6 most popular baby sleep-training meathods
By: Yogeshwar Singh
Tags: Baby, Baby Sleep Training, Baby Sleep, Baby Care, Baby Products

Exhausted new parents and certified sleep consultants swear by some of these sleep-training techniques. Here’s what you need to know before you get started.

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For the first few months of his life, Laura Welk’s baby, Greyson, was a dream sleeper. He had regular naps during the day, and all it took was a calming bottle in the evenings and he would be fast asleep. He would wake up only once a night for a feed, and that would last him until morning.

But when he was about three-and-a-half months old, the routine fell apart. “I would feed him, but he wouldn’t be asleep at the end of the feed,” recalls Welk. “I would rock him until he fell asleep and put him down, and then he would wake up 30 minutes later and I would do it all over again.” Desperate for some rest, Welk brought Greyson into bed with her, but then she ended up just lying still, holding a pacifier in his mouth all night long. “I didn’t know anything about sleep,” says Welk. “I didn’t know you couldn’t just rock them to sleep and then put them down.”

When Greyson was four months old, the first-time parents contacted a sleep consultant, who clued them into a few things that were getting in the way of Greyson sleeping well: All the rocking and pacifying were now ingrained in him as sleep associations—or crutches he needed to fall asleep and stay asleep. They decided to sleep-train him.

Sleep training is a loaded phrase, and one that is often used synonymously with letting your baby self-soothe, or “cry it out,” but that’s not the whole picture, says Alanna McGinn, a certified sleep consultant and the founder of Good Night Sleep Site. “It’s more about being able to teach your baby that they are capable of falling asleep independently,” she says. You want your baby to be able to nod off on their own—ideally without nursing, rocking or using a pacifier—because whatever tools they use to fall asleep at bedtime are the same things they’re going to wake up looking for during the night. Yes, this can feel unloving and even downright cruel. You’ll find experts on both sides of the issue: Breastfeeding advocates say it’s normal for babies of all ages to wake up multiple times to nurse, and even the sleep coaches interviewed for this article disagree with how much crying and distress are acceptable.

Recent research has shown that, at least in babies older than six months, sleep training with controlled crying and bedtime fading (both described below) improved babies’ sleep and didn’t lead to increased levels of cortisol. This provides some reassurance that a little bit of crying—if it leads to better sleep—likely won’t do your baby any harm.

Paediatrician Michael Dickinson, president of the Canadian Paediatric Society, advises parents to trust their instincts. “I don’t think there’s any evidence to suggest that it’s psychologically damaging to let your baby cry, but I think people need to be reasonable,” he says. “For most of us, letting your baby cry is five to 10 minutes.”

There’s also no need to institute a regimented cry-it-out plan if what you’re currently doing is working for your family. But good sleep habits never hurt, and being able to fall asleep on one’s own is a necessary life skill. If you sleep-train at a time that’s developmentally appropriate for your baby and with the basic ingredients of healthy sleep in place, you can minimize the amount of crying your baby (and, let’s face it, you) will do.

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