New research suggests stress can be "caught"; that is, mothers can pass their stress onto infants by touch. Does this provide support for sleep training? I am going to show you here why I think it does not at all...
Many parents who expect and accept their babies waking and crying end up frustrated when this stage doesn't magically pass in toddlerhood. Here are some of the many reasons toddlers wake and cry at night (and why they are deserving of our responsiveness too).
Many Australians woke this morning to scare mongering about bedsharing thanks to articles in their papers. Notably, claims that 25 babies died in the parent bed last year are leading to people declaring bedsharing should be illegal and even some people are being investigated for it (I kid you not).
We often talk about how normal most sleeping patterns are, despite being seen as abnormal in our society, but what about the situations where your infant's sleep truly is abnormal? That it's telling you something else is wrong?
What do you do if you want to bedshare but your partner doesn't? Some advice on how to approach the issue so that everyone feels like they at least have had a chance to be heard.
We all know about the “booby traps” that prevent parents from breastfeeding successfully, but what about the “snooze traps”?
Ever hear that your child should be sleeping through by 3 months of age? Or that night waking is a sign of something wrong? Here are some of the myths about night wakings and the actual facts associated with them.
In pondering the use of CIO and CC further, I start to wonder if those of us who speak out against sleep training may be inadvertently setting families up to fail. Hear me out…
Recently, news reports are making the rounds suggesting that the lack of a set bedtime in children 3 to 7 is associated with greater behavioural problems. Parents are getting panicked if their child doesn’t go to sleep at the exact same time every night... but should they?
Often when I write about crying-it-out or controlled crying, I get comments from people who have done it asking what else they should have done in their sleep deprived state. The question concerns me because it highlights not only how mainstream the idea of leaving a child to cry has become, but also about how ignorant society is as a whole about the alternatives to sleep training.
