One of Amanda’s MOST COMMONLY ASKED questions is getting answered this week! Listener Ashley jumps on with Amanda to talk about failed sleep training attempts and gets to the bottom of why ‘sleep training’ doesn’t always work out the first time around. If you’ve had sleep training struggles, this is the episode for you!
Voice Over:
You’re listening to the Slumber Party podcast with your host Amanda Jewson, a mom of two girls, a child and infant sleep expert and general sleep lover! If you’re a tired parent who is desperate for answers or just someone who loves sleep, this podcast was created just for you. Each episode is packed full of tips and tricks to help you maintain your sanity as well as your social life during the early stages of parenthood. So grab your headphones, it’s time to get comfy!
Amanda:
I absolutely loved having the opportunity to speak with Ashley about her sleep training struggles because this is a common refrain, you hear, “Sleep training doesn’t work. Why isn’t sleep training working. I’ve been doing it for a month…” And Ashley and I dig deep into why these things can happen. So if you are struggling with your own sleep training journey, I highly suggest that you listen to this episode or share it with the friend who needs it for some insight!
Amanda:
Okay. Ashley. Hello? Are you there?
Ashley:
I’m here. Thank you for having me.
Thank you for being on and thank you for messaging me on Instagram in such haste.
Ashley:
Oh, my God. I was so thankful when you responded. It was like angels from above.
Amanda:
You sent me pictures, your daughter had leopard print on, right?
Ashley:
Yeah, she’s outrageous. And it’s funny because after I sent it, I thought, “Oh, my God, this is kismet. Because Amanda loves leopard print!’ it’s meant to be! I didn’t even do it on purpose!
Amanda:
I’m just sucker and so predictable. It’s like, how do I do it? Just show a baby in leopard print and that’s it. And I’m like, yeah, that’s it. That’s all you had to do, you know what I mean? To be fair, I had like, it was so outrageous. So the last time I put a call out for people to come on my podcast, I basically had to beg people to do it, and they did. And there was, like, maybe two or three. But I like it because I am, I’m fine talking by myself, but it’s not great, like I’m not not my best self. So I was like, okay, I’ll try again this one time. So it was like a Monday morning and like I went into my instagram and there were, like, 20 messages within five minutes. And then all of the, and I was like, Oh, my God, I’ve created a monster. I’m gonna have to do this differently next time, just because I quite simply couldn’t get to everyone the way I usually like to. So if you do want to catch my attention, leopard print, always appropriate, chocolate to my door, you can email me for my address. I’m comfortable with that. But I really wanted to talk with you because, for a few reasons. Number one, you seem like you’re in the shit. You contacted me because you’ve tried sleep training three times. It has not worked. That is very frustrating. Number two, the the thing that sometimes can happen when people have tried sleep training and it doesn’t work is that they, they just give up when they think that you know something is wrong or that there’s something wrong with them or their child. And quite often it’s something a professional can help with. So I would, I really wanted to jump in. And to be honest, like there are, there’s like a small subset of babies that just aren’t ready to do the work yet, And I was like, I’m taking a risk because what if I get on a call and it’s, like, “they’re just not ready… You’ve done all the right things!” But the great thing is, there was something really easy that I could help you with, which is pretty awesome. And I guess I’m I just want people to have hope that they can sleep again. So thank you so much for reaching out. I’m really excited. I’m going to stop talking right now because I’m going to talk for the majority of this podcast, and I’m gonna let you jump in and tell everyone what happened and what’s going on.
Ashley:
Amazing. So I have a six month old baby girl currently, and Sophie when she was, you know, a baby, she always slept pretty well, I think, for a newborn baby. I always felt like it was an appropriate amount of sleep that I was getting. You know, she would wake every three hours, I would feed her, she’d go back to sleep. Sometimes we’d have to pretty like, aggressively rock her. But, you know, all in all, I was like, my baby’s amazing. And no one really talks about the four month sleep regression, and, you know, people have talked about sleep training, but the regression was not quite spoken about. And when it happened, I don’t think I really realized that she was in it. I just found myself waking up every hour, every 45 minutes, and I just kind of kept, you know, shaking it off and thinking it was going to get better. And then finally, it kind of really hit us that, okay, now we’re in it. So we decided, and this this was right on basically four months, so we decided, okay, well, we’ve heard of sleep training. Let’s sleep train. So without any real plan or discussion, we kind of just honestly jumped in. We had heard about Ferber. We knew that, like, you could go in at intervals. So we kind of did that. And we did a bit of like extinction. We honestly didn’t know what we were doing. And probably I feel, you know, it’s that mom guilt, that I did a disservice to my daughter.
Amanda:
No don’t do that, don’t do that. I’m gonna stop you because there’s so many clients that come to me and they’ve done stuff or they’ve done things, and they are like, “Oh, I’m a bad parent, and I shouldn’t have done this or like, I’ve done everything to help them to sleep. And now look. Look what I’ve done…”
Look, we are all surviving. We’re all doing what we can to survive. You are making choices for your family and for you. You weren’t like, “you know what? I’m gonna sleep train my baby so I can drink cocktails and like, go sit by my monitor and like…” Okay, Like you’re doing it because you weren’t surviving, and you’re the mothership. And we all know how important sleep is, right? We’re, we’re doing what we can. And by the way, you’re going to screw up so much more later on other stuff. I threw diaper cream at the wall yesterday when my three year old was driving me nuts. Okay, it’s just it’s never ending, so we’re going to stop it.
Ashley:
Thank you. So yeah, so anyway, so we tried our like mishmash of unprepared, you know, methods that resulted in Sophie barfing and crying for two hours and us crying and just being like, ‘Okay, we need to cut it.’ We thought, you know what? Maybe she’s not ready. She’s just four months after things didn’t necessarily get better. If anything, they kind of stayed a bit stagnant. And then I was just in a I’m a generally, like, pretty happy, rainbows and butterflies type of person, and I was in a pretty dark place for myself, where I found myself not enjoying being a mom. And, you know, So when talking with my husband, I was like, we need we need more help than this. And, you know, reading all the blogs and the books and everything, it was so much information that I couldn’t decipher it anymore. So we did hire a consultant. And we we tried sleep training again with her recommendations. And again, this lead to Sophie crying for six nights in a row for over an hour and 1/2 every night. We were only at this point, really trying to, to train during nighttime. We were leaving naps to be fed to sleep. Sophie was always, after the regression, she really loved the boob, so that was the only way that I could get her down. So that’s what we did at naps. It didn’t work so we took a pause. We did a reset, and then basically, I resumed feeding her to sleep for everything. Nighttime, wakes, naps, all of it. And then still with the sleep consultant, but we went a big rogue, we decided to use a different method that she wasn’t aware of and again, it didn’t really work. We tried to incorporate naps, but after a couple of days, it felt like maybe that was throwing off her nights. So we dropped the naps and we said, ‘We’ll just feed to sleep for naps, and we’ll try this again’ and again it just failed. So we have been just really discouraged. And I have had definitely had my moments of feeling like, maybe, maybe Sophie, maybe she just can’t be trained. Maybe she’s just this wild stallion who just just, you know, she can’t be tamed and she can run wild, like that’s literally what I thought. And I was, I was just wrapping my head around what that would look like. And we still try every night. You know, we let her cry to sleep. But still, it’s always at least an hour, and when everyone around you is saying, ‘you know, it only takes 3 to 4 days. Like, have you tried this? Have you tried that?’ It’s so frustrating because you just feel like, well what am I doing wrong or you know, not what’s wrong with Sophie, because I never thought anything was wrong with her. But, like, why isn’t she getting it like, yeah. And you just are left in this limbo of, of inadequacy and exhaustedness and it’s just a really awful place to be. Yeah. So I’m so glad that you responded. I’m really thankful!
Amanda:
I’m I’m so glad that you’ve reached out and that you still have hope, because I think that we can fix this. And there’s so much I’ve been, like writing notes of the things that I wanted to say here. So, like number one, that, that four month regression I always direct people back to my episode my very first episode on the four month regression. I go through in a lot of detail about what that entails and what that means. But essentially a lot of people can get away with, like, not doing anything before four months, because your baby is generally a good sleeper. And so they rock and feed and do all those things to sleep, And then they, and then they, like, basically that stops working. And then that’s not fun. And then so, the other thing is, what at that four month time and definitely go back to listen to that episode, if you want more details on that, baby starts to remember how they fell asleep, and they want that every time they have a end of their sleep cycle. So if there’s anything happening at the beginning, they’re gonna want that all throughout the night. And then, so that sounds like you know, that four month time, you were in the shit, right? You were probably doing some help prior, and then now that help wasn’t working anymore. And then you were in the shit. So then you try… like people come to me all the time like ‘I’ve done a 400 methods all in one. Like I did a Ferber. And then I sat with them for one night, and then I fed them halfway through.’ Or like people will say, ‘I did sleep training. But I still did feeds every two hours.’ And I’m like, What? Um, that’s something, and you know, you you had had mentioned, you know, maybe she wasn’t ready. And I do kind of want to talk to that because I do think it’s possible that a lot of the times, babies aren’t ready. They aren’t ready to do that work. And that is OK that they are not ready to do the work. And that does happen to even me, I’ll be working with four and five month olds where it’s abundantly clear within 4 to 5 nights things aren’t working because I think that for a lot of people, in my methodologies, I want to say it’s maybe like 1 in 20 where we have to stop and be like, they’re just not, they’re not getting it. They’re not ready. And we’re doing everything to make sure, like we’ve ticked every single variable, but we stop pretty quickly. So if you are, you know,after listening to this and you’ve figured out, you know, it’s been 4 or 5 nights, I would just stop for a couple of weeks before returning to any sort of program, just to kind of reset whatever behavior confusion may be happening, and why am I talking about behavior confusion? Well you raise a really good part about when you did do the training, you did separate night and naps. And so there’s there’s definitely 2 schools of thought on nights and naps. One of which is, you know, if there, we’re not going to do any nap training, we’re gonna help them to sleep for the sole purpose of making sure that they’re rested for the night time. If they’re rested for the night time, they’ll have a better sleep and then they’ll be able to get it. The other thing is like, you know, babies have short naps at that time, so why would we ever help them do any sort of nap training. And then part three, to be honest, is that some I mean, I, I don’t want to say this. This might sound bitchy, but it’s really not intended to sound bitchy, but naps are shit. Nap training sucks. It sucks. It sucks. It sucks. And the reason is because we don’t have any melatonin. So at night we have melatonin. So sleep training can be easier for a lot of babies. They do better stretches. During the day, we have nothing, so it’s like there’s no help. There’s light. You’re generally alone. Your partner’s gone. This, that and the other thing and this baby is screaming at you. So when I’m supporting my clients, when I’m working privately, I am available everyday 9 to 4 via text message because naps are so shit. So I think it can be, I understand why some consultants wouldn’t want to do it, at a certain time. Does that make sense? Like it can be challenging and I understand that. But here are the risks in not doing naps and nighttime the exact same. And from what I gathered, you had sent me a little evaluation beforehand about this. What I gathered is that there can be times where there’s a lot of confusion for babies, especially babies who are actually very ready to do sleep training. And we know that they’re very ready because they’re aware of the differentiation of their nights and days. So for this baby, you had been feeding, feeding, feeding all day. She’s having these amazing long naps. What, you had written in your questionnaire, that she’ll have a super long nap on you. And the reason why that, it’s not like she’s sleeping for that hour, hour and 1/2. She’s probably sleeping for that same 30 to 40 minutes and every time that 30 minutes and she goes, “Oh, squiggly, squishy mummy, I love this. I’m going back to bed.” And so she’s still using you and your assisting her throughout those sleep cycles. Okay, so, yeah, those naps are awesome. And then so you got to put her to bed at night and she cries for an hour because she’s like, “Ah, hello. I want that. That was awesome, what are we doing here?” So, and like, I don’t blame her being like “I love snuggling.” But if that is, you know ,you talked about you weren’t enjoying your life. You were in a deep, dark place. Those are, this is not a sustainable solution for you. Is it a sustainable solution for many? For sure. And they will never hire me nor will they listen to this podcast or give any shit. So there. But I feel like this is a point where you are not surviving? This is where you might need to evaluate. “Okay, I think I might need to do something, and it might suck for three or four days,” and it should usually be three or four days if it’s longer than we should stop. Yeah, you have your three or four days and then you’re you’re sleeping and it’s awesome, and everyone’s happy. So just, you know, going to the, the, days and nights confusion. So this is really common or there are instances with even older babies, so I would say, over seven months, who, that maybe the parent wants to continue night feeding or, in a lot of the cases, baby is underweight or not gaining or has always been small, and parents are really reluctant to remove the night feed because they don’t want their baby to starve. And I’m right there with them. But there are instances where behaviorally, and sleep training is extremely behavior, if not like, 90% of it is behaviorally related. If they’re eating at night, overnight, you know, two or three times, they will cry before their naps and they will cry before bed because that’s how they want to fall asleep. Okay. So in those cases, I would actually suggest, you know, for older babies having a discussion with their doctor about maybe a way to remove the night feedings and supplementing the daytime calories. And I promise you, a baby who is eating to sleep at night and during the day is not feeding efficiently in those low birthweight situations. And then I, like every client that I’ve been like, “Look, can we try this for three days? And if this sucks, I will stop. I’ll refund you and we will like, we’ll come back to this in a month when babies doing better.” That baby not only kills it. They eat more than they ever have at night, because they actually feel hunger for the first time. And most of my clients gain weight which is mind boggling, right? Like we take away the night feeds, that feels completely counterintuitive. And by the way, like there are some times where that’s not the case and I say I’m not comfortable, let’s stop. Let’s go back to this in two months. Let’s let’s just do what works for now. And that happens. But most of my clients, I want to say nine and 1/2 out of 10 where we try, it’s a really big change.
Okay. I’m getting a little bit off track. You know, honestly, the best thing that we can do for Sophie is make sure every single sleep situation is exactly the same. So what do we mean by that? You know, if we were to use Ferber as an example, just because that’s what you’ve suggested. Ferber is basically time checks that have a, like, a different differentiation for each one. So we go in for five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. And we have, we changed the wait time. So let’s say you were going to do that. You can still feed Sophie as often as you want. You just want to make sure you’re not feeding to sleep. So you’re going to make sure that you’re going to do those checks. Put her down during the day awake, alert. It’s gonna be crap. And you’re going to do the same for nights. How much does Sophie weigh?
Ashley:
Last she was 7.27 kilos like two weeks ago. So, like 16 pounds.
Amanda:
She could probably still have a night feed. I’ll be honest, just because of your history and a little bit of her confusion. I, like if I was starting with you, like, right now, client, clean slate, you’ve never done any sleep training, I would keep your night feed, and I would keep in at least one. And we would talk about that. I’m very reluctant to talk about night feeds. It’s a whole other podcast episode just because, there are babies who need to night feed. And then I don’t want that parent to not and then be like “Amanda Jewson on her podcast told me that I should do this because my baby is six months.” that’s not at all. It really is a case by case basis. So I would talk with your doctor. I guess how I’ll approach this is. I will be weird about answering this, purposefully. But I will also say, before you do any new thing, Ashley, I actually think I want you to have a week where we just help Sophie to sleep and not have any crying whatsoever. Zero crying. We help her to sleep at night. You help her to sleep overnight as long as you can do it. Five days. What we’re doing is we’re doing a behavioural reset. We don’t want Sophie to ever associate a long amount of crying with being helped to sleep or, that like, or just avoid any confusion. So then when you go back and you’re like, ‘OK, I’m doing the sleep training and here we go, and we’re going all in. This is it.’ She’s not going to associate that crying with anything or it’ll be lessened, right? She won’t be waiting for whatever the case is or whatever it is. So what I really want to do is kind of have a reset. And then hopefully with that reset, you might be able to re-negotiate that night feeding, and we can talk about that one on one about what to do. But for now, I think we need to reset. Your nights and your days have to include absolutely zero help to sleep. And then as soon as she has that zero help to sleep, you’re going to see a huge shift. In terms of your reset, there’s nothing, I wouldn’t do any even for nighttime. I wouldn’t even let her cry to go to bed. I would just stop, help her, 5 to 7 days, and then when you do start again. I think you’re going to see a huge shift in that behaviour.
Ashley:
Amanda:
Actually, this is, thank you for asking me that because I was going to talk about that. I would always start your initial start at night. The reason for that is there’s 12 hours of practice time in there, and then you would start with naps. Nap one, day one. So the very next day. And then so ideally, naps can take awhile. Naps can take maybe 2 to 4 weeks to have less protest. They might cry for like 10 or 15 minutes for a little while. Part of it is definitely working with the professional to monitor your sleep windows and wake windows. That’s gonna be a big part of it. For me, I think behavior out weighs the wake windows for a long time. And then once that behavior is settled, then it’s a wake window issue. Once there’s no help to sleep, then we look more at the wake window.
Ashley:
OK, interesting.
Amanda:
Yeah, it’s all about skill. And so this is the other thing. So then the other part of the panic and hysteria is “Well, if my baby is not sleeping well during the day, they will never sleep at night.” So for sure, there’s some truth to that going forward. Like if you were to, like, ignore your baby’s naps forever and ever and ever, they will be shit sleepers at night forever and ever and ever. But if you’re doing a training where we know that the days are gonna kind of be crap for a little while, but actually, melatonin is helping us get 10 to 12 hours of night sleep. That’s not like a hard core, overtired baby. That’s a slightly over tired baby. And it’s a means to an end, right? So the more that they can practice that, the more likely that they’re going to have, like a better sleep at night. And if you are, if you were 3 to 4 days in and there’s been no change, something is up. I’m not saying that never happens to me. It does. But it’s usually that there’s a feeding issue. There’s a calorie issue. There’s still some help to sleep. There is, you know, Grandma rocking them to sleep, and nobody knows. There’s something happening, and that we can fix. So if it’s 3 to 4, even five days, some babies are tricky, and there’s been zero anything. Then we stop and I would re evaluate. And don’t feel bad! Don’t feel like you’ve done anything. Just just call a professional.
Ashley:
Like you would for any other problem. It makes sense!
Amanda:
Well it sucks for us because we’re not like a regulated industry, and it’s also like, I’m not your doctor, you can’t show me your health card, right? Like it’s It’s a commitment, and it’s a financial commitment, and so I totally get it.
Ashley:
Can I ask you a question about naps? And maybe this is answered in your nap master class, which I have not had the chance to take. So if it is, feel free to refer me to that. But for the naps, because one of the things that I always think about and you kind of mentioned it. Do you look at kind of her behavioral cues or the wake windows? We’ve been going off of wake windows, but let’s say, okay, well, we’re gonna sleep train Sophie’s naps tomorrow. She’s supposed to go down for a nap at nine. We put her down at nine. Awake and alert in her bed. We do not feed her to sleep. She screams for an hour. She then wakes up after 30 minutes. Like so, then I feel like her wake windows, you know, she’s probably not gonna get the three naps or the two naps or whatever that the child is, you know their age. How does that kind of play in when you’re trying to sleep train with naps?
Amanda: It’s usually a short term problem. So the thing I’ll warn between four and six months, a lot of babies have crappy naps, which is why I was saying, like consultants like to avoid it between that age because sometimes no matter what, you’re only gonna get a 30 to 45 minute nap. As long as they’re napping and they’re falling asleep on their own and they’re waking up and your wake window in between is proper, they won’t be super overtired. So it means that for a four month old baby like at worst for seeing 4, 30 minute naps. That’s not only ideal, it’s not the worst. It’s two hours of rest during the day. Plus they’re probably gonna have a 12 hour night, right? Because their naps are so crap. So that’s 14 hours of sleep. Is that the best? No. And it will definitely improve because the reason why they’re having that 30 minute nap in the first place is because they don’t know how to fall asleep. So if, as soon as a master that skill, they’re gonna one day wake up at 30 minutes ago. Oh, I know how to do this. Connect. And then you get that hour and that’s how that happens. So it’s worth the short naps in the interim to get the long naps in the future without any assistance. I’making some pretty bold statements!
Ashley:
I like it!
Amanda:
I feel like there are just other like people who will disagree. But I also, like, this is so behavioural that I…
Ashley:
It’s so behavioural and with Sophie. I’m like, I know that she’s ready. Like there are times now where I’ll try and feed her to sleep, to be like, “Okay, we’re gonna reset you.” And she’s like, pulling off of me like ‘I don’t actually want to do that but I don’t know how else to do it.’ So then it’s this, like, it takes me forever to get her down, because it’s like she knows she’s not supposed to, but she doesn’t know how. So she’s so confused, and I know that she actually wants to just fall asleep. And she’s crying sometimes because I think she’s just like, ‘I just want to go to bed.’ Yeah. So I think that this sounds like it, it definitely is something that I am interested in, and I think it will have promise for sure if we stick with it.
Yeah, I think it totally will. I think it, like I am not saying I am perfect and I have all the answers for everything and their babies that are just gonna be in my blind spot for whatever reason, but it feels very, very easy for me. Yeah, this couldn’t, this is very easy.
It’s possible, which it always is, like the best for me. The biggest takeaway is that there is hope and it’s possible, and she can do it. And it’ll be it’ll be okay.
It’s totally gonna be okay! I’m excited. I’m so excited. I was worried, but this is gonna be okay. So, like I say to everybody, I want you to reach out again, Give me after your 3 to 4 days, reach out with a little update, and I’d love to hear how things were going.
For sure, I will definitely be updating you to let you know. Thank you so much for having us and for taking care of us. We really appreciate it. And I just, I really appreciate the work that you do and the love that you literally put out to the community. It’s really genuine. And that’s why you got so many messages. Because people know that you give us a shit, legitimately which is really nice.
Amanda:
I do give a shit! I really you do give a shit!
Ashley:
I know! It’s really nice. It’s really really nice. So you’re making a difference.
Amanda: Thank you. I’m bad at taking a compliment, but I am taking it!
Ashley:
GOOD!
Amanda: Yeah, I’m getting better! Amazing. Well, I’mgonna I’m gonna say good bye now. Bye, everybody.
Voice Over; Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Slumber Party! If you’re ready to help your little one get the sleep that they need and get your nights back while you’re at it, make sure to check out Amanda’s signature DIY sleep training courses or work with her directly. For more details head over babysbestsleep.com. Don’t forget to hit Subscribe, Like and Review. Happy sleeping, Everyone!