What is sleep training?

Sleep training in its simplest term is teaching your child how to go to sleep without your help. Sleep training is different from night weaning - cutting any feeds at night. You can still sleep train and keep night feeds.

Sleep training gets a bad reputation due to some of the harsher methods, such as Cry It Out. In essence, Cry It Out is putting your baby to bed and not going into them until the morning. The theory is that the baby will cry for a while but will eventually give up and start sleeping through. For parents this can be a game changer - to be able to put their baby down and then get back some of their sleep. For the babies though, they will still be waking in the night, they have just learnt that crying doesn’t lead to a response. If a sleep trained baby is then ill and needs additional support, parents often find they have to go through the sleep training process again to get their baby sleeping through again.

The other forms of sleep training may still involve crying but to a lesser extent and with more parental support. You can even look to help your baby sleep independently with no crying. These other methods will still lead to your baby sleeping through, but are likely to take longer - think of it as more supporting your baby to figure it out, rather than ‘training’ them to get there.

That’s how we like to think of what we do at The Sleepy Avocado - helping support your baby to sleep better, rather than training them.

We always look at what we can work out in terms of routine and sleep hygiene before turning to settling methods. With settling methods, it’s about working with the parent to find what works best for them and their parenting style, also, how quickly they want to get results. Sometimes just some tweaks to the days alone can be enough to sort the nights.