What is sleep training?
When you hear “sleep training,” what do you think? Do you imagine mom’s with babies on their chest scowling at you as they communicate via telepathy that you’re ruining your chance of an emotionally stable child? Or do you imagine endless nights of a screaming baby? Or, if your brain is like mine, do you imagine a baby in 70’s workout clothes, sweatband and all, training for their chance to crawl around the track?
Rest assured, all of these images are misguided. Well, someone who doesn’t understand sleep training may scowl at the sound of it, but only because they too love their babies and don’t want any little ones suffering.
No suffering babies here! Only healthy, happy, good little sleepers.
What if I told you that you can be both a momma who loves baby-wearing, contact naps, and good sleep habits? And that no matter how many bad sleeping habits have been established, sleep training typically never goes beyond a few nights to a couple of weeks at maximum. And that, in fact, good sleep from a young age is, indeed, beneficial for their physical growth and development (let the training begin!).
So, what is sleep training? Even as I trained to be a pediatric sleep consultant, I found this term confusing. I felt like it got applied to various forms of encouraging good sleep habits in your children, but that it rarely referred to any one particular thing.
When we talk about “sleep training” in the formal sense, we are referring to the process by which you teach a baby independent sleeping skills so that they are not dependent on an outside force (you) to put them back to sleep.
This process only takes place when they are developmentally ready. Typically this happens between 4-6 months of age, when babies have developed the capacity to self-soothe. By “self-soothe” I am not referring to the very mature ability of an older child or adult to regulate their emotions, but to an infant’s ability to return to a state of sleep via the use of various common behaviors like thumb-sucking, rocking back and forth, or twirling their hair, etc.
Before 4-6 months of age, there is a lot that you can do to create healthy sleep habits (if you’re curious, check out my Sweet Sleepers Package). If these behaviors are established early enough, you may be able to avoid sleep training altogether by avoiding the establishment of sleep props.
“Sleep props” are anything that a baby depends on to fall back asleep. Some sleep props are genuinely helpful and are even recommended by sleep consultants! I love sound machines, blackout curtains and pacifiers up to a certain age. Other sleep props, like feeding, rocking, or bouncing to sleep, become problems when your child becomes so dependent on them that they cannot fall back to sleep without them. This is a problem because, like adults, babies wake intermittently throughout the night. Everyone does, we just simply don’t remember it because we are adept at going back to bed without someone coming in to give a warm glass of milk and a kiss on the forehead.
Sleep training is the process by which you give your child an opportunity to learn these pivotal self-soothing skills. And here is the thing: your child is capable of learning these skills. They just need you to trust that they are, and then to give them the space to do so. Unfortunately, any of us who have lived long enough know that opportunity for growth requires a bit of discomfort. But we also know that the skills, confidence, and experience gained are worth the temporary unpleasantness of change.
For babies, their disinclination to discomfort is communicated through tears. For some lucky few, their babies will only let out a little whimper and then gleefully go to bed on their own for ages to come. Others will be less accommodating to our aversion to baby tears and will insist persistently that they get their beloved sleep prop. But as Dr. Canapari, the director of the Yale Pediatric Sleep Center, writes, “ the crying should be getting better by the end of the first week and is usually done by two weeks” (1). He shows in a chart, taken from a study done in 2018 that looked at real-world implementation of sleep training techniques, that the majority of the crying happened on the first night, with almost all crying gone by the first week (2)! Moreover, and equally important, he notes that there is “no evidence that crying during sleep training hurts children.” Despite the many claims made by internet fear-mongerers, crying for a handful of nights will not cause attachment issues, emotional disturbances or anything of the sort. And in the end, the goal of sleep training is actually diminished tears! A few nights of increased crying for a few years of tearless nights. Sounds like a winning trade-off to me!
If you have more questions about the process of sleep-training, or if you are feeling ready to help your child learn independent sleeping skills, then please feel free to reach out and I will get back to you promptly! I look forward to hearing from you.
https://drcraigcanapari.com/how-long-will-my-child-cry-during-sleep-training/
Real-World Implementation of Infant Behavioral Sleep Interventions: Results of a Parental Survey. Honaker, Sarah M. et al. The Journal of Pediatrics, Volume 199, 106 - 111.e2