Your Baby's Sleep: Why Your In-Laws Always Know Best

"Why do you have to make her so hyper before you go to bed? No wonder she is going to bed so late," my father-in-law said, completely disregarding the fact that he had fed my daughter chocolate before bedtime. She had also skipped her nap that afternoon, so of course she was hyper (which can be a sign of sleepiness in children). We are also experiencing a global pandemic, and she isn't having to get up to go to nursery, so give her a break!

But the mum-guilt is real. It is hard to not feel like a failure, especially when you are a sleep researcher and should have a child with perfect sleep, right? Well, no. One of the first things I learned as a mum is that while you can put a structure in place, you cannot control sleep. I knew this as a sleep researcher, but dealing with another human being's sleep is another matter. What I've taken away from these last few years as a mum is that I don't need my child to be a good sleeper, but I need my child to be a confident sleeper. And that is my job done.

The first few months after my daughter was born were tough in the sleep department. It was the classic driving her around in the pram at 7 p.m. to get her to sleep. Same for naptime. Luckily I had a friend that was in a similar situation, so we got a good dose of daily exercise. Then, when my daughter was about 5 months old, my husband and I started considering sleep training. As a sleep researcher in adults, I was familiar with the science behind these techniques, but did not know what I was getting myself into. Not because it was hard to implement (and gosh it was), but it was because of the negativity I would receive. From in-laws, friends, and others in mother-baby groups.

While there are a few different methods, we opted for graduated extinction, which involves removing yourself as a parent/guardian from being the thing that soothes the child to sleep. The goal of graduated extinction is for the child to learn to self-soothe (at the start of the night, so that it knows what to do when it wakes up in the middle of the night). This is done by putting the baby down awake and then leaving the room, giving the baby a chance to fall asleep. And just as you think they've drifted off, they start crying (I don't believe in voodoo, but it sure feels like it exists when the baby starts crying the exact minute you think she has fallen asleep!). Your task then is to return to the crib and soothe the baby (e.g., by patting her tummy, telling her she is loved) and leave the room again. Then it starts all over again. The length of time you allow yourself to return to the crib is gradually extended (wait two minutes, then five minutes, then 10 minutes before going into the baby's room). Eventually, the baby will learn to self-soothe and fall asleep without crying.

We were following Jodi Mindell's book, Sleeping Through the Night, which I loved because in this book she gave the OK to ignore the clock and just go back into the room when it felt right. Even if that was after a few seconds. We tried this, and gave up after the first night because it was just too hard. But I knew that I wanted this for my child (and for my own sanity), so a month later or so we tried again. It took about four to five days and she was falling asleep within a few minutes. Of course, there were odd nights where she would take longer or she still needed me/my husband (e.g., she was sick, or we were traveling to a different time zone), but I knew that she was gradually learning to fall asleep on her own.

So, armed with the information about this wonderful technique that would help babies sleep, I approached everyone to tell them the good news—in-laws, friends, other mothers. Well, I was not prepared for feeling like they were going to hunt me down and chase me out of town with pitchforks. "How could you do this to your baby, let them cry all night." "I know in my gut that crying all night isn't right for my baby." "Oh, I could not do that to my baby." Hello, mum-guilt! Well, this was the most frustrating aspect of our experience. Because I knew the mother's disproval was based on attention-grabbing headlines that warned that sleep training (always termed as the most extreme 'cry it out') would harm the relationship between baby and mother and increase stress in the baby to dangerous levels. Unfortunately, these claims are often based on research that stems from reports of babies left to cry in Romanian orphanages or blogs that link to studies that are only tangentially related to the effects of graduated extinction. Research has shown that graduated extinction has no impact on attachment style nor stress in both babies and mothers.

But why is this such an emotional topic? Why are there often the two extremes (co-sleeping vs. crying it out), with some parents stuck in between, wanting perhaps to try graduated extinction (or similar sleep training techniques), but are hesitant as a result of scaremongering? I think one of the problems is the language we use (good/bad sleeper). What does a good sleeper actually mean? Good for whom, the parents or the baby? Many think a baby that sleeps well does so for a solid eight-hour stretch. That's certainly good for the parents, right? And what is a bad sleeper, a baby that wakes up a few times during the night? Well, that's pretty normal.

I think a much better way of thinking about infant sleep is to consider sleep confidence. How can I get my baby to be a confident sleeper? And by that, I mean a baby/child that feels confident in the ability to go to sleep without the parent being there. And the path to get there might be very different for different parents. For some, a more gradual approach may more appropriate and more research needs to be conducted to evaluate these alternatives. But when using the term sleep confidence, I think it becomes clear that any form of sleep training is implemented in order to ensure the baby/child becomes more independent and that shouldn't be viewed as different from practicing tummy time, which will eventually lead to those first independent footsteps.