Is sleep a ‘learned’ skill?

[RLMCG]

How come a lot of what I read tells me that sleeping is a ‘learned skill’ but some babies have no issue at all & no one I know has been ‘sleep trained’. Is this just purely to get us to pay for sleep coaching/training?!

Falling asleep can be a learned skill, yes. For some, it seems to come quite naturally, but for others, they need to learn how to settle themselves.

DS still hasn't mastered the art of falling asleep and he is 12. (admittedly, is also not NT).

According to my parents, I was always an easy sleeper. My sister, on the other hand, really struggled to learn to sleep without being constantly rocked or touched.

Because babies are different and some babies don’t need to be sleep trained.

As with all skills, more practice means faster developmental progress.

That includes biological developmental skills - gross motor skills, fine motor skills, speech and language, sleep.

Consider speech and language...

Children who are exposed to rich speech and language will be able to make themselves understood at 5yo. So can most (NT) 5yo who have not been exposed to quality speech and language. Because both got to the same end-point doesnt devalue skills practicing to get there. The one who "practiced" consistently through those 5 years may have got there 2 or 3 years earlier than the other, and by 5yo have developed in a much broader way.

Sleep skills can similarly be practiced and learnt. Children will still ultimately get there even without practicing. But you can support children right from being newborn towards independent sleeping and they would likely be better for it.

With my DS, DS1 needed to be explicitly taught how to fall asleep (and actually this is true for many of the 'natural' skills he had to learn). DS2 was a bit hit and miss and needed guidance and support but got there in the end. DS3 used to just 'fall asleep'. It was quite surprising after the challenges with DS1 and 2. All were completely different babies - how they slept, fed, learnt, talked, etc.

Sleep training is basically a framework for getting babies to accept different sleep cues and associations. Whatever method you use, it's a way of sticking it out until your baby associates their cot and bedtime routine with sleep. Some babies take to it more readily than others.

You also get programmed with sleep habits, DH's family have silence at night so eg if you flush the loo everyone wakes and is quietly annoyed. My family have never been quiet at night, always loud music and no ones tiptoeing around - I only wake when I actually need to, not any noise. So eg I wake if DC cry out, DH gets woken by any motorbikes in the street.

If you think about it, before we had houses like we have now with separate rooms people used to sleep all in one room, there would naturally be noise around and children would sleep through it, they probably found it comforting.