What are the risks of sleep training?

Today I want to chat about sleep training myths because if there’s anything I get asked about the most, it’s about the incorrect information that spreads like wildfire (as click bait, to fearmonger, whatever the reason is).

And while I feel like the burden of proof is on the person making the claim, I’m happy to debunk some common myths we see all over the internet.

For instance, recently a post went viral about the “risks” of sleep training. Here are the 4 she listed out: 

1. Sleep training may not work.
   
   This one is interesting to me because who says what works? It’s all about individual goals and realistic expectations especially as it relates to age-- so if the goal is for sleep training to make your 4 week old infant sleep 12 hours at night without a feeding… then yeah, it probably won’t work.

2. Parents may experience guilt, shame or regret.
   
   I’m also interested in this one because it’s again, not backed by research and is just a potential observation that actually has nothing to do with the sleep training process and everything to do with a parent’s confidence and education about what they’re doing. 

3. Parent and baby attachment/relationship may be injured.
   
   Considering we actually have studies that show sleep training IMPROVED attachment behaviors and we have none that say sleep training injures attachment, this one isn’t evidence based either and purely their opinion.

4. Development of trauma response (for baby or parent).
   
   Since we’ve established over and over what toxic stress is/isn’t, what chronic abuse/neglect is/isn’t, and how sleep training actually falls under the “positive” stress category, I think we can safely say a short term practice of changing behaviors around sleep would make it nearly impossible for a child to develop a trauma response.

The author's reasoning discussed separation from their caregiver but didn’t explicitly state when sleep training so do we assume they mean when going to daycare too? Just wondering.

This blog also discusses a recently shared article and discusses the trauma/chronic stress point there as well.

Now, we can say there is no evidence of harm through the years of research that’s been done on sleep training, but can we say there is evidence of NO harm?

No, actually, and we can’t say that about ANYTHING. There is no standard which we can ever say ANYTHING could never be harmful for one child or another in particular situations but that doesn't keep us from making recommendations based on the evidence. There’s basically no way to gather evidence of no harm, 100%.

We can look at the evidence we do have and say based on everything we’ve gathered, there are no detrimental effects. No evidence of harm.

It’s double speak to say well, all the evidence says no harm but MAYBE THERE IS. (I guess you could if you want to stress parents out all the time). We could say this about car seats, baby led weaning.. Anything.

Now, I never try to bust sleep training myths to convince people to sleep train. That would never be the point of any evidence based information.

The information is there to say if this is your choice, you’re justified. If it isn’t, you’re also justified.

Because parents deserve support!

Hope that was helpful and answered some commonly asked questions or concerns for you!