How to Sleep Train Your Child

All of us, from babies from ~4months old to adults, sleep in cycles. We start off drowsy, transition through light sleep, into deeper sleep, back into light sleep, and then we often wake up for a moment (even if we don’t remember it). “Sleeping through the night”, is hence not the “goal” of sleep training, since none of us “sleep through the night”.

All of us, however, get into a habit regarding how we sleep. Most adults have the habit of going right back to sleep on our own when we wake up in the middle of the night. Many young children, however, have developed habits of depending on some sort of assistance from their caregivers to fall asleep. As such, when they wake up in the middle of the night, especially ~4months old when their sleep cycles become more similar to adults’, they call for help from their caregivers to assist them back to sleep. Most children do eventually figure out how to fall asleep on their own (randomized studies of sleep training have typically shown that, in the long term, kids who weren’t sleep trained catch up). An average age they voluntarily do this is around 3-4 years old.

Sleep training is often defined as teaching your child to fall asleep independently — and if that’s the definition you had in mind, you’re not wrong, that’s genuinely part of it. We prefer a broader definition: any strategy that helps improve your child’s sleep environment, whether or not independent sleep is the goal you’re working toward.

If independent sleep is what you’re after, it helps to know that no one can really “teach” it directly — your child needs to experience and learn it for themselves, and all you can do is respectfully give them the time and space to figure it out. But independent sleep isn’t the only valid destination, either. Plenty of families thrive with ongoing caregiver assistance for months or years, by choice to build better connection, which is a valid approach. Either way, here are the aspects of your child’s life worth getting right:

1) Age-appropriate Feeding and Sleeping Schedule – Helps your child to fall asleep and/or stay asleep both during naps and during the night.

2) Pre-nap and Bedtime Routines – Cues your child to prepare for sleep, but not meant to assist them to sleep.

3) Sleep Associations – These can be built through people, sensory input (smell, sound, motion), or familiar items your child associates with winding down. If your goal is for your child to eventually resettle independently, it helps for these associations to be things they can access without your help — like a comfort object, or input which does not need you to provide/replace. If ongoing caregiver assistance is part of your plan, that’s completely fine too — the association can be with you/inputs you provide.

4) Noise and Light – Ideally, we all prefer dark, cool, quiet and/or with pink/white noise for sleep, but different people can sleep in different environments. Changes to any aspect of the sleeping environment though, may affect the process of falling asleep or staying asleep.

5) Sleep Training Method – There are several methods! (Yes, not just “cry it out”!) We break down the difference between approaches with more and limited caregiver assistance on our Baby Sleep Consultant page, and also elaborate on the all the different respectful approaches to limited assistance sleep training here. Pick something you feel you can remain consistent with, but have a back-up in mind too — different children respond differently, so higher-intervention or more gradual methods of limiting assistance don’t always mean less crying.

6) Consistency and Connection – We are trying to develop new habits. This means the schedule, routine, environment and method ALL require consistency. Inconsistency sends mixed signals and causes confusion for your child and it’s hard to develop new habits through inconsistency. Through it all, development and maintaining a deep connection with your child with be the foundation of all good sleep.

Through our Baby Sleep Consultations, we work through with your family your priorities and preferred lifestyle, in order to propose recommendations on the above 6 points to help your family get the rest you all need. As with everything we do, we believe that every family is different, and do not only prescribe fixed schedules, routines or methods as “right” or diss other methods as “wrong” ways. Instead, we work alongside you respectfully to figure what would be best for your family.