I want to file a complaint

I have now tried to file a formal complaint with the BBC three times.

Twice, I filled out the online form at bbc.co.uk/complaints and received an automated response directing me back to the same website I had just used. So I found a direct email address for the editorial board and wrote to them instead. They responded by asking me to fill out the form. The form that sends an automated response telling me to fill out the form. I am a regulated social worker with a graduate degree and I genuinely cannot figure out how to be heard by one of the most powerful media organizations in the world. I can only imagine what it feels like to be a sleep-deprived parent trying to navigate this.

Which, actually, is the whole point.

Here is what I was trying to complain about.

On May 8, 2026, BBC Future published an article titled "Parents in ancient times felt less sleep deprived: what our ancestors did differently on baby sleep." It is the latest in a series of articles by the same journalist, Amanda Ruggeri, covering infant sleep from a consistent and singular point of view. That point of view is this: our ancestors coslepted, breastslept, and lived in communal villages, and modern parents feel exhausted not because they are actually sleeping less, but because industrialization has made us expect too much from our nights. 

I don’t disagree with Ruggeri. She’s not wrong in any way.  However, this argument is also incomplete in a way that I think causes real harm.

Sleep training is not mentioned in the article. Not once. Not to endorse it, not to dismiss it, not even to acknowledge it exists (which isn’t surprising given Rugger’s stance on sleep training–more on that later…). And yet sleep training is one of the most researched approaches to infant sleep support in the world. You’ve been here long enough to know that sleep training isn’t fringe, it isn’t random or rogue–it’s a substantiated, well documented and well studied intervention. It is reccommended by countless medical and mental health professionals. It is bound in science (albiet imperfect science, but unfortunately all reserach on sleep training are more or less incomplete but questions in many directions)

This is interesting. It is also not new. Ruggeri has been writing versions of this argument for years (and I know this because her articles are sent to my by clients frequently). In February 2022, BBC Future published her piece on the science of healthy baby sleep, which framed night waking as biologically normal and questioned the premise of consolidated sleep as a goal. In March 2022, she published "What really happens when babies are left to cry it out,"where she labelled sleep training as "extinguishing signalling" rather than improving sleep.  In December 2024, Scientific American published her piece Does Sleep Training Work? with the subheading: "Many parents choose sleep training to get their babies to sleep through the night. But the evidence supporting it is flawed."  Across all of these pieces, the same pattern holds: the same small group of researchers are quoted, the same evolutionary framing is applied, and behavioural sleep support is either absent or presented as something parents are pressured into by a culture that has lost touch with biology. Ruggeri frames the fact that children are able to connect cycles themselves as a problem. She highlights that babies still wake the same amount of times (...ummm thank god), and some gotcha moment when in reality its showcasing a lack of understanding of how all humans do this. All night. It’s biological and normal to wake and sleep. Work doesn’t change that. 

I want to be clear about something. I am not here to tell you that cosleeping is wrong. It is not. It works beautifully for many families and there is genuine research supporting it. What I am saying is that it does not work for everyone. It is not safe in every circumstance. There are families who have tried it and were more depleted, not less. There are parents who cannot safely bedshare due to medication, sleep environment, or physical health. There are single parents, shift workers, parents with postpartum depression, parents who have other children with early school start times. For all of those families, the BBC's coverage of this topic offers nothing. No options, no alternatives, no acknowledgment that another evidence-based path exists.

The Straw…

One week after that article was published, BBC News released an undercover investigation into the unregulated infant sleep industry. Reporters found that self-described sleep consultants with no qualifications were advising parents to place newborns on their fronts to sleep, directly against NHS safer sleep guidance, and recommending loose items like towels and muslins inside cots, which the Lullaby Trust identifies as a SIDS risk. An NHS paediatrician who reviewed the footage called the advice "fundamentally the most dangerous thing she has said." The Lullaby Trust and an MP wrote to the Health Secretary calling for urgent regulatory action. The BBC reported on all of this correctly and with appropriate alarm.

…what?

The same organization that spent four years publishing articles pointing parents away from regulated, evidence-based behavioural sleep support also published an investigation warning parents about the dangers of turning to unregulated, unqualified practitioners for sleep help.

Do you see what has happened here?

When parents are told that their baby's night waking is biologically normal and that the ancestral solution is to cosleep, and when the full range of regulated clinical options is never mentioned, those parents do not simply go to sleep peacefully in a family bed and wake up restored. Many of them, exhausted and desperate, turn to whoever is in their Instagram feed promising to fix things. Some of those people are qualified and ethical. Some of them, as the BBC's own investigation found, are telling parents to put their babies face-down in cribs full of loose fabric.

The BBC investigation correctly identifies that the infant sleep industry is unregulated and that this creates genuine risk for families. What it does not ask is what role media coverage plays in pushing parents toward that industry in the first place. If you are a parent who has read that sleep training is biologically unnatural and that the evidence supporting it is flawed, and cosleeping is not working for your family, where do you go next? You go looking. And what you find online is not always safe.

I am a Registered Social Worker. I work under a regulatory college. I have professional accountability, an ethics framework, and a complaints process. Families who work with me have recourse if something goes wrong. The BBC's investigation is right that this kind of regulated professional accountability is exactly what the infant sleep space needs more of. But you cannot on one hand call for regulated, evidence-based practitioners and on the other hand spend four years implying that the evidence base for behavioural sleep support is flawed or nonexistent. Those two positions are in direct contradiction.

So I tried to tell the BBC that.

Last month I tried to write a complaint that showcased the pattern I have observed over the past 4 years. I asked for an addendum to the May 2026 article. I asked the BBC to consider revising opinion-style articles on contested clinical topics be labeled as such. I said I would happily contribute a clinical perspective or connect them with practitioners across the spectrum of infant sleep if that would help.

I filed it at bbc.co.uk/complaints.

3 days later, I received an automated email telling me to file it at bbc.co.uk/complaints.

I filed it again and received the same response. So I found a direct email for the editorial board and wrote to them with the full complaint.

They replied asking me to fill out the form.

I am now publishing this instead.

I want to be clear about where I stand, because I have been in this conversation long enough to know how it gets misread. I have never believed that every family should sleep train. I do not believe that now. The best sleep arrangement for any family is the one that leaves everyone in it functioning, bonded, and okay. We live in systems, and those systems look different for everyone. If your system works better with your baby in your bed, that is a legitimate and well-supported choice. If your system works better without, that is equally legitimate. What I am asking for is the right for both of those families to be seen.

We have to consider the risks beyond what science can tell us at this moment. Risks to healthy bonding, physical risks of sleep deprivations (which is felt differently by every person), risks to your system–this will look different for everyone.There are risks to the system itself, the relationship, the household, the parent's capacity to show up the next day–these risks are real, they are clinical, and they deserve to be part of the conversation every time infant sleep is covered in the mainstream press.

I think she genuinely believes what she writes, and I think her perspective has value. What I am asking for, from the BBC and from anyone who shapes how infant sleep gets covered in mainstream media, is the same thing I ask of anyone who talks to parents about sleep: tell the whole story. All of it. Not just the part that fits a particular view of how parenting should look.

Parents are not failing to sleep because they have made the wrong cultural choices. They are navigating a genuinely hard set of circumstances with imperfect information, limited support, and enormous pressure. They deserve a media landscape that takes all of that seriously. Right now, the BBC is running two parallel stories about infant sleep that actively contradict each other, and nobody seems to have noticed.

I noticed.