What science says about Helping Baby Sleep

I didn’t want to do it that way. I was really tired of it.
Not only sleep training. Not only “cry it out.”
But also the whole idea of “good” and “bad” habits around sleep.

Anything related to changing a behavior.

I was tired of that obsession on what parents are doing good or wrong. I just wondered if we could just leave parents alone, offer them (back) the credit they truly deserve. I wanted to approach baby sleep in a family, in a way-more truthful approach.

​

These ideas of sleep training and “good” and “bad” habits —it just didn’t sit right with me.
So I started to look deeper. And what I discovered… changed everything.

​

Does sleep training really work?
Does it actually help babies sleep longer?
And by the way — what is “longer”?

That’s how I landed into sleep biology.

What I’ve found out shifted my entire practice. Completely!​

Because… of Hall's study.

DOES SLEEP TRAINING LIKE CRY IT OUT WORKS ?

They finally did a study that actually measured the results of behavioral approaches to help baby sleep.

Behavioral approach will be all the approaches that go from teaching parents what are the good and bad sleep associations, to the cry-it-out method.

​

Until recently, most studies on baby sleep relied on one main tool: the sleep diary. Parents were asked to manually note each time their baby woke during the night.

​

But this method had its limits. The diaries were often incomplete, and above all, due to the constant fatigue parents were under, their interpretation of when their baby was waking up was too subjective.

So this time, with Hall's study, they compared these sleep diaries with objective measures (Hall et al., 2015).

​

They did not just ask the parents if their baby woke up or not.
They used actigraphy—the eye of a machine that watches baby's brain activity and sleep patterns.

​

And they discovered that, even when parents recorded that their baby didn’t wake them up after being sleep trained… the actigraphy still recorded biological wake-ups.

​

In other words: sleep training doesn’t change the baby’s sleep pattern, but it changes how we perceive their sleep, often leading us to believe they are sleeping better when, biologically, they are not.

​

So, this is what we’re gonna do this week: deep dive into how sleep biology works and what we can do to let biology do her work to support your baby’s sleep.

Making sure you have sleep biology by your side.