How to Sleep Train Without Sleep Training

Sleep training gets a bad reputation on social media because it’s often painted in a bad light (which means it’s more often than not misunderstood). When done with a plan, sleep training is a simple behavioral modification to improving sleep for your little one (and you). 

There’s a lot of misconceptions about sleep training overall, so you can check out what sleep training is as well as the research in this blog. Remember, it’s never used to bully you or convince you to sleep train, but rather to help you make an informed choice.

If you’re hoping to avoid any crying though- that’s likely not possible. For example, how else will your child let you know they’re awake in the middle of the night? The only thing waking me in the middle of the night is a crying baby. (But if you’re hoping to not use Ferber/timed checks or CIO/extinction, that’s totally possible! Those methods aren’t mutually exclusive with sleep training.

So the billion dollar question is: how do I improve sleep WITHOUT sleep training? 

Before you even look into a method that allows you to support your child in falling asleep independently, there are a few different puzzle pieces you want to have in place first. With them in place, you may find they don’t actually need sleep training!

1. The right sleep environment. Honestly, this is key! (okay, they’re all key but this is important too). Just like you don’t sleep well outside of the ideal environment, neither will your child. The right sleep environment: has white noise, is as dark as a cave (past the 8ish week mark), has their safe sleep space, is around 68-72 degrees, and most importantly… they associate it positively and with sleep!

Here are some blogs that may help:

• White Noise for Baby Sleep

• Dark Room for Daytime Naps 

2. The right schedule. This can be tricky because there are lots of resources out there. I suggest starting with the morning wake time. Log sleep for a week and see what time they’re naturally waking up. Then look at how much sleep they’re actually getting in 24 hours. Are they happy? Overtired? Hyperactive? Fighting all sleeps? That will help you know if they’re higher sleep needs, lower, or just average and then you can adjust the schedule from there. But I will tell you that no matter if you’re sleep training or not, whatever method you choose, TIMING is a huge component in setting them up to be successful in falling asleep independently without a ton of props. Or staying asleep even with props.

Here are some blogs that may help:

• Determining Your Child’s Sleep Needs

• All About Wake Windows

• Troubleshooting Short Naps for Babies

• Wake Times vs By the Clock

• Sleep Expectations by Age

3. The right routine. Do you have an actual bedtime (and naptime) routine that has a series of events so that your child knows that sleep is coming? We don’t want it to be a surprise! We want it to be well timed and intentional so that they know and accept sleep.

Here are some blogs that may help:

• Bedtime Routines for Newborns and Toddlers

• How Bedtime Routine Evolves with Age

• Moving and Maintaining Your Sleep Routines

4. Are they drowsy or asleep when you put them down? That *can* work, but most often will backfire. It’s best that they go into their sleep space from a calm, but awake state so that they are not disoriented by entering the first stage of sleep (drowsy) or already sleep and waking up somewhere else. That’s even confusing to an adult!  

Here are some blogs that may help:

• Sleep Cues for Babies

• What Does Drowsy but Awake Mean?

5. Consider developmental norms for sleep! Meaning, are you expecting too much from what your child can developmentally actually do when it comes to sleep? This can be common when you’re constantly comparing children on social media!

Here are some blogs that may help:

• Why does my baby only take 45 min naps?

• Is it Common? Normal? Okay?

• Sleep Perfectionism

• How to Handle Night Wakings

6. Shift your focus to your sleep habits so that you don’t obsess over your child’s. I know this is easier said than done, but like I always say, with newborns especially, you’re in more control of your own sleep than theirs. So finding ways to prioritize your sleep can make a world of difference!

Here are some blogs that may help:

• Sleep Tips for New Parents

• What ACTUALLY Matters when You’re Newly Postpartum

7. Consider habit stacking; this is simply where you add in more sleep associations and ways to get your child to sleep.

This could be shhing/patting WHILE nursing them to sleep and then gradually nursing less while shhing/patting instead. You gradually fade out one prop with another being added until the new prop works well. You can do this with rocking, etc.

If you only get them to sleep ONE way all the time, it’ll be more difficult for them to fall asleep in other ways. Rather, we want them to be able to fall asleep in a LOT of different ways. This can alleviate a lot of stress from the main caregiver and allow other people to give you a break/put your baby to sleep.

These are the things I focus on with my clients first before implementing any sort of sleep training method; some parents find they don’t even have to implement a method and can have a completely tears free experience when they have all the right puzzle pieces in place! If you’re dealing with a severely overtired child, I can’t guarantee that will happen, but it’s always a goal.

If you’re ready to take the plunge into sleep training in order to improve sleep, then check out my 1:1 options and have better sleep as soon as next week!