pod ep 18 why sleep training didnt work
===
[00:00:00] Welcome to this sleep by Alex podcast. I am a certified pediatric sleep consultant and a mom of three, and I will be bringing you quick science backed sleep advice to get you and your baby or a toddler sleeping well. Hey everyone. Welcome back. Hope you had a great week.
Happy Tuesday.
I love this weekly moment for me to just sit and reflect and chat. I'm getting to that point in pregnancy where, you know, by the end of the day, I am physically exhausted and can't bend over or barely walk. I think my body's just tired. I've had a lot of babies, so I am really counting down the days until this baby is born
and I am done carrying it around in my belly and I can just carry it around in my arms, maybe put it down here and there. In case you didn't see on my Instagram over the weekend. I am at 32 weeks now, and that totally like plummeted me straight into nesting mode. I [00:01:00] just woke up one day and looked around and. Oh my gosh, there's like a thousand things I want to do before this baby's born in this house. And it's so funny 'cause I get this feeling every time in pregnancy at some point or another.
And each time it just feels so intense. And you probably know the feeling if you've been pregnant before. Where you just wanna feel like you have your ducks in a row before you bring your baby home. Of course things are never going to be perfect. That's just not how life works. But it was nice this weekend to totally commit the whole weekend to preparing for baby to come.
Um,
so in case you don't follow me on Instagram. Our house we're in right now is not super big. It was two bedrooms and then we turned a little dining area into a third bedroom. , so it's a pretty small room. It doesn't have a closet or anything, so we do have to have like two dressers in there to fit all the crap.
[00:02:00] So there's just not enough space in there to have Calvin share a room with the baby. There's just not enough space for another bed in there. So what I did over the weekend was prepare the big kids' room for Calvin to move into. Cal is my 2-year-old, almost 3-year-old. So that eventually the baby will just have the nursery or the room with the crib.
So basically spent a ton of time cleaning out the five and six year old's room, getting rid of a bunch of toys and stuff, getting rid of a train table, getting rid of a desk, just trying to make space for Cal. I also got him a toddler bed. I haven't put it together or put it into the room yet. I'm not quite ready for him to be sleeping in there or transitioning to a toddler bed, although I'm sure it will be totally fine.
I'm not super worried. But right now things are going well. So like why mess with what's going well? And I don't necessarily need the bedroom for at least a few months, so. I am putting it off for a little bit longer in regards to actually moving him in there, but I just wanted the space to [00:03:00] be ready. So he has a new dresser with his clothes in it.
He has a toddler bed, which is not yet in there, but there's a space for it. And I washed and put away all the baby clothes and cows old dresser in the room with the crib.
So that was really fun. It was just like a way to finally start to think about this baby actually coming and get excited to meet this little one. I just love folding and putting away all the little newborn clothes and thinking, oh my gosh, how is there something this tiny going to be living in my house yet again?
I just can't wait to meet this baby to find out if it's a boy or a girl and to have a. His or her siblings meet them as well 'cause they're so excited.
I've also been working on stocking up on newborn essentials, so I've just made a huge list of all the things that I know that I love and I need. For especially those first few months. So I'll definitely be sharing that soon. I'm, I'll record a podcast with like all of my favorites and share with you what I have bought, because by the fourth baby, you definitely realize [00:04:00] like, okay, what do I actually need and what actually works and what can I skip and what do I not need?
So as far as the baby stuff goes, I'm going pretty minimal when it comes to all the gadgets, but I do have my certain things that I cannot live without. So. I will put together an episode for that and share that soon.
I am also freaking out a little bit that I am 32 weeks now and still have no idea what this baby's name is going to be.
I usually go into each birth having two at the top of my mind, and then once the baby's born, I pick one. But this time we are having the hardest time narrowing it down. Like we just have no idea, and it doesn't help that we need to come up with boy names and girl names. It just feels like twice the amount of pressure.
So I'm a little stressed out about that. If you have any name suggestions, shoot me a DM at Sleep by Alex. Like, seriously, I'm not even kidding. Shoot me a list of maybe the baby names you didn't use or the ones you love [00:05:00] because I need help desperately.
Okay, that's this week's update for the podcast episode. This week I'm going to be covering five reasons why sleep training didn't work for you or your baby.
So you may have already tried to sleep, train your baby before and felt like it was a complete fail. It didn't work. You never saw the progress you wanted to see. You hear from those random friends who sleep trained like, oh, we did this, or We followed this method, and three days later they slept through the night and they haven't woken up since.
Like, you're gonna hear everybody's highlight reels. So it can be really tricky when you feel like you chose a sort of. Run of the mill sleep training method that you found online and you just feel like it doesn't work for your baby. How can it work for everybody else's baby and not yours? So today I wanted to talk about five of the top reasons why sleep training didn't work for you [00:06:00] or your baby.
The first reason is your baby's age or developmental readiness. So most babies are ready to learn independent sleep around four months old. But of course, there's not some magical thing that happens the day your baby wakes up at four months old, right? Some just aren't ready yet on that day, and they need a little bit more time.
They're just not developmentally capable of learning to self-soothe quite yet. If you're noticing that you're trying to sleep, train, and you're not seeing your baby show signs of self-soothing, and some of these signs can be sucking on their hands, rubbing their eyes, rubbing their head back and forth on the mattress, scratching the mattress with their fingernails rolling to their side.
Little things that they're doing with their body to try and soothe themselves. These are all great signs, so if you feel like you're not seeing any of these, or your baby's really not making any progress and [00:07:00] they're maybe freshly four months old or even younger, they may just not be ready yet and may need a couple more weeks before you try again.
The easiest and best time to sleep train is typically between four and six months. So yes, you can try right at four months. If you feel like it's just not going well at first, shoot for, you know, four and a half, shoot for five. It's okay to wait, but getting somewhere in that sweet spot of four and six months is going to be your best bet.
The next reason sleep training may not have worked for your baby is the method you chose. So there are so many ways to sleep train, right? If you just Google sleep training, you're going to see so many different websites and methods come up, different books,
there's a lot of ways to go about sleep training. Maybe you chose a method that just didn't really mesh with your baby's temperament or even didn't mesh with your temperament, right? If you are using a method that [00:08:00] you feel is unsustainable for you, you're not going to stick to it. The key is finding a method that feels doable for you so you can stay consistent.
I had this experience with my first baby. He is six years old now, almost seven. And so six years ago when I was sleep training him, I used a very, very popular sort of sleep consultant method out there. And it was very cut and dry. It was like if your sleep training, you are not responding to your baby's cries in the middle of the night.
And so in my head I thought, okay, if I was sleep treating, I don't go in there when they're crying, ever. And then that meant that anytime he went through a sleep regression or he got a tooth or he got sick, I just resorted to co-sleeping. 'cause I thought, okay, well I'm not gonna not go in there like he's not feeling well.
So I guess I'm not sleep training, quote unquote. Uh, so I'll just sleep with him. Then I would end up sleeping with him for [00:09:00] two or three months until that became unsustainable, and then I had to do it all over again. This method just felt so all or nothing. It was like, either you're doing this 100% of every single moment, or your baby is not going to sleep, and that just scared me and I, it was my first baby and I had a really hard time staying consistent with it.
So it's really important that you find a method that feels doable for you, so that over the years you can stay consistent even when they are getting a tooth, or when they do go through sleep regression or when they do get sick or they have separation anxiety.
I luckily learned by, you know, the second and third that I don't have to throw everything out the window. There's different methods that you can stay consistent with yet tuned into your baby's needs, and those are the methods I use now and that I teach all of my clients. So I'm so grateful to have found that.
The next reason sleep training may not have worked for you or your baby is your baby's daytime schedule. So for example, if your [00:10:00] baby is chronically overtired,
, meaning that they stay up for hours on end during the day, they only take cat naps. Maybe they wake frequently at night as well,
And they are tired and not happy about all of this.
It's going to be a lot harder to sleep, train them. They can fight sleep, they can have a harder time falling asleep and a harder time staying asleep.
So this is going to make sleep training really, really tricky. That's why when I approach sleep training, we always focus first on phase one, optimizing daytime sleep. This is the very first thing we do before we even think about starting any sort of sleep training method. Because we really wanna make sure, is our baby's sleep tank full?
Are we making sure that they are not chronically overtired before we're laying them down and trying to teach them to fall asleep independently? That is just going to be no fun for everybody. And honestly, same thing goes if your baby is not tired enough. So [00:11:00] if your baby's on a schedule where they're taking too many naps a day and they're not tired enough, by the time we put them down for a nap, or by the time we put them down for bed.
They're also gonna stay awake a lot longer, fight sleep, have a harder time getting into sleep and staying asleep. So your baby's daytime schedule can be a reason why you may have tried and it just didn't quite work out.
Reason number four, sleep training may have not worked for you is discomfort in your baby. It is so important to first address any possible discomfort your baby may be dealing with before sleep training. And what I mean by discomfort are things like. Extra gas reflux, lip ties, tongue ties, intolerances, other feeding issues.
These things can make it very hard to sleep train successfully if your baby is uncomfortable and waking frequently and crying a lot. Because of that, we're really gonna wanna address those things first before we dial down a sleep training method.
And [00:12:00] finally, the last reason, reason number five, why sleep training did not work for your baby is. WA wa consistency. You're not being consistent enough or giving it enough time. So I find this happens so frequently. You try something to get your baby to sleep better for like two days and it's not working how you thought it would.
So then you try something else for a few more days and maybe that worked a little bit, but not quite what you thought. So like you try something else for a few more days. If you are not consistent with one thing, it's going to get you nowhere fast. This ties back to finding a method that you can stay consistent with.
So it's really important that you do that because if you are not consistent with one thing for a couple weeks, rather than trying a million things over a couple weeks, you're not going to see the progress you're wanting to see.
If you'd like some support in nailing down a plan that feels doable for you, that you can stay [00:13:00] consistent with and you'd like help making sure your baby is not uncomfortable, that we've optimized your baby's daytime schedule, that we've addressed all of these issues before starting.
Please, please go to the show notes and follow those links and reach out for support. There's no shame. In asking for help when your baby is not sleeping well, it's so funny because if our baby is not feeding well, we're gonna contact a lactation consultant. If they're not growing well, we're gonna contact the doctor.
So if they're not sleeping well, there is no harm. In chatting with me quickly and seeing if we can get this sleep on track, which I truly believe we can
In the show notes, I've linked all of my resources. Please let me know if you'd like to work together to get a sleep training method that does work for you and your baby.
Once again, thanks for popping in this week. If you found this helpful, a quick five star review or sending it to a friend is very, very much appreciated.
I'm truly grateful for each and every one of you who spend some time listening to this podcast, and I hope you have a great [00:14:00] rest of the week. I'll see you next week. I.
