Sleep training - the evidence

[MrsMuffins]

I’ve seen lots of sleep training threads recently, and I’m finding it pretty upsetting TBH. The evidence strongly suggests that sleep training causes your baby to remain in a high stress state - they haven’t ‘self settled’, they have just learned not to cry as no one will come. Salivary cortisol (stress hormone) samples showed that cortisol levels were as elevated when baby was crying and when they had ‘settled’/gone quiet.

Studies also suggest that sleep training has no long-term effects - toddlers and older children that were sleep trained have no better sleep patterns than those who weren’t.

And most of all - night waking is NORMAL for babies! They are not designed to sleep for long periods without parental input, and frequent waking is in fact a safety mechanism that helps to prevent SIDS.

So, before you consider sleep training, please read the evidence, and consider other ways of managing your baby’s sleep. Would co-sleeping work better for you? Do you have a partner who could tag team with you for wake-ups? Can you sleep in the evening to allow you to wake in the night without being too knackered?

A good read for evidence summary - sarahockwell-smith.com/2015/05/14/ten-reasons-to-not-sleep-train-your-baby/

I don't judge you for not sleep training, so please don't judge the mums and dads who choose to. My 2yr old and 14month old are sleeping right now and without sleep training we probably would've all had a breakdown! We sleep trained them both from 7months of age, sleeping 7-7 and I still think it's the best thing we did as nothing else was working.
Kudos to the mums who can carry on with the night wakings for years but it's not for me and we are all very happy and rested.

We never left dd1 to cry. We co slept and rocked her for hours and all sorts.

She's 7yo now and has no idea how to self settle and go to sleep. She's awake now. She sleeps when she passes out from pure exhaustion.

Not sleep training hasn't done her any favours in the long run.

MrsMuffins you are clearly just citing studies that fit in with your own agenda. Knock yourself out. Do what you want to do, and believe what you want to believe, but let the rest of us get on with it in peace.

Sleep well

@normalpeeps there are people who study sleep, sleep disorders and possible treatments as a professional career, I would class these as sleep experts.
Of course there are - and I use the work of BASIS, the infant sleep lab, regularly. But they’re not the ones writing the sleep training books, are they? They’re written know by self-proclaimed ‘experts’, who are no more qualified than Sarah O-S.

I was lucky and never needed to sleep train DC1, and DC2 is not at that stage yet.

However if my DC were waking hourly or more and constantly exhausted, I am certain I would sleep train. Sleep is absolutely vital for development. If my baby wasn't getting enough to eat I would do everything I could to sort that out, I don't see how sleep is any different.

The only evidence of long term harm comes from studies of children in Romanian orphanages and yes, obviously that was completely appalling but it's not comparable to a few nights of sleep training.

Where are your research citations MrsMuffins?

What you are giving is just your opinion; that’s fine for you to base decisions on but undermines others right to make informed choices.

I thought the only extensive study into this was the Australian one?

La Leche League summarise it here
www.laleche.org.uk/letting-babies-cry-facts-behind-studies/

I don't know anyone who has just left a baby to cry. I think most people go in at regular intervals.

For me my son was crying because he wasn't asleep... He would cry if I was cuddling him, feeding him etc as he was frustrated.

I was hallucinating with tiredness with DD. If we hadn't done sleep training at 14mo I might not be here. We were all miserable, especially her, and that changed as soon as she started sleeping 7:30-7:30, rather than waking up every 45mins, for hours at a time.

I did it at 7mo with DS because it was starting to go the same way, plus he was waking DD. I couldn't have her falling asleep at school, so we did CC.

Three days of crying, one of them bad and the other two mainly just whinging. After that, sleep. Lovely, restful sleep, for all of us. Unless there's a problem, in which case they let me know (amazingly, considering how we "left them to cry"...). It was like having different children, afterwards.

Cosleeping didn't work, nor did rocking or feeding. Controlled crying did.

What no one who is adamantly against sleep training has ever explained, is why it is worse to let a baby do a concentrated burst if crying, going in at intervals, over a couple of nights, vs months or even years of waking up and crying for a few mins (until you can get to their room) multiple times a night. I too would never do the ‘close the door and leave them’ method but having had a baby who woke up every 90-120 mins and cried every time, I just can’t see how controlled crying is worse than the cumulative stress of crying at stages all night, every night.

I can’t see how controlled crying for a wk is worse than people who have toddlers who still wake up 3-7 times a night. No brain and body can sufficiently develop on such crap sleep surely.
As for learning not to cry, I can assure you my near 3 year old knows how to cry and reach out to me despite those 3 nights of training 2 years ago. As for co sleeping, my child needs to sleep at 7, I can’t go to bed at 7- so again, the solution is what keeping her up for another 3hrs- nah!

What no one who is adamantly against sleep training has ever explained, is why it is worse to let a baby do a concentrated burst if crying, going in at intervals, over a couple of nights, vs months or even years of waking up and crying for a few mins (until you can get to their room) multiple times a night.

THIS.

(My sleep training support thread may be one of the ones that sparked this post.)

To add my own anecdata, I was so tired with my second child that I drove my entire family- DH and 2DC- into three lanes of oncoming traffic. I also have no intention of being like my cosleeping friend who has been kept up every 2hs for literally years with her toddler and now-7mo. I need sleep myself in order to parent my children well and safely.

If you do any form of gentle sleep training, all you’re doing is changing your child’s sleep associations. Instead of being held/rocked etc, they learn to associate darkness and quiet with sleep- and there’s nothing wrong with that. Sleep is a skill, and we can speed up its acquisition.

Don’t want to do it, then don’t. 🤷‍♀️

That sounds terrifying @Goostacean - I'm so glad you're all ok.

I'm definitely a much better parent with sleep and my kids still communicate their feelings to me in a variety of ways.

I co slept with mine. Problem solved.

Thanks @BullshitVivienne - me too! Shook me up for days, and I’d had my licence for 12 years so it’s not like I was an inexperienced driver...

I’ve struggled to cosleep. I have tried but got good quality sleep, and the baby always woke more frequently when in bed with me- I think they could smell a snack 😂

Lynda07 until what age?

I definitely fall into the 'not sleep training your child is cruel' camp. We never did cry it out, but my son has been in a much better mood since he learnt to sleep through the night after night weaning him, and I'm a much better parent for it. Other people have posted studies and stuff, but there is no actual proper evidence on the cortisol theories.

If we have another, I will be night weaning them much sooner, and sleep training if necessary.

Pipe down Lynda.

Oh up until around GCSEs (joke) :-), onlyfools. We did all sleep well though.

Co-sleeping isn't necessarily the answer. I tried that first with DS1 because I didn't want to sleep train. It made no difference to the number of times he woke up (from every 2 hours to every 40 minutes on a bad night) and he cried every time. All it did was very slightly reduce the amount of time it took to get my nipple in his mouth to feed him back to sleep. He didn't roll over and latch on by himself or snuggle up to me. And the tiny amounts of sleep I got were terrible quality, scared of rolling onto him and on edge waiting for him to wake and cry again. He was grumpy all day, dark circles under eyes, wouldn't let anyone hold him but me. And that changed virtually overnight with sleep training and 12 hours sleep. My mum commented what a changed, happy baby he was. I don't feel bad about sleep training, it was the right thing for my baby and me. I didn't sleep train DS2 because I didn't need to. He gradually increased his sleep times all by himself until he slept through and could self settle from early on.

This just shows that babies and small children are individuals and everyone has to work out what suits each child best. There's no one theory that fits all. The important thing is that the child feels secure and parents get some quality sleep, even if it means taking it in turns to do so for a while.

They’re written know by self-proclaimed ‘experts’, who are no more qualified than Sarah O-S.

I am genuinely concerned that you seem unwilling/unable to judge someone's credentials before swallowing their advice on parenting. Psychology is a hugely popular undergraduate degree, it baffles me that you would interpret this as expertise.

There are lots of types of sleep training. I'd suggest you do some wider reading before goading posting further.

We've never ever let our DS cry at night for any longer than it takes to get from our room to his. I think it's cruel especially with the threads you have been referring to!

I want him to feel safe and secure and leaving him to cry won't help that.

Grumbling is fine crying is not!

I also want my child to feel safe and secure- and not cry at night because he knows his bed and room are safe places, and it’s okay to go (back) to sleep by himself. He knows I’m around, I’ll reassure him, I bf on demand... Different strokes for different folks.

@MrsMuffins you should check out Cribsheet, a trained economist WITH NO AGENDA evaluates a range of parenting issues by looking at high quality research. She found no evidence of crying before sleep causing long term neurological damage and lots of evidence that lack of sleep does cause development issues of its chronic. There are studies on the other side of this issue of course... but you need to evaluate whether or not the research is actually good quality as study design has a huge impact on whether the results are meaningful.

You’re also completely failing to take in to account the impact that a child not sleeping has on the other family members, both because parents are human too and their happiness has worth and because well rested parents are happier and more stable. And again, high quality research has demonstrated this has a significant positive effect on children.

The study often sited on kids crying before sleep was related to Romanian orphans, left for days with minimal human contact, not kids from loving homes left for short periods of time.

Lastly, if you talk to most adults of our parents generation they will tell you 1. Of course we left you to cry, you had to figure it out 2. Oh, I never used a baby monitor, but I’m sure you slept great or 3. My kids were all great sleepers because I wouldn’t tolerate it any other way. WE WERE ALL SLEEP TRAINED!! Are you irreversibly damaged? Because I’m pretty sure I’m not!