Traditional sleep ‘training’ is based on the belief that babies should adapt to fit into our adult lives and therefore fit their sleep around our needs, often meaning they’re left to fall asleep alone, or to cry when they wake. It’s about taking the baby where they are and trying to get them to where we, as adults, are, under the guise of sleep being something you can learn.

In reality, while you can 'train' a child not to call out at night or to accept less input from you less reluctantly, you can’t actually teach the biological skill of sleeping.

But that doesn’t take away from the fact that adapting to a life with frequent night wake-ups, early risings and literally feeding another human being (often from your own body) every night isn’t exhausting and hard…It is.

It is also, however, not your child’s fault that they are behaving exactly like a young carry mammal, used to being cosy in it’s mother’s tummy, is designed to do. To want to be close to its adults, to seek reassurance often and request food frequently to fill its tiny tummy. 

So, taking all of this into account, the developmental and biological needs of babies and young children, and parents feelings (whatever they may be), Gentle Sleep Coaching is about meeting each child where they are at and looking at how the family’s sleep overall can perhaps be improved or adjusted to to ensure everyone’s needs are being met. 

For example, sleep coaching may focus on:

• Biological strategies - using knowledge of the body and brain, we can help babies and children to regulate and encourage appropriate sleep. For example, to help your new-born to separate night from day before their circadian rhythm has developed, we can expose them to plenty of sunlight, napping outdoors or in the light, and create a calm, quiet, dimmed bedtime routine as you enter the evening. 

• Developmental strategies - we can use knowledge of developmental stages and their impact on sleep to adapt approaches and make them more aligned with where you baby or child is at. So, for example, during periods of separation anxiety, we'd focus on building connection before bed, or even settling them to sleep on a floor bed so that they can feel close to you before the long hours apart. 

• Nutritional approaches - These approaches are based on understanding that what we eat or don’t eat can influence sleep. So, for example, by minimising stimulating foods such as sugar or caffeine towards bedtime, you can create the calm environment needed for sleep (both for your child and for you). For a younger baby, this may involve ensuring they feed as much as they can/want in the day, so they don’t play as much calorie catch-up overnight (but never forgetting that night feeds are normal and can extend way beyond the first year for many babies).

• Behavioural strategies - By changing habits and associations around bedtime and sleep through methods such as habit stacking (another post to come on that) you can feel less reliant on one way to put them to bed. For older children, behavioural strategies may be more focused on, very gradually, in line with how your older baby/child responds, reducing your input into settling them to sleep (but always returning to your child if they’re upset).

I’ll delve into each of these categories more in a future post but, for now, I hope that may have given you some ideas of ways you can look at your little ones’ sleep and meet them where they are. 

And, if it all feels too much, you can choose to do nothing and wait for time and development to do it’s thing, or reach out for respite and gentle support.