How sleep training culture has stolen our intuition
Part of the rite of passage of becoming a new parent is the uncertainty and not knowing exactly how it is you are meant to care for the small human in front of you. Figuring it out as you go along is a universal experience of first-time parents worldwide, trust me I’ve worked with loads of them!
None of us knows how to raise or care for a baby before having one. No one knows how to look after this unique being in our care. Our culture in the west has become one of isolated families rather than extended communities so it can now be rare for any young adult to encounter babies and infants until the day they are born a parent themselves. We are a generation that often needs to be shown or to google how to change a nappy and how to feed our infants. This guidance is no longer provided by the elders in our villages as it was for so many years but by online “experts” and institutions that follow protocols and manuals as though we and our babies were just another box to tick.
When it comes to our infants, sleep might be the biggest area in which we have handed over our parenting power to experts and institutions. In the west, it is becoming the norm to relinquish the reins of our infants' nighttime care to so-called sleep experts - but at what cost to us and our infants?
SLEEP TRAINING AS A REMEDY TO CHAOS
As the waters of the sleep training industry become murkier and the semantics of sleep more and more confusing; parents too are becoming confused and stripped of their intuition when it comes to learning how to respond to their babies at night. With widely polarising opinions when it comes to sleep and the branding of controlled crying and extinction sleep training methods as sleep learning or responsive settling, it is now hard for any parent to know what is right and what is wrong when it comes to our infants’ sleep. It is this uncertainty that has us following the zeitgeist rather than doing what feels right to us.
“Parenting is no easy feat and parenting a brand-new baby when you have never done it before can feel as if you are careering out of control off the edge of a cliff. So, what the sleep “experts” sell is a guide, steps one two and three which allows you as the parent to once again feel in control of your own life.”
Early parenthood is an inherently chaotic time; we are ripped from the life we once knew, a life in which we had some semblance of control over our days and years and thrown into a life that asks us to be at mercy of our baby's wants and needs. What the sleep industry has done is jump upon this uncertainty. Sleep training has provided a solution to this inherent chaos by introducing many formulas and “easy to follow” steps that can seem like a quick-fix way of bringing back some control in this otherwise chaotic season of our lives.
WHAT IS THE COST OF HANDING OVER THE REINS?
What the sleep training industry has done to a generation of parents is strip them of their autonomy and choice when it comes to raising their children. In an industry so loud, we hand over the reins of night-time parenting to well-branded strangers on the internet and blindly heed their advice. So for the parents for whom sleep training doesn’t work, just as it didn’t for Marianna Castaman and Rachael Shepard-Ohta of Hey Sleepy Baby (I encourage you to listen to our conversation HERE) it can leave us confused and wondering why we don’t know how to respond to our child, it leaves us feeling not enough!! Our intuition gets steamrolled out of the window by said stranger. We find ourselves in throws of self-depreciation at the hands of someone who perhaps has never met your baby and doesn’t understand their uniqueness, but insists on selling you a universal sleep plan that is right for all infants.
“The baby who cries for the parent is not engaging in “tyranny,” she is expressing her deepest need — emotional and physical contact with the parent. The deceptive convenience of Ferberization is one more way in which our society fails the needs of the developing child.””
— GABOR MATE
HOW THE SLEEP TRAINING INDUSTRY HOOKS NEW PARENTS
What we need to remember as parents is that the process of becoming a parent, of learning how to parent is just that – a process. Parenting is a dance of relationship that the sleep training industry just doesn’t consider, it is a dance in which we won’t always know the next right step. In a society that is so hyper-focused on sleep we forget or override the biological drive and impetus to attune to the child in front of us. We forget to try and understand their uniqueness and to tune into our voices and values.
In the west, our parenting is very often judged on how much our baby is sleeping. It can become almost impossible not to fall into the trap of obsession around sleep and sleep quality within our families – almost no new family is immune from this. As Rachael also discusses in our poddy conversation, many of us parents have decision fatigue. Having a new baby means that every day there are new choices to be made, and the sleep training industry preys upon this. It offers parents one less thing they need to carry, it offers them one less decision they need to make.
So, it makes complete sense in the haze of exhaustion and the path to becoming a parent why people would be drawn to controlled crying and extinction techniques. Techniques that can be detrimental to parental confidence and our relationship with our child. To read more on the impacts of sleep training on our children head on over to the Australian Association of Infant Mental Health whose position statement is thorough and well worth a read HERE
“It is normal and healthy for infants and young children to wake through the night and to need attention from parents. This need not be labelled a disorder. There are no long-term health or developmental problems from babies waking at night. Responding to an infant’s needs/crying will not cause a lasting ‘habit’ but will contribute to the infant’s sense of security”
— AAIMH (2013)
image by @louiseagnew
“When the infant falls asleep after a period of wailing and frustrated cries for help, it is not that she has learned the “skill” of falling asleep. What has happened is that her brain, to escape the overwhelming pain of abandonment, shuts down. It’s an automatic neurological mechanism. In effect, the baby gives up. The short-term goal of the exhausted parents has been achieved but at the price of harming the child’s long-term emotional vulnerability. Encoded in her cortex is an implicit sense of a non-caring universe”
— GABOR MATE
The draw of sleep training is that it takes us naïve parents who have little experience in normal infant sleep or child raising and assumes it knows more about our child and more than our intuition. What this is doing to us as parents is fighting against our inherent knowledge instead of allowing us to lean into it. The pressure in western society to sleep train is preventing many parents from finding their way and figuring out what works for them as a family.
If we look at our sleep as adults, we see that none of us is consistent day to day or week to week, our sleep needs vary within us and between us and so why shouldn't our infants? If as adults we were given a blanket one size fits all ways of sleeping, we would be doing a huge disservice to a huge proportion of our adult population, because we are diverse as are our children.
HOW TO TAP BACK IN
As Racheal, Mariana and I wax lyrical about on the podcast, sometimes the only way for us to learn what works, and perhaps it could be argued is the ONLY way we learn as parents is to go on the journey ourselves. This is what we encourage all the parents we work with to do. We journey with them. No one can go through those early weeks and months of learning how to parent your child for you. You could go as far as to say that this approach of trial and error in parenting is the real journey of parenthood. Instead of heeding the advice of others we should try and fail, and try and succeed and that is how we slowly but surely learn what it is our child needs, what it is we need, and this is how we start to build a solid attachment relationship with our infant.
“What sleep training culture has done is assume that all infants are the same and it keeps us guessing and assuming that any small hiccup in the day-to-day variation of our infants’ sleep is not “normal”.”
While it can be scary to try a different approach and for things to maybe not work - harking back to our societal need to be in control. Parents need this space to experiment with what works for them. It is in the trial and error of figuring out what our babies need and what works that we come into a relationship with them. We discover there is no one way to parent, there is no one way that each infant will find sleep and this is ok!
WE WILL FINALLY FEEL ENOUGH AS A PARENT!
If we step back and support parents to try and fail and succeed, we not only allow them to attune to their babies, but we also allow our infants to become attuned to their bodies. They start to understand when they feel tired as opposed to the clock dictating when this should be. We allow them to show us the support they need both day and night. For some children this might look like being supported to sleep throughout their early childhood for others they may become independent sleepers much earlier in their lives.
So, the message is that there is no right way, there is only your way. Some voices are extremely loud and would have you disbelieving your ability to figure it out. Parenthood and infants are not a one size fits all PDF guide. It is so much more nuanced than this. No parent needs to feel forced into crying it out or extinction sleep training methods just because the external voice of the society in which we live is so loud.
As parents what we first must learn to do is honour the unique voice of our children and the unique values of our own families and figure out what it is that works for us. We need to become comfortable with not knowing, and comfortable with the journey of figuring it out ourselves.
If you're struggling with the noise, anxiety or shame around how you have approached your infant's sleep in the past and want some guidance on finding your unique voice as a parent I am here to support you, head on over to my Honest Sleep Support Page HERE to see how we can work together to help find your voice as a parent.
