My baby didn’t self soothe, then we sleep trained and now they do

If you read part one - Can babies self soothe? of this post, you will be up to date with the hard cold facts that babies cannot learn to self soothe as that is a complex neurological skill that comes from years of brain maturity.

So what happens when your baby starts self-soothing after or during sleep training?

First and foremost, just to make sure we are all on the same page, I sleep-trained my son, I don’t and will never judge anyone who sleep trains, or who has. However, I am passionate about sleep training being a CHOICE that a family makes based on what is right for their family. For sleep training to be a choice, parents need to be fully informed about what it actually is, and what it isn’t. And the same needs to be said about the work that I do supporting families with sleep, people need to know what I offer and what I don’t offer. Fair is fair, parents deserve to be fully informed so they can make choices that are the appropriate fit.

In part one of this post we discussed how babies can be split into two categories. Those that self-soothe easily between sleep cycles, and those who signal between sleep cycles. We also discussed how this is entirely based on things out of our parental control, such as genetics, temperament etc.

So let’s take that a step further, we know that roughly 30-40% of the population are a more “chill” temperament, and those babies would take to sleep training like a duck to water because those babies are chill in general. They just get on with it because they don’t need much extra co-regulation or support, especially not when it comes to sleep.

Then you have the highly sensitive spectrum, we know that is (depending on what you read) 20-30% of the population and babies with a highly sensitive temperament are the babies that will scream for weeks on end during sleep training, they are the babies that scream so hard they throw up in their bed, and then they keep screaming. For parents who have not had a child with this temperament, it can be really hard to conceptualize how things that work for your baby don’t work for a baby with this temperament. These babies are often lost in a system that is not well equipped to deal with them and parents are left on their own with a “keep at it, they are just stubborn" or an assumption that the parents were “not being compliant so that’s why they didn’t get results”.

That leaves 40-50% in limbo between those two groups. These are often the “slow to warm” temperaments, these are the temperaments that will take to sleep training but it will be HARD work, weeks of effort, and then with any form of a hiccup (change in routine, teething, sickness etc.), it is back to square one again.

So in summary, if your child didn’t self-soothe, and you sleep trained and now they do, it is likely your child falls into the first temperament category when it comes to sleep, that’s great right? But what isn’t great is that parents are being led to believe that their child has “learnt a skill” that is from a brain development perspective IMPOSSIBLE for them to learn.

I wrote a post on Instagram about this recently, would you expect your 7month old to put their own socks and shoes on? Go check it out, it’s great.

For now, I hope this gives you some insight as to why some babies take to sleep training and why others don’t.

Holistic, responsive sleep support looks at the family as a unit and rather than using parental behavioural techniques to change the baby’s behaviour, we work on parental behavioural strategies to support the parent in supporting the baby with what BOTH PARTIES need. There is NO cookie-cutter approach, every family gets different support based on their individual needs.