Darcia Narvaez Ph.D.

Baby Sleep Training: Mistakes “Experts” and Parents Make

Advice to ignore the needs of babies

Posted Jan 06, 2013

*See co-author list below

A world of “experts” and journalists tell parents about the safety of “controlled crying” or “cry it out” techniques to make babies sleep. The advice has multiple mistaken premises and conclusions about what is normal and good for babies.

Here are several foundational mistaken premises:

Mistaken Premise 1: The notion that sleeping through the night at 6 months is normal and developmentally/physiologically appropriate, therefore not sleeping through the night at age 6 months is a disorder

Mistaken Premise 2: The notion that there is such a thing as self-soothing, and the accompanying idea that when babies do not sleep through the night at age six months it is because parents have interfered with their ability to self-soothe

Mistaken Premise 3: That sleeping through the night should accompany breastfeeding which contradicts the social and biological realities of breastfeeding and the fact that breastfeeding beyond six months is a widely agreed-upon public health goal,

There is an incredible disconnect between mainstream medical notions of normal infant sleep and sleep advice for parents.

What is normal? Study after study shows that breastfed babies wake up more often than bottle fed babies (ergo, night waking is arguably normal in breastfed babies).

Some breastfeeding advocates don't seem to like to talk about frequent waking perhaps because they are afraid mothers will be discouraged from breastfeeding.

Sleep experts typically don't like to talk about breastfeeding at length because they can't be seen to be anti-breastfeeding. But their focus/obsession is that babies simply have to sleep through the night, even though this is unnatural.

What is the core message parents need to hear? Breastfeeding is natural, normal and necessary for optimal development (more here). It is the kind of feeding that babies and mothers were designed to experience. Night waking to varying degrees is normal in breastfed babies. So if a breastfed baby is waking, parents may not like it, but should understand that it doesn't mean that anything is wrong. Parents can choose to live with it rather than trying to fix it.

How to cope with night waking?

Make breastfeeding at night easier and less intrusive for the baby. This means co-sleeping (same room) and/or bedsharing (including sleeping units added to the parental mattress).
Understand the true (and limited) risks of co-sleeping
Learn gentle strategies for calming babies generally
Learn gentle strategies for gradually moving older babies and toddlers in the direction of less parental intervention at night and perhaps fewer wakings.
The overall goal should be nights that parents can live with, not eliminating night waking at all costs. In our experience, both personal, from talking to parents and from doing research is that many parents do not find one relatively short wakening per night to be hard to cope with.

Controlled crying should never be presented as the default, best or only option. But it is difficult to say that it should never, ever be an option that might be right for certain parents (based on consideration of a number of factors).

If parents want to try a controlled crying method they should understand the risks which are:

It will be hard for them
It will be stressful for their baby, regardless of whether the baby continues to cry or stops crying
It may not work or it may work only temporarily
Parents should also get guidelines on when to give up when controlled crying isn't working and outside limits in terms of how long to let babies cry.

We will discuss more details of these points in other posts in this series on baby sleep training.

Posts in Sleep Series:

Baby Sleep Training: Mistakes “Experts” and Parents Make

'Let Crying Babes Lie'? So Wrong

Simple Ways to Calm a Crying Baby

Normal, Human Infant Sleep: Feeding Method and Development

Normal Infant Sleep: Changing Patterns

Normal Parent Behaviors and Why They Won’t Hurt Your Child

Normal Infant Sleep: Night Nursing's Importance

More Normal Parenting for Sleep

Understanding and Helping Toddler Sleep

Understanding and Helping Toddler Sleep-Tiredness?

Understanding and Helping Toddler Sleep--Preparing Success

SIDS: Risks and Realities

Bed Sharing With Babies: What is the Hype About?

Bedsharing or Co-Sleeping Can Save Babies' Lives

Also, check out: Dangers of "Crying it Out"

NEW BOOK: To read more about the importance of early experience for optimal development, see the forthcoming book, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom.

OTHER POSTS ON PARENTING ISSUES :

BIRTH

New Moms Need Social Support

Painkillers for Childbirth? The Few Pros and Many Cons

What's the Use of Midwives and Doulas?

Jesus Had a Home Birth

What if Jesus Had Been Born in the USA?

CIRCUMCISION

Why Continue to Harm Boys from Ignorance of Male Anatomy?

What Is the Greatest Danger for an Uncircumcised Boy?

Circumcision Ethics and Economics

Circumcision: Social, Sexual, Psychological Realities

More Circumcision Myths You May Believe: Hygiene and STDs

Myths about Circumcision You Likely Believe

BREASTFEEDING

Stand Up For Breastfeeding

Talk About Breastfeeding With Your Family, Friends and Doctor

Breastmilk Wipes Out Formula: Responses to Critical Comments

In Light of Last Week's Posts: Is Pushing* Formula Evil?

Breastfeeding Resources

The REAL Truth about Breastfeeding

5 Things You Thought You Knew about Breastfeeding

The TREMENDOUS Benefits of Doing What is Normal: Breastfeeding

Myths you probably believe about infant formula

Your assumptions about infant formula are probably wrong

It’s Breastfeeding Week: Why should you care?

PARENTING: GENERAL

Research on Spanking: It's Bad for ALL Kids

What Happened to Ethics in Pediatric Medicine?

Baby-, Parent- or Life-Centered Parenting?

Ten Ways to Truly Respect Motherhood

Slings and Heroes

Parents Should Know the Limitations of Science Experiments

Babies "don’t cry in Africa," why should they cry in the USA?

Blame the baby or blame the experts?

Dumb Parent(ing), Dumberer Child

How to Grow a Smart Baby

Are you treating your child like a prisoner?

Undercare: The bane of American life?

Promoting Thriving in School-Aged Children: A Checklist

Is it good to make kids afraid?

How NOT to Ruin a Child

Are you or your child on a (touch) starvation diet?

Mother’s touch of dead baby causes “miracle”

What Does Good Parenting Look Like? You Decide.

CHILDREN’S RIGHTS

Childism Revisited

Are You a “Childist?" Test Yourself

Babies Are Needy—Does That Bug You?

Do We Need Declaration for the Rights of the Baby?

Where Are the Happy Babies?

The Decline of Children and the Moral Sense

Believing "children are resilient" may be a fantasy

How America Morally Fails its Children: What Needs to Change

Increase the well-being of children around you

Co-Authors

John Hoffman, uncommonjohn.wordpress.com

Wendy Middlemiss, University of North Texas

Sarah Ockwell-Smith, babycalming.com

Kathleen Kendall-Tackett

Helen Stevens, Safe Sleep Space

NOTE on BASIC ASSUMPTIONS: When I write about parenting, I assume the importance of the evolved developmental niche (EDN) for raising human infants (which initially arose over 30 million years ago with the emergence of the social mammals and has been slightly altered among human groups based on anthropological research).

The EDN is the baseline I use for determining what fosters optimal human health, wellbeing and compassionate morality. The niche includes at least the following: breastfeeding on demand for several years, nearly constant touch, responsiveness to needs so the young child does not get distressed, playful companionship, multiple adult caregivers, positive social support, and natural childbirth.

All these characteristics are linked to health in mammalian and human studies. Thus, shifts away from the EDN baseline are risky. My comments and posts stem from these basic assumptions.

22 Comments

Really looking forward to

Submitted by Anonymous on January 6, 2013 - 7:59pm

Really looking forward to this series! As I commented in the other post, my 7 and a half month old has a really difficult time sleeping. I have read just about everything on the subject, and my husband and I have tried a lot of strategies. We have not tried "Cry it Out" because I just cannot get behind it.

Misleading information

Submitted by Kelly S. on January 8, 2013 - 11:25pm

Some of the claims made in this article are misleading. For instance, the author claims that " ...formula makes babies sleep too deeply, contributing to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)." The link provided, however, provides evidence only that breastfeeding (even partial) is associated with a decreased incidence of SIDS. First, the finding that breastfeeding is associated with a lower incidence of SIDS, although well-supported in the literature, is essentially a correlation and CORRELATIONS DO NOT PROVE CAUSATION. Despite the attempt to measure and statistically control for possible third variables, it remains possible that parents who choose or are able to breastfeed share some common characteristic that also contributes to a lower incidence of SIDS. In other words, without a double-blind clinical trial there is no evidence that breastfeeding CAUSES a decrease in SIDS. More importantly, however, and the misleading part of the article is that even if we were to assume that breastfeeding does, in fact, cause a decease in the incidence of SIDS it does not logically follow - nor is there any evidence to suggest - that formula either (a) makes babies sleep too deeply, or (b) contributes to SIDS. To conclude this we need studies showing that (a) formula makes babies sleep too deeply (not just longer, since longer doesn't necessarily mean too deeply), and (b) formula causes SIDS. Indeed, the article cited by Dr. Narvaez provides evidence that babies who are fed formula have a decreased risk of SIDS if they are also breastfed.

BTW, I have a 14-month-old who was EBF until she weaned herself at 12 months. We struggled with sleep issues until about a month ago when we decided to finally try a controlled CIO method. This involved going into her room when she woke at night, telling her it wasn't time to get up and still sleepy time, laying her back down, telling her we loved her and would come get her in the morning, and leaving the room while she cried for first 10 minutes, then 15, then 20, etc. We never made it past 20 minutes, it took 3 nights, and now she falls asleep easily and sleeps through the night (for 12 hours). I would not have tried this when she was much younger because I wanted her to be able to understand what we were telling her, and am not an advocate of CIO methods in general, but I also believe that misinformation and fear-mongering (in the form of psuedo-science) have made some parents so confused and anxious that they suffer and allow their babies to suffer through unhealthy sleep patterns well into their toddler years. I know parents with 18-month-olds who bed-share and wake several times at night to breastfeed. If they do this because they WANT to do this, then that is their choice. But if they do this because they are afraid that night-weaning will somehow harm their baby or their attachment relationship, or they are afraid that a little controlled CIO will do more harm than good, then - Dr. Narvaez - we owe it to them and their infants to NOT MAKE CLAIMS UNSUPPORTED BY EVIDENCE, ESPECIALLY WHEN WE HAVE A PHD OR MD AFTER OUR NAME AND PRESENT THESE CLAIMS AS EVIDENCE-BASED. WE CAN AND MUST DO BETTER THAN THIS.

I am a Developmental scientist with a Ph.D. from the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota.

causal links

Submitted by Darcia Narvaez Ph.D. on January 9, 2013 - 1:15pm

Thanks for pointing out that we should make any causal links more clear. We added the following information:

Active sleeping is a condition associated with more heart rate irregularities and sleep apnea which are potentially life-threatening if the baby does not arouse). When babies are actively sleeping, breastfed babies are more easily aroused than formula-fed babies (Horne et al 2004; Franco et al 2000). Arousability is related to risk for SIDS (Kato et al., 2003).

Franco P, Scaillet S, Wemenbol V, Valente F, Grosswasser J, and Kahn A. 2000. The influence of a pacifier on infants’ arousals from sleep. J Pediatr 136: 775-779.

Horne RSC, Parslow PM, Ferens D, Watts AM, and Adamson TM. 2004. Comparison of evoked arousability in breast and formula fed infants. Arch Dis Child 89: 22-25.

Kato I, Scaillet S, Groswasser J, Montemitro E, Togari H, Lin JS, Kahn A, and Franco P. 2006. Spontaneous arousability in prone and supine position in healthy infants.Sleep 29(6):785-90.

Not causal

Submitted by Kelly S. on January 10, 2013 - 3:26am

Dr. Narvaez, the additional citations you provide are outdated and demonstrate an association only - not a causal link. Horne et al. employed a quasi-experimental design to compare breast- and formula-fed infants, not random assignment, so causal inferences can not be made. I can only imagine that you are aware of this, so I am confused as to why you persist in presenting this evidence as casual?

I would also point out that (a) Horne et al. only found a difference between breast- and bottle-fed infants at 2-3 months, and NOT when they were 5-6 months, and (b) these data were collected between 1997 and 2001, long before DHA and other key nutrients were added to formula. Thus, there is no justification for claiming benefits of breast feeding beyond 5 months for reducing the incidence of SIDS, nor can these data be generalized to contemporary cohorts. You must provide evidence from studies conducted in the last 5 years or so in which formula-fed infants received formula supplemented with DHA to validate your claim that formula contributes to SIDS. Again, I can only imagine that you are aware of these issues and am confused as to why you would mislead this way?

Parents want what is best for their children, and they rely on some combination of instinct, experience, and expert advice to make important decisions about child-rearing, They deserve complete and accurate information about scientific research. At best, this article falls far short of that goal and, at worst, it manipulates the reader with outdated, incomplete information in order to advance a personal (or perhaps religious) perspective on how parents - and mothers in particular - "should" behave.

Come on!

Submitted by Darcia Narvaez Ph.D. on January 10, 2013 - 10:54am

You really think formula is a good first choice for babies? Please read our series of 9 posts where we discuss formula and breastfeeding. Here is the last one that has links to the rest:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/moral-landscapes/201108/breastmilk-wipes-out-formula-responses-critical-comments

Randomized experimental trials for breastfeeding vs formula in humans would be unethical. So we take the evidence where we can.

There is something wrong with a scientific approach that thinks it has to be proven with randomized experiments that a paltry human-made substance doesn't match up with the elixir of human breast milk (thousands of ingredients in the right proportions for that particular baby to build the brain, body, immune system). This is crazy scientism. Science is meant to serve us and give insights into what we don't know. It would be foolish to think that we don't know that breastmilk is better than formula. There is a lot of misinformation though that leads people to think there isn't much difference.

Yes, the formula companies keep adding a new ingredient every now and then and touting it but formula remains MILLIONS of miles away from breastmilk. It is human hubris to think that humans can formulate something equivalent or even close.

In case anyone else reading this is interested, here is a slide show comparing formula and breastfeeding put together by my students: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tey_Ip-5pw

As we say in the last post (link above), formula is good for emergencies but we fail our children if we reach for it first.
Our society needs to provide more options for breastmilk and breastfeeding and more support for babies, moms and families.

Dr. Narvaez, I never said

Submitted by Kelly S. on January 10, 2013 - 1:45pm

Dr. Narvaez, I never said that formula was a good first choice for babies. I said that the evidence YOU provided does not justify YOUR claim of the benefits of breast feeding beyond 5 months for reducing the incidence of SIDS. I also said that as the ingredients in formula changes over time, research must be updated if we are to draw the same conclusions. This is straightforward matter of the limitations of the scientific method that every first-year doctoral student is taught, not "crazy scientism". (As a side-note, is that really the extent of your scholarship? Hope your readers aren't knowledgeable enough to critically evaluate your claims and call them names in an attempt to discredit if they do?)

Yes, it would be unethical to attempt a randomized trial of breast-feeding vs. formula-feeding. It is also unethical - not to mention dishonest and socially irresponsible - to purposefully misinterpret the scientific record in order to promote one's personal opinion.

"There is something wrong with a scientific approach that thinks it has to be proven with randomized experiments that a paltry human-made substance doesn't match up with the elixir of human breast milk (thousands of ingredients in the right proportions for that particular baby to build the brain, body, immune system)."

No, this is in fact the essence of the scientific approach. We question assumptions, design experiments to test them, and interpret our results in the context of the limitations of our study and the extant literature. Science is but one system for understanding the world. Religion is another. I am not saying that science has, or can have, all of the answers. I am saying that if you present yourself as a "scientific authority" and make statements that you claim are supported by scientific evidence, you should play by the rules of science. Don't cherry-pick outdated and obscure studies - which you then go on to over-interpret - in order to promote a personal agenda. Otherwise, what you are promoting is religion masquerading as science.

I am also not saying that I think formula exactly duplicates breast milk, or that formula is as optimal as breast milk, but I think it is a bit far-fetched to claim that breast-milk contains "thousands" of ingredients customized for each individual baby and that formula is "MILLIONS OF MILES" away from breast milk. Millions of infants do, in fact, thrive on formula. The question of whether they are thriving as optimally as infants who are breastfed is a matter of debate, and in many cases the differences found in the scientific literature are unreliable (found in some studies but not others) or so small as to be negligible. In fact, a recent meta-analysis argues that the only reliable finding is that breast-feeding reduces symptoms of gastro-intestinal distress. Now, you are free to disagree with this study, but scientists have an obligation to present scientific findings accurately and allow people to make up their own minds.

I also think it is insensitive (not to mention inaccurate) to claim that mothers who do not breast-feed are "failing" their children. What about mothers who, for medical reasons, cannot breast-feed? What about single mothers who must return to work immediately after childbirth and whose jobs are not conducive to breastfeeding?

How convenient to cite scientific research when you want to imbue your opinion with scientific authority, and then disparage science when you are called out for misinterpreting the record.

One other thing that I would

Submitted by Kelly S. on January 10, 2013 - 1:59pm

One other thing that I would point out. In your third paragraph you make the argument that we do not need science to tell us what we already know - that breast milk is better than formula. Here you are committing the "Naturalistic Fallacy" - the assumption that the way something exists in nature is the optimal way. According to evolutionary theory, the way something exists in nature is simply a consequence of the constraints imposed by the environment and the organisms resources for adaptation - not some ideal or optimal design imagined by an intelligent creator. In my view, this is where you reveal your argument to be more in line with fundamentalist thinking than scientific reasoning.

I want to emphasize that I do not think there is anything wrong with having a personal opinion or religious viewpoint, just that statements made from these perspectives should be identified as such so that readers are not mislead into thinking they are reading evidence when they are reading opinion or belief.

you forget

Submitted by Darcia Narvaez Ph.D. on January 10, 2013 - 8:31pm

You forget that this is a blog, an opinion piece, not an article for a scientific journal. It's impossible (and unreadable) in a blog to cite every study or viewpoint and nuance that an academic journal might expect.

It is fine to want only experimental studies to be cited and evidence from decades of proper study. But then go read science academic journals.

But I too get frustrated that so many one-time studies are presented in popular press magazines as generalizable to all human beings, when they were done in a small university with 20 sophomores from the USA.

But the converging evidence on mammalian and human childrearing is increasingly clear that the practices that violate evolved caregiving practices that evolved 30 million years ago with the social mammals matter greatly for health. My colleagues and I are finding that they matter for psychosocialmoral development too.

It's not a matter of "science or religion". Life is much more complicated than that. There is much we know that science cannot address. Those who study breastfeeding these days say that about breastmilk. We need much more attention to the science, as you say, but also to keep our heads and not expect science to be able tell us what we should already know. There are many things in nature that cannot be scientifically studied. The trick is to know when we need an experiment and when we do not.

I never said that only

Submitted by Kelly S. on January 11, 2013 - 2:54am

I never said that only experimental studies should be cited. You are the one who provided citations for the claims you made in the article. I simply pointed out that the studies you cited did not support the claims you were making, and that you can not draw casual inferences from studies that do not use random assignment. I can't say this enough - if the claims you are making reflect your personal opinion then identify them as such. Do not pretend they are supported by scientific evidence when they are not.

This discussion has never been about the advantages of breastfeeding or breast milk. I have read the scientific literature on BF and still choose to EBF my daughter until she self-weaned. This conversation is about how to appropriately interpret and cite scientific research so as not to mislead your readers into thinking that your opinions carry the weight of scientific proof.

"The trick is to know when we need an experiment and when we do not." - we need an experiment when we claim that SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH supports our claims of a casual link between formula and SIDS.

Dr. Narvaez, to what extent are your professional and scientific positions informed by your religious beliefs and/or a religious perspective?

broad knowledge needed

Submitted by Darcia Narvaez Ph.D. on January 11, 2013 - 11:27am

No religion involved, just baby advocacy.

Perhaps I should have reiterated my baseline. I use the work of other sciences, evolutionary (developmental systems theory) and anthropological sciences, for baselines about human nature and behavior. We know that the caregiving practices I discuss frequently in my blog emerged more than 30 million years ago with the social mammals and were slightly changed among humans according to anthropological studies of small-band hunter gatherers. I use this as a baseline for what humans needs for optimal development. In a way evolution has done its own 'experiments' on what brings about human flourishing.

Deviations from the evolved baseline for early caregiving have become normalized in the USA particularly, and discussions of moving back to the baseline are treated like they need perfect experimental research for justification. That is what I am reacting to (perhaps mistakenly) in what you have been saying.

Instead, the bar should be extremely high to show that a violation of an evolved parenting practice is all right. We can't do longitudinal studies but we can point to other indicators. So, however imperfectly, I do gather studies that offer support for the evolved practices. None reach experimental perfection but still suggest that we be much more cautious in abandoning nature's long experiment.

I've been writing about how USA child and adult wellbeing have been deteriorating for some decades. (I argue that the decline in ancestral parenting practices has something to do with it.) A new report has more data about the decline: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/health/americans-under-50-fare-poorly-...

Could you repost the link to

Submitted by Kelly S. on January 11, 2013 - 2:25pm

Could you repost the link to your report? It isn't working for some reason.

Nevermind, I found the

Submitted by Kelly S. on January 11, 2013 - 2:55pm

Nevermind, I found the article by searching the site. The article focuses on the death rate for Americans under 50, and reports that car accidents, gun violence and drug overdoses were the top three contributors. I can see how addiction may be related to parenting practices, but car accidents and homicide?

I understand well the limitations of the scientific method, and the need for broad, interdisciplinary perspectives for understanding complex social issues such as parenting, but I still don't understand where you came up with the notion that feeding babies formula contributes to SIDS? And I still don't understand why you claimed there was a causal link when the studies you cited did not support this? Where is this coming from?

Is there a peer-reviewed article or chapter that summarizes your work on the decline in ancestral parenting practices and the role this plays in child wellbeing that you could recommend? Any links to your work on your ND website?

risk of SIDS from not breastfeeding

Submitted by Darcia Narvaez Ph.D. on January 11, 2013 - 4:01pm

The causal link was first presented to me by my colleague, James McKenna, who studies mother-baby sleep and related issues. I've asked him to send papers.

But the 2011 USDHHS report on breastfeeding also puts this in their list of risks for not breastfeeding. There is a 56% greater risk (and most studies only compare 3 months of feeding practices). Download the report here:
http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/calls/breastfeeding/index.html

If you read through the other report of health for people under 50, there are 9 areas in which US citizens have a health disadvantage compared to the other 16 developed nations and I think there are early life experience links to many (not all) of these (they mention some in the report). Here is their list in their order:
adverse birth outcomes;
injuries, accidents, and homicides;
adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections;
HIV/AIDS;
drug-related mortality;
obesity and diabetes;
heart disease;
chronic lung disease; and
disability

I would be happy to send a review chapter from a just-published book from Oxford if you send me an email to my university address: dnarvaez@nd.edu.

Thanks for the conversation and trying to keep me honest! I appreciate it.

Black & White Thinking vs. Intuition/Common Sense

Submitted by Lyndsay Katauskas on January 31, 2013 - 5:22pm

Dr. Narvaez,

I wholeheartedly agree with paragraph 3 & 4 above--and is one of the main reasons I found myself going away from academia as a military spouse with a masters in counseling. We've been moving every year due to military orders. So I find myself with my own marriage education and coaching business where I can use curriculum and material close to SFBT and teach life & resiliency skills until our moving around every 1-2 years stabilizes. I aligned myself with Dr. John Gray and Mars Venus Coaching material, because he is doing what you're doing too (I especially like the latest stress/gender intelligence/nutrition links). Widely reading/researching across all of the fields to bring out links between all the areas of study, and explaining it in a way that MOST (not masters or doctoral degree holders) people can understand--then apply to their own life.

I believe this is much different from popular press magazines advising us as what you're both doing is explaining human development and evolved caregiving practices (which in people who understand healthy relationship dynamics is intuitive and based on common sense, but is not the majority of our population) to people struggling to figure out how to make their primary love relationships work so they don't end in divorce, split families, or unattached/needy people.

We have to get back to the baseline, and point out that the fads don't work. The most straight-forward way I help people to figure out how to do this is to first remember what basic needs must be met: feeling safe, secure, and loved.

If a baby or young child is not getting this basic need met, then whatever the "experts" say is probably going to be against someone's maternal instinct. I copiously read preparing for our first son's birth--and what made sense to me over and over was breastfeeding, natural childbirth, and skin-to-skin contact, and teaching our son emotional intelligence. Despite 4 moves in 4 years, he's a well-adjusted, compassionate, articulate pre-schooler. He's never mistreated anyone, has always shared toys, and knows how to speak up if another child is mistreating/bullying him or someone else. We breast-fed until he was just over 2. He's completely potty-trained, and knows how to sleep through the night now. He likes to cuddle with us, and we're not opposed to when he asks to join us in the early morning hours, because what he wants is human touch. Who wouldn't? Is it really normal to sleep in a big bed by yourself? And, believe me, when my husband was deployed and I was exclusively breastfeeding--and all of the popular books were telling me to let my child cry it out, or that he should be sleeping through the night--I often pulled the intuition/common sense card out going against this "popular advice." In our case, me and our time breastfeeding was the only thing that stayed the same--beds, rooms, houses, other people--were all transient (between military move and family/friends visiting). This is what let him know that he had a place, was loved, and his basic food/soothing/safety/security needs would be met when he communicated he wanted something.

We're welcoming baby brother in a few weeks, and after reading the popular material (and knowing human development), and parenting our first son--I have the experience that backs up my initial belief of ultimately basing our parenting choices on what will most make our sons well-rounded, independent, and feeling safe, secure, and loved; not what we're told is our evolved/latest norm.

Thank You!!

Can't wait to post to social networks, share with other moms, and spread this around.

Sincerely,

Lyndsay Katauskas, MEd
Mars Venus Coaching
Corporate Media Relations

Bravo

Submitted by Anonymous on January 8, 2013 - 11:31pm

With our first child I had unreasonable expectations about our sleep patterns. I read alot on the internet about how to get our baby to sleep through the night. Exhausted, I thought 8hrs was the healthy and natural state we should be aiming for. It would have been less stressful if I had understood more about the natural sleep habits of babies. So with our second child (9 m.o.)I have tried to follow her lead. Still exhausted but less stressed. I especially appreciate the information in this article about breastfeeding.

I agree that breast feeding

Submitted by Anonymous on January 13, 2013 - 6:09pm

I agree that breast feeding is important for the babies. It is also important for the mother. I also agree the breast milk is more healthy and nutritious than formula. I think mothers should breast feed there child even if it means babies will cry more and waking more in the night.

posts to come

Submitted by Rachel Verweij on January 30, 2013 - 9:05am

Dear dr Narvaez,
I am very much looking forward to your post nr 7: Gentle strategies for encouraging toddlers to need less parental intervention at night. We have a 2 1/2 year old who is very insistent about her breastmilk in the night, and we are quite desperate for sleep. Could you give us an idea on when that post is due?
Thanks a lot!
Rachel Verweij

Basically babies are

Submitted by baby daily deals on February 13, 2013 - 10:04am

Basically babies are suffering from sleeping disorder; therefore parents are worried about their sleeping practices. Research says that babies growth are partly depend upon the density of sleeping, so we are give more importance to baby sleep first and used to take lessons from experts and experience mothers.

A new born baby need much

Submitted by deal steal on April 2, 2013 - 11:49am

A new born baby need much time to sleep,it create a good health for the baby. Many child are crying at the time of sleeping so its a problem for the parents and the baby.For the sleep better advice from the doctors or any exports.

It would be really to good to

Submitted by Andrea on February 16, 2014 - 5:10am

It would be really to good to clarify early on that 'sleep experts' that recommend CC and not experts by any stretch of the imagination. Their books are merely opinion pieces, I wish this was pointed out more clearly.

Behavioral Sleep Medicine

Submitted by Kristin L Daley, PhD on April 22, 2014 - 10:55am

As a clinical psychologist certified in behavioral sleep medicine, this blog opinion piece greatly disappoints me. I have been through lectures by Dr. Ferber, and his caring about pediatric sleep is immense. It would be great to have sleep articles written by people who ARE familiar with the decades of research in pediatric sleep (as Dr. Narvaez indicated she is not), and pay attention to the studies that are published as part of their regular line of work. There is a lot of support for breastfeeding in the pediatric sleep community, and the efforts at helping infants sleep well are designed to work for the entire developmental spectrum. This is not an "us vs. them" approach or argument that is presented from the sleep community, but rather unprovoked attacks. This is why I no longer subscribe to Psychology Today.

bebek sitesi

Submitted by http://www.bebekcaddesi.com/ on June 19, 2015 - 7:06am

Best information post are here..thank you soo much..

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Baby Sleep Training: Mistakes “Experts” and Parents Make

Advice to ignore the needs of babies

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