoreSo many of my clients have heard comments like these on a regular basis. It makes them feel alone, isolated, and even doubt themselves.
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 MoreThe other day I was talking with a client about how hard it is when your little fights naps! It reminded me of my own struggles with a toddler who won’t nap. My daughter was fighting her nap so hard, even though she was tired. This wasn’t the first or last time she refused a much-needed nap, and every time the struggle is real!
Read MoreI’m going to do something a bit different in this post and share a client story through my own words and my clients.
When E reached out to me, she was tired, anxious, and at a loss for how to improve their sleep situation. Her 2-year-old daughter, S, needed to be both bounced and rocked to sleep, and it had become physically exhausting, stressful, and unsustainable.
Read MoreThe word gentle is popping up everywhere! So many professionals are using gentle to describe what they do. It’s become a marketing buzz word, and the more it’s used, the less clear it is what gentle actually means.
Read MoreAre you ready for the time change?
I’ll be honest, I completely forgot about it until last week. It snuck up on me. This year it’s November 1st so we get Halloween and a time change all in one weekend!
Read MoreRoutines and rituals are an essential part of family life. They create predictability and security. They provide comfort and connection. They give us familiar structure for our days, for our transitions.
With so much uncertainty and upended routines, finding family rituals and routines to anchor and connect you during these times is a powerful tool.
Read MoreI hear so many parents confused and conflicted about bedsharing. Is it safe? Is it ok to do?
Let’s go through some of the recommendations and things you may want to consider.
Read MoreWhat happens when you are too tired, drained, and burnt out to work on sleep? When you are too exhausted to give any energy to improving sleep? When you can’t see where your next opening will come to improve things, so you just keep your head down and keep going…
Read MoreBedtime is hard. Most of us aren’t at our best at the end of the day. You are tired, probably still have a million things you want to do, and just want some personal space. Your child is tired, maybe overstimulated, and wants nothing more than to stay close to you. Or perhaps you have a child with a major case of FOMO, fear of missing out!
Read MoreSo many parents start asking “When will my baby sleep through the night” early on in their child’s life. Our culture places a strong emphasis on babies sleeping through the night. This view shapes new parent’s focus and expectations. From friends to family to pediatricians the questions and messages are the same. It is your responsibility to get your baby sleeping through the night as soon as you can. If your baby doesn’t sleep for long stretches, then you are doing something wrong, hurting their development, and undermining their ability to sleep forever!
Read MoreSupporting sleep with littles in the family is hard, even at the best of times. These are not the best of times. Your whole routine has likely been thrown out.
Read MoreSo often nighttime parenting tends to fall on one parent, particularly in nursing families. The nursing parent takes sole responsibility for nighttime parenting because nursing is such an effective way to get baby to sleep. If this works for your family, there is no need to change anything.
Read MoreI’m very excited to have expanded my business with a new service, Infant Sleep Education. With so many different approaches to sleep, I feel that it’s important to share a little bit about what Infant Sleep Education is and isn’t. I hope you will find this Q & A helpful for learning more about this great approach to sleep.
Read MoreI’m excited to share the next post in my series on great people and businesses working with pregnant and new parents in the DC area. I’d like to introduce you all to Nikki Wray, Co-Founder of Metropolitan Doulas. It’s been wonderful to hear more about her story, and pick her brain on some tips for postpartum families. Nikki’s love of her work and supporting parents is one of the things that really shines through when you talk to her, and I hope this interview lets you see that.
Read MoreI’m so excited to be starting a new, on-going blog series about the amazing people serving pregnant and new parents in the DC area. In this first post, you will hear from Tracie, a massage therapist in Capitol Hill and owner of My Orange Wellness.
Read MoreBreastfeeding is natural. You are busy. There are so many things to do to prepare for birth and the arrival of your baby. Adding one more thing to your crazy schedule seems laughable. What is there to learn anyway?
So why should you make time for a prenatal breastfeeding class? Here are 5 reasons.
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.