Little Nest Sleep

Please come and share your most honest thoughts about cosleeping!!

An orchid is such a blessing. They are the best!

Some children are dandelions. They generally thrive in most environments. Others are like orchids and they need very specific types of care.

Both flowers are miracles. They are beautiful.

But we can’t treat them the same.

My issue here is that a study about about sleep DURATION is being used to persuade parents to use behavioural interventions which impact sleep FRAGMENTATION.

A child who wakes 3-4 times to feed but sleeps 11 hours overnight is very different from a child sleeping only 8½ hours.

The Touchette et al 2007 study does not find a link between wakefulness and later challenges. In fact, no research has found this.

Do we need to ensure our children get an appropriate amount of sleep for their development? Obvs. It’s patronising to even write that, sorry.

And the only studies we have on sleep training long term show the effects are short lived and there is no different in those who were sleep trained and who weren’t 6 years later.

Another key point about this study: sleep trainers often report these findings as though poor sleepers are destined to struggle.

That’s not what the data shows.

The differences are generally small increases in risk, not dramatic developmental impairment.

Many children with shorter sleep developed perfectly normally.

Many children with long sleep developed behavioural difficulties.

The distributions overlap considerably.

And don’t get me started on correlation vs causation.

There are many reasons some children have sleep challenges. We know that certain medical or neurodevelopmental differences are associated with issues with sleep onset and duration. Ie asthma or ADHD.

It doesn’t automatically mean the reduced sleep caused the developmental difference.

TLDR: This was an observational study. It found an association between certain sleep patterns and later outcomes, but it didn’t test sleep training. It didn’t compare sleep-trained babies with babies who weren’t sleep trained.

Sometimes the noise just gets too much and we all need to remember, we can find our own way.

Which have you tried? Or have you done worse?

Please don’t forget this - if there was one magic hack to get all babies sleeping through the night, we’d all just do it.

If you don’t want to sleep train, you simply don’t have to. It sounds obvious but there can be so much pressure now. So much noise.

Trust your gut.