SELF SOOTHING
Does my baby need to learn to self soothe?
You’ve probably heard it everywhere, whether it’s your pediatrician, your friends, your mom, or on social media: Babies need to learn to self soothe! The message can be deafening. But do they really?
Self soothing is sold as the ticket to great baby sleep — once babies can calm themselves down and get to sleep on their own, everyone is more well-rested, right? In some ways, leaving your baby to figure it out for themselves might "work.” But at what cost? Are our babies truly soothed?
What is self soothing?
Self soothing refers to a baby's ability to calm themselves down from a state of dysregulation. Most babies naturally exhibit some regulating strategies shortly after birth, like sucking on their fingers, turning their heads from side to side, or moving their gaze away. These behaviors may help to calm a baby who is mildly dysregulated.
As adults, we have our own mechanisms for soothing ourselves when we’re upset. Whether we’ve learned from a responsive caregiver or figured it out on our own, we often know when we need a minute alone, a few deep breaths, a call to a girlfriend, or a cup of tea to soothe us.
Can babies actually self soothe?
But the thing is, babies aren’t actually developmentally capable of self soothing. We might get a lot more sleep if a baby could just pop their thumb in their mouth and go from crying to sleeping in an instant, but this usually isn’t realistic. If we think of emotional arousal on a scale, babies actually have six arousal states: asleep, drowsy, hypo-aroused, calmly focused and alert, hyper-aroused, and flooded. When we are calm and alert, we intuitively want to keep ourselves there. When we feel ourselves moving out of this state, we try to self regulate so we can stay calm. If this doesn't work, we move up the arousal scale and become hyper-aroused.
But when a baby is hyper-aroused (like when they wake up crying at night), they are unable to move themselves back down the arousal scale to a state of calm. They can’t soothe on their own — they’re biologically hardwired to attach to a loving, nurturing caregiver who can come and help them regulate. If a parent or caregiver does not come, they will go up the arousal scale and become flooded with upset and overwhelm.
They might eventually fall asleep, but here’s the thing that people often miss: It’s not because they have soothed themselves. They pass out from sheer exhaustion. When babies begin to learn that no one is coming to help soothe them, they instead learn to conserve their energy and stop crying — their voice becomes powerless in the environment. According to Dr. Stuart Shanker, "It is the brain's last mechanism for protecting itself from severe energy depletion" (2016).
In fact, a 2012 study published in Early Human Development looking at mother-infant synchrony during sleep training measured the cortisol (stress hormone) levels of 25 babies between 4 and 10 months old being left to cry alone at the onset of sleep. On the first day they were separated from their mothers, the babies’ cortisol levels were high, and everyone could see and agree that the infants were in distress. (In response to their infant’s crying, the mother’s cortisol levels also measured high.) A few days later, the babies no longer cried when left alone at bedtime, but their cortisol levels continued to measure the exact same. (However, mothers no longer had elevated cortisol levels, suggesting a disconnect between what the baby was experiencing and what the caregiver was perceiving).
So although a child might stop showing any outward displays of distress, internally they can still be just as stressed as if they were crying. Rather than babies learning to self soothe by being left to cry alone, what they really learn to do is stop signaling their distress.
Will you get more sleep? Maybe. But will your child learn to trust that their needs will be met? Maybe not.
So how can we help babies soothe?
Every time we step in and help our babies regulate down the emotional arousal scale, we are giving them the skills to do this for themselves one day. Babies cannot make sense of and organize their feelings by themselves, which is the first step of emotion regulation. We need to come alongside and help them do this, mirroring the skills we hope to give them. This can look like picking them up, naming what they might be experiencing, taking a deep breath, humming a song, or rocking them in our arms.
Think about how you as an adult calm yourself down after a rough day — you might call your mom to vent, grab a drink with a friend, or ask your partner for a hug. We need relationships to self soothe and co-regulate. It’s what humans (in healthy relationships) do. Our loved ones help us work through moments of frustration by lending a listening ear and calm energy, and in the process, help us come back to baseline.
This is even more profound for babies, who don’t have the skills to soothe on their own. This is not something we should ever be trying to “train” out of our children — it is one of the most integral parts of being a human, and we as parents can start by modeling it.
This process takes years, but the good news is that when we provide this nurturing response to our babies’ distress, we are wiring their nervous systems to be more robust in the face of stress. Not only are they learning critical life skills from us, but their entire system is building up a tolerance for stress, so they're able to make sense of their feelings, develop trust in others, and stay calm more easily as they grow into childhood and beyond.
References:
1. Middlemiss W, Granger DA, Goldberg WA, Nathans L. Asynchrony of mother-infant hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activity following extinction of infant crying responses induced during the transition to sleep. Early Hum Dev. 2012 Apr;88(4):227-32. doi: 10.1016/j.earlhumdev.2011.08.010. Epub 2011 Sep 23. PMID: 21945361.
2. Shanker S, Barket T.(2017). Self-Reg. How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life. Penguin Books.
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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