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/

@MrsMuffins how old are your children and how often do they wake at night?

Yanbu op, we don't believe in sleep training either but it's very heavily entrenched in western culture so you'll get a lot of criticism on this thread.

No it's much healthier to let your baby wake up constantly through the night and cry and wake the mum up and you both be sleep deprived for years and years. Yeah, that's much more healthy no stress involved in that

Mum forums are full of exhausted mums with 1/2/ even 3 years olds who haven't slept properly in years because of judgy advice like this. And funnily enough these babies must have cried way more than sleep trained babies if you add up all those wake ups.

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.

Jesus, I didn't know that this was the study that is so often quoted on MN as conclusive evidence sleep training is cruel. Might be one or two extrapolating variables with a sample of children who had experienced horrific and consistent neglect.

A sleep deprived baby is full of cortisol, which is like experiencing long term stress. It's corrosive and will have an impact on their ability to engage with others and the world around them.

You can say you don't believe in sleep training. I don't think attachment parenting is the way to go, but this doesn't make it wrong for everyone. Some babies may respond to it brilliantly, others might not. Babies are as different as we are and sleep training is just one approach that works for some.

@firstimemamma no it is not "heavily entrenched in western culture". My family are all from Asia and I can tell you now that multiple nightwaking, crying, resettling etc. is NOT the norm.

People live with multiple generations and the advice from the older generations? Have they had enough to eat? Yes, then put them down and leave them to it, they will learn. Ain't no-one in a large household going to tolerate bad sleeping.

Sick of people thinking that in developing countries parents somehow just roll with everything and are earthly Mother Nature types that only do attachment parenting be because 'that's the most natural thing' 🙄

If anything it's better there as there is no sleep training debate because it hasn't been defined, it is a given that after the first few months your child will sleep through the night.

@normalpeeps I find this very interesting and confirms my thoughts on how it must be in other cultures. people often like to say how different it is in the modern world when it used to ‘take a village’ to raise a baby, but in other countries it is still like that when large families live together... but no one is going to be winning if the whole ‘village’ is severely sleep deprived! 😂

I used to use this board a fair amount 3 years ago when my eldest was a baby and we were really struggling with her sleep and people like OP are the biggest problem and the very reason I rarely come on any more. I really struggle to understand how anyone can be so narrow minded in that they are unable to see that not all babies are the same and not all parents are the same. Are you so clueless that you cannot see that judgemental, ill-informed posts like this can be the tipping point for a mother who is desperately struggling with no sleep, possible PND and possible additional anxiety around current climate??

As many others have said, SOS is no sleep expert – she strongly promotes attachment parenting and all her books revolve around this. I have read most of her books but my opinion is that the Sleep book is useless for a desperate parent; the evidence is cherry picked to suit her agenda, and often taken out of context as the poster above as commented with regards to Romanian orphans. There are also a few parts where she contradicts herself later in the book. It makes good light reading when pregnant so that a new mum’s expectations on baby sleep are set correctly but her method is not the only way. She has a very convincing way of phrasing all her books as though her way is the only correct way to parent and everything and everyone who does otherwise is wrong and this is what I dislike about her.

As a paediatrician, I can assure you that sleep ‘experts’ do exist, however the children they see are those with other medical conditions where they condition itself or medication affects their sleep. As I am fortunate to have colleagues who work in the field, I did ask for their opinion before going down the sleep training route with my daughter (in addition to reading and scrutinising every single bit of medical evidence I could get my hands on). There is absolutely no evidence sleep training causes long term harm. The cortisol study also does not demonstrate harm and if the reader understands why and how cortisol is secreted, they would be able to come to this conclusion very quickly.
(Also just FYI – my 3.5 year old still sleeps more in 24 hours than she did when she was between 2-5 months of age pre-sleep training. That’s how sleep deprived she was before we did something about it)

Before making such nasty posts, maybe consider what you wanted to achieve from this thread. Parents who sleep train are usually desperate and surviving on bare minimal sleep, sometimes with the entire house being disrupted and elder siblings also suffering too. As someone above has mentioned, she nearly had a fatal accident due to sleep deprivation – do you feel better for guilt tripping her for doing what was clearly best for her family? Sleep deprivation is linked to PND and mothers often live with the guilt of PND for the rest of their lives even though they are not to blame. They are NOT parents who are complaining because they had to get up to feed their baby just once.

I suggest you develop some empathy and kindness towards fellow parents and appreciate their tolerance for lack of sleep is likely to differ from yours and their baby will also differ from yours.

Sleep training is such an emotionally charged subject. We sleep trained our DS when he was 6 months old. We were broken, hadn't slept in the same bed at the same time for 6 months, we were both surviving on 5 hours a night and co-sleeping didn't make a difference. The problem was that every nap was a struggle, it'd take 40 minutes of rocking or feeding to get a 40 min nap, exactly the same all through the night too.

All babies are different, a friend's baby slept through from 6 weeks, but ours took till 15 months!

The biggest critics of sleep training are those that didn't need to use it, so respect our decision and our need to use it.

@riddles26 what a well articulated and intelligent post 👏

OP if you find it upsetting don't read the thread.

This is a personal decision every parent makes.

Sleep Training culture is awful. The idea of sacrificing your childs needs including comfort so parents get more sleep is just weird to me. I'll never understand how people think leaving a baby to cry themselves to sleep is ok. I don't get if it was done to an adult how it would be classed as abusive but not for a vulnerable child by those who are pro cc or cio.

So many unrealistic expectations and the eagerness to force our babies to not be babies as soon as they come out of us. Totally ignoring their biology and what's normal and healthy.

Parents health is very important but I think it shouldn't come as the cost of your child. They need a responsive caregiver. More research shows that it can be detrimental, our local NHS Trust discourages sleep training too.

BASIS, UNICEF UK have great evidence based information and don't advise sleep training.

A brilliant group on Facebook called the beyond sleep training project has a great library of recent research and debunking the myths that you need to sleep train.

Oh give over. Like I've pointed our before, it's great if you don't need to sleep train, go feel morally superior to us that needed to.

You cannot tell me that it's normal for a 6 month old to take 45 minutes to settle to sleep, only to wake 45 minutes later and need another 45 min of settling? And that was with co-sleeping. The only way DH and I got any sleep at all was because we did it in shifts and slept in the spare room.

It wasnt about getting more sleep or getting DS to sleep through, it was about getting some sleep period. Our DS gets more sleep now at almost 21 months than he's ever done, at 6 months every single nap was in the sling while I trudged around the streets just trying my best just to stay sane. I need up with PND too, so should I have done more? Been a better parent??

Well, this thread has reinforced the idea that the whole debate is as polarising as politics and equally as unlikely to find anyone being suddenly persuaded to switch to the other side by reading what someone has written on the Internet (or in books it seems).

But it does seem the completely anti-ST people just will not acknowledge the idea that a child who is not getting enough sleep themselves and spends a portion of every single night crying (not to mention whinging all day from tiredness) is not really fitting into the idea of the ‘normal and healthy’ sleep trope. It would be good if some people could consider there is a happy medium of more gentle methods and stop trying to make people feel bad!

they haven’t ‘self settled’, they have just learned not to cry as no one will come.

That's not sleep training. You don't just leave them to cry in the cot on their own. You keep going back every few minutes to reassure them you are still there and not far away.

The baby crys at first because they think they have been abandoned. You show them that's not the case, they are safe and mummy is just outside. That's also why you don't sleep train until they are old enough to understand.

You seem to be referring to locking a newborn in a room to cry it out. Which no-one would advocate.

If done properly you will have a much happier more content child. My dd skips up to bed and is full of smiles and cuddling her teddy. She's not even 2 yet. I have friends with 3 year olds that are distressed and crying every night because they want to sleep in mum and dad's bed with them from 7pm.

I hate self appointed parenting experts.

The best advice you will ever get is do what is best/works for you and your baby and follow your instincts.

That's not sleep training. You don't just leave them to cry in the cot on their own of course it isn’t- not one person I know trained this way, it was always gentle retreat with timed returns to reassure their baby.
I really don’t care if people cosleep with their children until they are 5, wake up 6/7 times a night, I do though assume they only have one kid and no job but each to their own. But the part I struggle with is these are inevitably the people who then post “help my 6 year old won’t sleep” errr no shit!

And yet you advocate co-sleeping which is proven to increase rates of SIDS.
Leave people to parent their children as they see fit.

Thank you @doadeer, I feel passionately about not judging another's circumstances as none of us know what it is like in another person's shoes.

@TakeMeToTheDarkSideOfTheMoon
The idea of sacrificing your childs needs including comfort so parents get more sleep is just weird to me.
First and foremost, sleep training does not involve withdrawal of comfort. CIO (where you leave the child and do not return) is absolutely NOT recommended anywhere.
Secondly...
Please elaborate how allowing a child to get sufficient rest at night so they are able to be happy and play, socialise, learn, go to nursery during the day is sacrificing their needs.
Please elaborate how allowing a parent to be able to function and be able to look after their child(ren) in the day safely is a sacrifice to your child's needs.
Please elaborate how allowing a parent to be able to work safely and earn money to keep a roof over the family's head is sacrificing the child's needs.
Please elaborate how allowing a parent to be able to perform basic functions such as driving safely without causing an accident which could potentially injure both their children and other road users is sacrificing their child's needs.

Parents health is very important but I think it shouldn't come as the cost of your child. They need a responsive caregiver.
You are contradicting yourself in the two statements. A severely sleep deprived parent is unable to be a responsive caregiver. You were clearly able to cope with the level of sleep deprivation you experienced however all adults are different and have different levels of tolerance. This comment shows how ignorant you are to the effects of sleep deprivation on adults.

More research shows that it can be detrimental
Please provide us with this evidence. Not a quote from a book or website, the actual source that links it to harm.

@HeatherIV The baby crys at first because they think they have been abandoned. This is often not the case and certainly wasn't with my child. Their only communication is crying so they are unable to tell us anything using words. They usually cry because they are protesting to a change.

@Melamine, I don't agree that those can't be convinced to switch to the other side. I have mostly co-slept and breastfed my son through his first year as we both slept better that way. I slowly moved him into his cot by first attaching it to the bed and then gradually moving further and further away.

My daughter didn't co-sleep well; she just liked being in her own space once she was past the newborn phase. It didn't suit and there were a number of other issues that led us down the sleep training path.

However, as @HeatherIV said, we need to follow our instinct and make the right decision for us at that time. Sleep training would have distressed my son so much, there is no way I could have done it, however it was the right decision for my daughter.

FWIW, both children self-weaned from night feeds and slept through the night in their own room at a similar age - around 14/5 months.

Hit a nerve 🤣🤣

Already have mentioned sources, up to you to do the legwork if you want to know more.. It's not my job to spend my time going through links, I have a child to respond to and with pro sleep training advocates it's normally as waste of time, just more defensive reactions... if you feel comfortable in your decision to leave your child to cry to train them that's on you.

This post was about not agreeing with it. None of your "justifications" will change my mind. And it's actually quite upsetting that people still think that this is how you are supposed to parent because society has engrained such a unnatural message. But hey, you do you... Just don't expect everyone to agree with it.

Oh and I had insomnia so know sleep deprivation... Would still never sleep train as it would have only been for me, not for them.

Great posts on this thread, @riddles26