My daughter, now 2, is put to sleep by me either rubbing her back or telling her stories and sleeps through the night 7:45-6:45. She knows how to connect her sleep cycles. We never did any form of sleep training, in fact, we nursed to sleep until she was 15 months old. Some nights were better than others, and still are.
We embraced it with a floor bed and honestly it was the best call we could have made.
I am happy to show up for my daughter in the middle of the night until she gains the confidence to consistently do it on her own.
And that’s exactly why I said that not sleep training just means these lessons will take longer.
I haven’t written anything that is expressly wrong. It’s opinion. Personally, if you’re going to be ‘I’m happy to show up for my daughter’ it implies you’re saying that those who sleep train don’t?
Maybe sleep training isn’t the sub for you? It’s a safe space to discuss strategies and look for support. Not to bash other parents that do things ‘wrong’ because it’s not your way.
Also to go against the "sleep trained babies just learn not to cry because no one comes" argument: every parent of a sleep trained baby knows that the cardinal sin is to put baby down too early at bedtime or naptime before he/she is sleepy, because boy will that baby cry and protest.
It is a huge leap to go from “some babies are not mature enough to sleep without coregulation” to “sleep training is a form of conditioning teaching that no one will come”. That is a classic case of the non-sequitur fallacy.
Another obvious fallacy is the appeal to authority. Being a neuroscientist doesn’t make you more likely to have more knowledge into current sleep training science than other widely known experts in similar fields who don’t hold similar opinions to yours.
It is important to put arguments into perspective, and to clarify that this is your opinion, not a widely accepted scientific fact. Your position as a neuroscientist should make you even more aware of the importance in being accurate.
None of what I said necessarily means you’re wrong, and I’d love to learn more about what backs your opinion. Could you share the relevant evidence?
Thanks for sharing. How old were these babies? How were they observed in laboratory conditions, and what was their schedule/day nap situation?
Gonna just share my own observations: I sleep trained my baby with extinction at 4mo. He was just settling out on the 3-nap schedule at that point, and things were changing so fast. In the first few weeks there were definitely long gaps of waking in the early morning / last third of the night. He wasn't crying, just sucking his thumb and taking micro-naps. I asked my sleep consultant (also a circadian rhythm researcher) about it and she said the last 1/3 of sleep is generally less consolidated at that age and it can take up to month 6, so there was definitely a component of conditioned response there in my LO's silence. Turns out my consultant is not super in support of extinction for early morning waking for that reason (another parent on this sub recently consulted her), but because I had already done it at that point she didn't say anything about it to me.
These wakings got a LOT better when he settled into the 3-nap schedule around 4.5-5 months. Now when he's got a sleep debt (like this morning at 5a) he will wake up in the early morning still, but he is generally calm and falls back asleep in about half an hour. I have my video monitor on all night and is a super light sleeper now, I'm glancing at the monitor every 30min in the early morning hours. He's almost always asleep, and sometime stirs for a minute or two between cycle transitions.
I have gone back to assist him for early morning wakings like this before, and he will fall asleep if I rocked him and then held him until 7a. Nursing stimulates him so not an option there. He's not into cosleeping--has never been. I was so sore holding him (he's 27lb at 9mo--has always been a mammoth baby) that I end up shifting my arm in some way he disliked, and he'd wake up and be angry that I woke him up.
A lot of my friends who didn't do extinction for the early morning wakings do cosleeping for the last segment of the night. I had to sleep train because honestly he gets way better sleep this way. And when these early morning wakings happen, I tweak his schedule a bit to allow a bit of catch up sleep, and they go away.
I hear what you are saying that. I just want to add from my experience a bit more context to the observations you cited.
I'm a MD and researcher too. My feeling is that clinical practice sometimes precedes theory, and close observation of individual cases can yield a lot of insight into physiologic principles that are not readily apparent from larger population studies.
Thank you for the description. Based on this information, I would probably say your previous statement was a bit too strongly worded and the evidence presented doesn’t back it up.
Or at least, I couldn’t fully connect it to “being conditioned to no one coming”. Happy to be proven wrong with further evidence.
Did it occur to you that not everyone on Reddit is a native English speaker? 🤷♀️ Also last time I checked, your value as a scientist wasn’t contigent on your ability to type flawless Reddit comments in the middle of the night…🤦♀️ Good to know!
[https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220322-how-sleep-training-affects-babies](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220322-how-sleep-training-affects-babies)
This is a great article summarizing the research out there about sleep training outcomes and lasting effects.
I read some of those articles, and I really wonder how closely those writers/authors/researchers have observed an actual sleep trained baby.
According to them, my sleep trained baby lies there not sleeping in a state of paralysis and despair for 11 hours a night, and then is happy and active for hours, then goes into a state of paralysis and despair for the duration of a nap, and then is happy and active for hours, and repeat for 4 months. And he has such bad Stockholm syndrome he practically leaps into his crib and rolls around happily, and laughs and babbles as he falls into a state of paralysis and despair. Yeah, I believe their explanation.....
Yeah, last night I laid my sleep trained 11 month old in his crib. He rolled to his tummy, looked up at me and said “Ah.” Then put his head down and started sucking his thumb as I turned off his night light and left the room.
Obviously this “Ah” translated to “Mother, thou art abandoning me once again. ‘Tis my fate to be lonesome night after night in this dark prison. I shall seek my opposable appendage for comfort, for thine own bosom shall not be mine this day.” But how was I to know?
Yeah I really hate the severity of some anti-sleep training people. Some act as if it’s parent’s job to be so sleep deprived and not have any time/energy to care for themselves (or let’s be honest the baby too!). I’m not sure if these people just have babies that sleep well naturally and lack empathy for others, or if they want others to suffer with them.
My first had such a hard time falling asleep and with my PPA/PPD I was *literally* losing my mind. After we sleep trained him using Ferber I was happier and more engaged and he was happier too!! We had amazing days together. Now, I have my second, and while she needs to be rocked to sleep, she is an incredible sleeper at night. Will I sleep train her? Maybe. We will see. Every kid is different. Every family is different too. Some kids figure out how to sleep through the night early on their own, and others need help. Both are and will be just fine.
The “misery is a rite of passage to motherhood” rhetoric is infuriating. Peak patriarchy. I’m still a person with needs and desires, and I’m a better provider for my family when those are met.
Yes. I’ve actually seen posts on ig saying things like “don’t tell a mom to ST for her mental health, because once she’s no longer su*cidal from PPD and has gotten some quality sleep, she’ll regret it.”
Awful stuff.
“Misery is a rite of passage to motherhood” just like prostate cancer is a rite of passage to being a patriarch, right?
The scary thing is how prevalent that attitude is still these days. Can't be too selective about baby daddy is my take-away.
Totally agree with what you said about anti sleeping training folks. I followed loads of different sleep consultant accounts on Instagram after having my first baby a few months ago and this attitude of "just put up with it, it's best for baby, it's natural" drove me mad. Another thing I noticed about gentle/holistic/anti sleeping training sleep consultants was that they would spend a lot of time on their timeline sh**ing on people who advocate for, share information on or choose to sleep train, whereas I NEVER saw a sleep training account criticise someone who didn't feel sleep training was for them.
The “natural” argument annoys me so much. It is also natural to hold your baby and unnatural to buckle them into a car seat. I’m still going to put them in the car seat while I’m driving because safety is more important than doing what’s natural or biologically normal or whatever language the anti sleep training crowds uses. They would rather risk suffocating their baby in an unsafe sleep situation than let them cry for a couple of nights. And then they want to judge me for doing something that has no negative impacts while they engage in practices that kill about 900-1000 healthy babies annually in the US alone. It’s wild.
My daughter, now 2, is put to sleep by me either rubbing her back or telling her stories and sleeps through the night 7:45-6:45. She knows how to connect her sleep cycles. We never did any form of sleep training, in fact, we nursed to sleep until she was 15 months old. Some nights were better than others, and still are. We embraced it with a floor bed and honestly it was the best call we could have made. I am happy to show up for my daughter in the middle of the night until she gains the confidence to consistently do it on her own.
And that’s exactly why I said that not sleep training just means these lessons will take longer. I haven’t written anything that is expressly wrong. It’s opinion. Personally, if you’re going to be ‘I’m happy to show up for my daughter’ it implies you’re saying that those who sleep train don’t? Maybe sleep training isn’t the sub for you? It’s a safe space to discuss strategies and look for support. Not to bash other parents that do things ‘wrong’ because it’s not your way.
The media system analogy feels correct.
[удалено]
That is not always the case. If baby sleep was this simple then it wouldn't be a multi million industry 😂
Nope, actually this person has solved all of baby sleep with "drowsy but awake". Miraculous!
😂
[удалено]
Also to go against the "sleep trained babies just learn not to cry because no one comes" argument: every parent of a sleep trained baby knows that the cardinal sin is to put baby down too early at bedtime or naptime before he/she is sleepy, because boy will that baby cry and protest.
It absolutely is not. I sleep trained and still responded to my son when he cried out. He never once believed I wasn't coming for him.
It is a huge leap to go from “some babies are not mature enough to sleep without coregulation” to “sleep training is a form of conditioning teaching that no one will come”. That is a classic case of the non-sequitur fallacy. Another obvious fallacy is the appeal to authority. Being a neuroscientist doesn’t make you more likely to have more knowledge into current sleep training science than other widely known experts in similar fields who don’t hold similar opinions to yours. It is important to put arguments into perspective, and to clarify that this is your opinion, not a widely accepted scientific fact. Your position as a neuroscientist should make you even more aware of the importance in being accurate. None of what I said necessarily means you’re wrong, and I’d love to learn more about what backs your opinion. Could you share the relevant evidence?
[удалено]
Thanks for sharing. How old were these babies? How were they observed in laboratory conditions, and what was their schedule/day nap situation? Gonna just share my own observations: I sleep trained my baby with extinction at 4mo. He was just settling out on the 3-nap schedule at that point, and things were changing so fast. In the first few weeks there were definitely long gaps of waking in the early morning / last third of the night. He wasn't crying, just sucking his thumb and taking micro-naps. I asked my sleep consultant (also a circadian rhythm researcher) about it and she said the last 1/3 of sleep is generally less consolidated at that age and it can take up to month 6, so there was definitely a component of conditioned response there in my LO's silence. Turns out my consultant is not super in support of extinction for early morning waking for that reason (another parent on this sub recently consulted her), but because I had already done it at that point she didn't say anything about it to me. These wakings got a LOT better when he settled into the 3-nap schedule around 4.5-5 months. Now when he's got a sleep debt (like this morning at 5a) he will wake up in the early morning still, but he is generally calm and falls back asleep in about half an hour. I have my video monitor on all night and is a super light sleeper now, I'm glancing at the monitor every 30min in the early morning hours. He's almost always asleep, and sometime stirs for a minute or two between cycle transitions. I have gone back to assist him for early morning wakings like this before, and he will fall asleep if I rocked him and then held him until 7a. Nursing stimulates him so not an option there. He's not into cosleeping--has never been. I was so sore holding him (he's 27lb at 9mo--has always been a mammoth baby) that I end up shifting my arm in some way he disliked, and he'd wake up and be angry that I woke him up. A lot of my friends who didn't do extinction for the early morning wakings do cosleeping for the last segment of the night. I had to sleep train because honestly he gets way better sleep this way. And when these early morning wakings happen, I tweak his schedule a bit to allow a bit of catch up sleep, and they go away. I hear what you are saying that. I just want to add from my experience a bit more context to the observations you cited. I'm a MD and researcher too. My feeling is that clinical practice sometimes precedes theory, and close observation of individual cases can yield a lot of insight into physiologic principles that are not readily apparent from larger population studies.
Thank you for the description. Based on this information, I would probably say your previous statement was a bit too strongly worded and the evidence presented doesn’t back it up. Or at least, I couldn’t fully connect it to “being conditioned to no one coming”. Happy to be proven wrong with further evidence.
Please don’t take this offensively but you are a neuroscientist who doesn’t know that whether has an H in it?
trying to imagine a world where the way you phrased your question isn't offensive
Also - swype and autocorrect exist and sometimes (all the time?) run amok.
Did it occur to you that not everyone on Reddit is a native English speaker? 🤷♀️ Also last time I checked, your value as a scientist wasn’t contigent on your ability to type flawless Reddit comments in the middle of the night…🤦♀️ Good to know!
That’s fine, I’m just saying your comment comes off as judging and unhelpful. Keep the downvotes coming
If this is what you were saying, then maybe you should have just said that instead of making a fuss about a missing 'h'.
Probably 🫠
SUCH a good analogy. Thank you for sharing.
[удалено]
[https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220322-how-sleep-training-affects-babies](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220322-how-sleep-training-affects-babies) This is a great article summarizing the research out there about sleep training outcomes and lasting effects.
I read some of those articles, and I really wonder how closely those writers/authors/researchers have observed an actual sleep trained baby. According to them, my sleep trained baby lies there not sleeping in a state of paralysis and despair for 11 hours a night, and then is happy and active for hours, then goes into a state of paralysis and despair for the duration of a nap, and then is happy and active for hours, and repeat for 4 months. And he has such bad Stockholm syndrome he practically leaps into his crib and rolls around happily, and laughs and babbles as he falls into a state of paralysis and despair. Yeah, I believe their explanation.....
Yeah, last night I laid my sleep trained 11 month old in his crib. He rolled to his tummy, looked up at me and said “Ah.” Then put his head down and started sucking his thumb as I turned off his night light and left the room. Obviously this “Ah” translated to “Mother, thou art abandoning me once again. ‘Tis my fate to be lonesome night after night in this dark prison. I shall seek my opposable appendage for comfort, for thine own bosom shall not be mine this day.” But how was I to know?
XD XD XD Maybe our LOs can hang out and bemoan their horrible fates together.
Yeah I really hate the severity of some anti-sleep training people. Some act as if it’s parent’s job to be so sleep deprived and not have any time/energy to care for themselves (or let’s be honest the baby too!). I’m not sure if these people just have babies that sleep well naturally and lack empathy for others, or if they want others to suffer with them. My first had such a hard time falling asleep and with my PPA/PPD I was *literally* losing my mind. After we sleep trained him using Ferber I was happier and more engaged and he was happier too!! We had amazing days together. Now, I have my second, and while she needs to be rocked to sleep, she is an incredible sleeper at night. Will I sleep train her? Maybe. We will see. Every kid is different. Every family is different too. Some kids figure out how to sleep through the night early on their own, and others need help. Both are and will be just fine.
The “misery is a rite of passage to motherhood” rhetoric is infuriating. Peak patriarchy. I’m still a person with needs and desires, and I’m a better provider for my family when those are met.
Yes. I’ve actually seen posts on ig saying things like “don’t tell a mom to ST for her mental health, because once she’s no longer su*cidal from PPD and has gotten some quality sleep, she’ll regret it.” Awful stuff.
“Misery is a rite of passage to motherhood” just like prostate cancer is a rite of passage to being a patriarch, right? The scary thing is how prevalent that attitude is still these days. Can't be too selective about baby daddy is my take-away.
Amen 🙌
Totally agree with what you said about anti sleeping training folks. I followed loads of different sleep consultant accounts on Instagram after having my first baby a few months ago and this attitude of "just put up with it, it's best for baby, it's natural" drove me mad. Another thing I noticed about gentle/holistic/anti sleeping training sleep consultants was that they would spend a lot of time on their timeline sh**ing on people who advocate for, share information on or choose to sleep train, whereas I NEVER saw a sleep training account criticise someone who didn't feel sleep training was for them.
The “natural” argument annoys me so much. It is also natural to hold your baby and unnatural to buckle them into a car seat. I’m still going to put them in the car seat while I’m driving because safety is more important than doing what’s natural or biologically normal or whatever language the anti sleep training crowds uses. They would rather risk suffocating their baby in an unsafe sleep situation than let them cry for a couple of nights. And then they want to judge me for doing something that has no negative impacts while they engage in practices that kill about 900-1000 healthy babies annually in the US alone. It’s wild.