These are feelings and beliefs experienced daily by parents as they’re introduced to the culture and current climate of baby sleep training today.
“I’m guilty of rocking my baby to sleep.”
“I often nurse my baby to sleep which has caused bad habits.”
“I’m a first time mum, I didn’t know any better and now my baby has all of these unhealthy sleep associations I can’t undo. I just want to do what’s best.”
“I’m ashamed to say my baby doesn’t have a routine, I feel like I am letting her down every day for not teaching her healthy sleep habits, how do I fix this?”
“I know my baby needs to learn to self-soothe but I can’t stand to hear him cry! I rush to him straight away and scoop him up. I’m just too weak to go through with it.”
“I started reading this book by a well-known baby sleep whisperer and just a few pages in, I was feeling like I’ve done EVERYTHING wrong! I am so overwhelmed! I never realised I shouldn’t cuddle and pick up my baby so often.”
All statements made by parents (including me in my early days) which I’ve heard many times over the past few years.
After typing this, I feel like I need to go and rinse my mouth out with mouth wash … the pure rot being foisted on new parents about their care and approach to their baby’s sleep makes me physically ill.
The worst part is knowing most of the mainstream baby sleep advice offered to new parents is based on lies. Lies which have been peddled for over 100 years. You can read more in Baby Sleep ‘Tamers’- Recycling the Same Bad Advice Since 1913.
I don’t care how unpopular an opinion it may be right now, history will show this sleep training culture has deprived our babies of the nurturing care they need on a mass scale. We’re damaging human relationships from the very beginning.
What Is The Current Climate of Baby Sleep?
Sleep? There are documented studies showing sleep trained infants under the age of six months don’t get any more sleep than their non-sleep trained peers. It has also been shown sleep trained infants and toddlers night wake just as frequently, even though their parents report they don’t. This disparity is damning.
Parents are no longer in sync with their child.
They no longer know what actually goes on in the night for their baby or toddler.
This breakdown in relationship shouldn’t be underestimated.
Sure, the sleep training proponents love pedalling out studies showing no difference in secure attachment between sleep trained children and their non-sleep trained peers, but there’s still more at play here.
Sleep training sets the tone for parenting choices and approaches moving forward in a child’s life.
It sets a combative scene. Parent versus child. Us versus them. A winner and a loser.
A power play where the parent holds the power, makes decisions about how things should be and then runs with those choices regardless of how successful they are and where the child is at developmentally.
It is the forerunner to all of the ‘tough love’ decisions still held dear in society today.
Sleep training is the very first foray into rewards and punishments and placing conditions on love and attention.
It is based on a compliance model that seeks out ‘good’ behaviour and demands true feelings are masked.
What Are We Scared Of?
We need to ask ourselves – what are we afraid of? That we might grow children into adults who are so fully loved and nurtured they enter the world as their true selves and not a cookie cutter press of what society tells them to be?
Is that it?
If we don’t mould them and shape them and remould them again any time they step away from the narrative, might they just grow to be ground breakers and movers and shakers who know their value as a unique human?
Are we so fragile from generations of distant, prescriptive, hard line parenting that the first hint we’re being too human, too in touch with our inner feelings and attached, we recoil in disgust at our own nurturing behaviour?
Is that why these baby sleep bibles and sleep training whisperers we hear from the moment our baby is born feel so very wrong on a visceral level, we bow to them as ‘right’ and ‘correct’?
Maybe, it’s not so much we’re looking for this advice, but that it is given to us by the most trusted and ‘knowledgeable’ of sources. From doctors, to child health nurses, paediatricians and midwives, this advice seems to be so factual and reliable. The sleep deprivation hurts, if a trusted professional tells you that your baby is also suffering, who are you to deny this?
What if you are at the very fringe of sanity or even over that edge, and the only way you can seek the care you require for your mental health comes with the caveat you must ‘teach’ your baby to sleep alone?
What if when you refuse to comply and instead of a real alternative being offered, you are told to come back when you are willing to compromise? Your mental health or your baby’s need for night time parenting? What do you pick?
In a society who cheers a mother on as her baby cries and ‘protests’ them self to sleep but angrily swoops on anyone who dare suggest it’s okay to pick up the baby and soothe them in arms or at he breast, is a society in turmoil.
When I can’t write a post telling mothers they don’t HAVE to sleep train and there are other ways without being accused of shaming and judging those who sleep train, we know we’ve hit a raw nerve.
Human babies and toddler have always and will always need night time nurturing.
There is no number of cuddles that will ever be too much.
You will not look back at your grown children wishing you had kissed them, held them, nursed them or soothed them less, but you sure as hell may wish you had more.
Parenting our young babies and children in a nurturing responsive way often feels right deep in our heart and soul but in this current climate, it is far from easy.
It’s hard not to doubt yourself and your baby no matter how right it all feels when you are worn out, touched out and over it.
This hostile society chooses to make these vulnerable moments yet another time to tell us we’ve got it all wrong and when we are ‘ready’ we can ‘fix’ it all.
But what if we won’t stand for this anymore?
What if we as parents demand better support for this time in our lives?
What if every time someone tells us we need to train our baby, we challenge them to step up with an alternative?
What if those ‘well-meaning’ friends and family who tell us to leave our baby to cry are instead asked to come and hold our baby while we shower in peace or provide more practical assistance and much-needed emotional support and validation?
What if health professionals look beyond pathologising normal infant sleep behaviour and instead work with families to investigate adult sleep hygiene, support networks and health interventions for the family that allow the parents to continue parenting the way their child needs to be parented?
What if babies and toddlers who are exhibiting behaviour outside of the biological norm are supported through their struggle while professionals help that family explore all options for issues that may be exacerbating their normal wakeful behaviour?
What if, when we see or hear a desperately vulnerable new parent reaching out for affirmation and support, we meet them right where they are at and help them to see the incredibly important work they ARE achieving every day and nurture that exhausted nurturer until they feel like they can keep going?
We need to see an enormous shift within society and the way to achieve it is to take ownership of the role we play.
How Can I Help With The Current Climate of Baby Sleep?
Maybe it is simply a matter of nurturing out loud and proud. Nurse that baby, soothe that baby, smooch that baby, wear that baby and pour every ounce of love you feel into that little soul for all the world to see.
Perhaps you can also reach out to parents around you in your real life and online and provide the information, support, reassurance, advocacy and alternatives they need to find their way.
You can rally for better leave conditions and protections, roster flexibility, access to quality childcare and respect and recognition of value of the unpaid work going on day in night out in family homes.
If you are a health professional, take time to look at your repertoire for support, if sleep training is currently your go-to or your go-through for your clients then it’s time to reassess and broaden your approach. You can also reflect on your interactions to gauge whether you are playing into this culture that discourages nurturing behaviour and work to improve your skills.
If you are a person with influence and power in the parenting world, it’s time to step up and own your responsibility to change. If your words are absorbed by those in vulnerable and desperate positions, be mindful that you can change the course of that person’s life for good or for ill and also the life of that child. You can choose to speak up for better supports for families, you can choose to call for change from the current ‘fix-it’ model and you can do all of this even if sleep training was something you used.
Even if sleep training was the ‘best thing you ever did’ or ‘it saved my sanity’, you can still reflect on the climate that your decision was made in and recognise that maybe we could do better as a society for the future to not have parents reaching the point where they ever need saving by sleep training.
We can make this shift happen, I know because it is already underway and it has blown me a way watching the momentum grow.
I am not the sole voice in this.
I am a loud one and I do cop the most for it but it doesn’t make me solitary.
I speak for the many parents who demand better support for very tired parents and their babies.
We can and should do better than this.