Sleep Consultant

[locost27]

Hi all.

Does anyone have positive experiences of sleep consultants?

Ds is very good a going to sleep at 7 after a bath and bottle. However when he wakes during the night from about midnight he won't go back to sleep! We are exhausted and it is making our relationship difficult!

IMO they’re just frauds. It takes zero experience or qualifications to call yourself a sleep consultant, anybody could set up an Instagram and advertise themselves as one.

I would very much steer clear of any ‘consultant’ that claims they can help ‘fix’ your child’s sleep. It isn’t one size fits all OP, no two babies are the same.

may I ask how old your child is? The bit about bath and milk tells me they are still a baby? Honestly I get how hard it is, it’s exhausting but there are a million reasons as to why your baby isn’t sleeping, and there is not one single “sleep consultant” on this planet that can give you answers

it could be teething, brain development, too hot, too cold, wake windows, over stimulated, under stimulated, hungry, not feeling right, 100 other million things

babies are biologically meant to wake up overnight. Nobody wants to hear this and sleep consultants certainly won’t tell you this because what would they then be able to sell?

They will only tell you to do Ferber

What's Ferber?

It's a kind of sleep training where you let your baby cry for short periods of time. Usually 5, 10, 15, 15, 15... Minutes until the baby falls asleep on their own. In a matter of days the baby should sleep through on their own.
There people who say it's neglect and it only causes the baby to give up crying for help.
Others say it helps teach how to self soothe.
Either way. No study found it had negative effects (I've done like 4 months of research on this) but do your own research.

I would recommend you wake up your baby if she sleeps too long for a nap. Maybe she has too much daytime sleep and that's why she sleeps badly at night.

I’ve heard that some people swear by it and say it’s the best money they’ve ever spent.
Personally I have to agree that they are mostly frauds. All the information they’d give you is available on the internet, they just hold you accountable and don’t let you make excuses to change the method mid way through the night. But every baby is completely different, my DD is a horrible sleeper, absolutely awful, but I know a lot of the tips and tricks from working with children for years and I’ve successfully helped other parents with routine and consistency and achieved having babies sleep in cots when they wouldn’t before.But it’s about the child’s temperament and personality, DD will not under any circumstances sleep in any other way than being fed to sleep and put in the cot (this results in lots and lots of waking and finishing naps on the boob after 45mins) and sometimes even this takes literal hours to achieve.
I have tried it all and driven myself crazy with the ‘norms’ and ‘rules’ which DD just doesn’t fit into.
She is ten months old and has a record of keeping herself awake for ten hours no matter what I tried to do. No sleep consultant is fixing that or telling me something I don’t know or giving me a magical method to get her to fall asleep on her own.

If the money is no issue for you then maybe it’s worth a try, and if you feel it would be beneficial to have someone essentially hold your hand and not let you quit then it’s probably worth doing.

I think they're mainly frauds too unfortunately. The information they give is rarely evidence based and some, like the ones who advertise in our area, haven't even had babies.

Can I ask what you've tried so far?

The advice when you distill it all down is about toughening up with the babies. Controlled crying, worked for us after 3 days!

Agreed with previous posters. We spent £350 with Millpond to get my 12 month old to sleep. It did work but was just the ferber method with some follow up phone calls. It was a slow painful experience as my son did not settle for about 3 weeks and the advice was to continue with it despite him crying for over 2 hours on a few occasions. I think he is just strong willed and has always fought sleep. He sleeps really well now at 2 and a half years old and it did work but unfortunately I think he's the sort of child who you couldn't do gradual retreat with and was never going to settle with nudge techniques. Sleep/awake windows, gentle routines, rocking to sleep, I tried it all!