NO SLEEP SCHEDULE?
Before having the baby, our lives were pretty predictable.
We more or less knew what our day was going to entail, we controlled our routines, we chose what we felt like doing - or not doing - when we were off work. We ate when we were hungry, went to bed when we were tired, and didn't think much about what it would feel like not to be able to do these things.
And then our babies are born. And all of that is thrown by the wayside. We lose structure, we lose the ability to predict how our days are going to unfold, we lose control over our own time. Suddenly, we are at the mercy of our babies… what they need and how they feel on any particular day.
We have no idea if our baby is going to sleep hours that day and be in a good mood when they wake up… or spend most of the day fussing and clinging to us and only taking 10 minute naps.
We can’t predict whether we’ll be able to get our babies back to sleep easily at night, or whether we’ll be up for hours cycling through a rotation of diaper change - feed - burp - rock - feed - burp - diaper change - rock.
According to Gabor Mate, “The research has identified three factors that universally lead to stress:
Uncertainty
Lack of information
Loss of control.”
And having a new baby entails all three of these things.
We never know for sure what the next day - heck, the next hour - is going to entail. We don’t have a handbook for what this baby needs, so we have to go through some trial and error before figuring them out, making it feel like we don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing a lot of the time. And we have no control over the temperament and needs of our baby!
This lack of control - lack of structure - is a really tough feeling to reconcile. So what do many of us instinctively try to do? Search for control where we can.
Enter, sleep training culture. Selling us the promise of all that structure and predictability we had pre-baby.
It’s a tempting sell - buy this program, implement these methods, and you’ll have a baby who sleeps like clockwork. Think of all the free time you’ll have when they’re sleeping for hours each day and night!
The promise makes us think this whole baby thing could actually be… easy?! And sure, some babies will take three long, predictable naps a day and sleep 12 hours a night. But most won’t. And when the sleep trainers make us think it must be us who are doing something wrong when it doesn’t work, we spiral even harder. We double down on trying to control all the elements in an attempt to make.it.work. A lot of parents end up feeling more frustrated and out of control by the end of it.
What does the research say?
In the largest sleep study of our time, looking at the sleep of over 5700 babies from 0 to 2 years, researchers found that sleep is highly variable in the first year, and doesn’t tend to become more predictable until the second year of life (Paavonen et al., 2020).
Studies also show behaviour modification strategies to change a baby’s sleep (that is, sleep training) have a pretty short shelf life - they often need to be repeated after babies go through a developmental leap, reach new milestones, or experience illness, teething, or big life changes (Douglas et al., 2013; Loutzenhiser et al., 2013; Hiscock et al., 2007). So it’s not like sleep training is the silver bullet to perfect baby sleep either!
So what are we supposed to do?
Just let everyday pass by in whirlwind of unpredictability and go-with-the-flow-ness? Well, sorta. There is a lot of ease that comes with the radical acceptance of baby sleep. Expecting our baby to need to be supported to sleep, to prefer napping on a caregiver, to wake often in the night… makes it a lot easier to accept these things when they happen.
But that’s not our only option. There are a number of ways that we can create rhythm and routine to our days that don’t entail trying to hyper-control our baby’s sleep, but that still give us an element of predictability that many of us crave.
What makes my approach different:
The whole gist behind most sleep training programs is that you have to follow their rules for it to work… even if it feels awful.
That’s not what we do here. I will never ask you to do anything that goes against your intuition.
You’re the expert, and you get to call the shots.
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