Sleep Training - What is it and what isn’t it?
Sleep training. It’s a hot and often contentious topic in parenting, but it really doesn’t have to be. Parent on parent judgement and the spreading of misinformation have given sleep training a bad reputation – one it doesn’t deserve. In this blog, I am going to address what sleep training is and what sleep training isn’t in an effort to clear up some of the confusion.
Let’s start with what sleep training is. It’s pretty simple. Sleep training is teaching your child to fall asleep independently, that is, without assistance from movement or a prop. I would say that 95% of the families I work with enlist my help because their child has become dependent on something to fall asleep, whether it be motion, nursing, a bottle, a pacifier, a parent in bed with them, etc., and parents don’t know how to break the cycle. With these families, we create opportunities for the child to practice being put in their safe sleep space with the absence of their usual crutch and implement strategies for how the parent is going to respond, usually offering some degree of support for bedtime and wake ups until the dependence on that crutch no longer exists.
This is the part that I think parents have a hard time with and where the misinformation begins. The crying. Babies are creatures of habit, and inevitably, when you change some element of their routine or do things in a new way, they’re going to have feelings about it. They also only have one way of communicating their feelings and needs until they are verbal; crying. But I say this to my clients all the time and it really is true: Not all crying is the same. Not all crying is communicating fear, pain, or abandonment. In fact, crying is a very healthy form of communication and it’s important for children to be given the right and space to express themselves rather than being immediately pacified in order to stop the noise. It’s also important for parents to tune into the crying to learn what their child is trying to communicate. I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve worked with that have learned through the process of sleep training that they were misinterpreting their child’s cries as true distress when their child was actually communicating “I’m tired and I don’t know how to fall asleep,” or “This is new and I don’t prefer it.” So many of my clients have reported being able to better discern what their child’s cries truly mean as a result of the sleep training process, which is always one of my favorite pieces of positive feedback!
I’ve sort of begun to allude to this, but now let’s talk about what sleep training is not. Sleep training is not necessarily leaving your child to “cry it out” as you will often hear asserted. Is cry it out, or extinction, a method of sleep training? Yes. Is it appropriate for every family, for every child, for every age, for every circumstance? Absolutely not. Are there moments where it is appropriate? Absolutely. And the only person that can judge what is and is not appropriate for an individual family is the family itself (with the guidance of their pediatrician and their sleep consultant should they choose to seek my input in their method selection). Period. If you’ve heard that sleep training is synonymous with cry it out, you’ve probably also heard that allowing your child to cry for any amount of time will damage them in some way or affect the parent-child attachment. This is not true. Please reference this post for more information on the topic.
I hope this helped clear up some confusion and dispel some myths about sleep training. Sleep training is perfectly healthy and can be game-changing for parents and children alike, both in terms of mental and physical health.
If you have questions about sleep training or would like to schedule a discovery call with me to discuss the process of working together to sleep-train your child, please click here.
