Bring up 'sleep training' around parents, and you'll either get enthusiastic 'it was a life saver' or 'that's torturing your child;' there's no real middle ground opinion. But the term sleep training is drastically misunderstood by both mobs.

Let's start with history. Did people in the 1800s sleep train? No, but they also lived in large extended family households. There were many people to pitch in and help. Now that's not the norm, and many of us have to consider our own human need for sleep. This is the reality.

Lack of sleep is linked to worse health outcomes, coinciding with obesity and mental health disorders. It impairs thinking and judgement. A sleep deprived person is similar to someone intoxicated. Parents basically are drunk zombies caring for their kids. You need sleep too.

On one hand, it's not actually possible to teach a child to sleep. Sleep is governed by cortisol, melatonin, and circadian rhythms. At the newborn stage, babies have none of these. They develop at 8 weeks, 9 weeks, and 4 months respectively.

In order to help your baby naturally develop these, studies have shown that light exposure and then darkness at night is critical. So let baby be by windows in the day and make the room dark at night. Nightlights are actually not a great idea.

On the flip side, sleep training is not letting a baby cry for hours. Does training for a marathon mean running 26 miles immediately? No, it's a gradual process. And there're no sound studies that find a gentle method harms children. 3 (1, 2, 3) studies show the opposite.

So what is sleep training? Starting around 5-6 months old, it's a gradual process of teaching a child to fall back asleep by themselves. Everyone, even adults, wake up between rhythm cycles, sometimes as much as 30x a night. But we don't notice since we put ourselves back down.

Babies do this too, but if they're not trained or are trained to be rocked or fed to sleep (because these are forms of training too), many don't understand how to do it alone. This creates sometimes hours long disruptions in their sleeping that could be reduced to a few seconds.

Start with the baby's wake times during the day. 4 month olds need about 14.5 hours of sleep in 24 hours. They may have 4 naps with 1.5-2 hrs of wake time between them. These wake times increase from there. Taking Cara Babies has great 4mo, 6mo, and even toddler schedules.

Move on to the nighttime sleep from there. You want to establish 'cues' and not 'crutches.' Cues may include a bath, pjs, and a book. Anything consistent that will continue on indefinitely. Children thrive on consistency and settle when they know what will happen next. Cont. pg 2