The Truth About Baby Sleep
Episode 1: The Truth About Baby Sleep: Solo Episode with your host Rachael Shepard-Ohta (of Hey, Sleepy Baby)
Have you ever googled "baby won't sleep" at 2am? Same. Baby sleep information can be a total minefield and most parents are left confused, unsure of who to trust (hint: you can trust yourself!) and TIRED.
Join Rachael for the FIRST episode of NOTU and hear all about the reason she founded Hey, Sleepy Baby after a traumatic journey with baby sleep as a first time mom. Rachael discusses:
her first baby's sleep "problems" and what she tried
dealing with reflux, CMPA and tongue tie
how baby sleep drove her a little insane and made her eventually try out sleep training (from that popular trainer) and what happened
how she started cosleeping with baby number 2
what she's doing differently as a mom to her 2nd and 3rd babies
what "normal" baby sleep really looks like
what "counts" as "sleeping through the night"
Stay tuned till the end for a little pep talk if you're in the thick of it. It gets better!
Listen to the full episode:
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Welcome to No one Told Us, the podcast where we tell the truth about parenting and dive deep into the topics that they really should have told us about before we had kids. Hi, I'm Rachel Shepherd-Ohta. I'm the founder of Hey, Sleepy Baby and the host of this podcast, and today it's just you and me. I wanted to start this podcast by just sharing a little bit about my origin story and why I'm so passionate about sharing the real deal on baby sleep and other parenting topics. Today we're going to talk all about baby sleep and the truth about baby sleep and the things that are very conveniently left out when people talk about baby sleep.
I want to just kind of go back and take you back to when I first became a mom. I first became a mom about, gosh, almost six years ago now. My oldest will be six this October. I thought I had it all together. I babysat my whole life. I absolutely loved babies. I had a Master's Degree in Education with so many child development courses and things like that under my belt. I really thought that I knew what I was getting myself into and I was so excited to become a mom. And then he was here and he was not what I would call an easy baby. He was very colicky and hard to soothe and often fussy. I loved him so much and I was so excited to be a mom and I had such a supportive partner and we really should have had the most amazing, magical postpartum that you hope and dream for, and that wasn't exactly how it went. I very quickly became baby sleep obsessed. I read all the books I could get my hands on, I took classes, I paid sleep consultants, I bought very expensive PDFs all about how to get my baby to sleep. I tried everything and he still needed things like bouncing on a yoga ball to fall asleep, he needed contact naps sometimes, he had a hard time sleeping in a stroller. I thought for some reason that babies just loved strollers and car seats and would just pass out when they were on the go at any moment, and I was very wrong about that.
What I actually didn't realize, though, was that he slept really well, especially considering things that we didn't really know at the time, we hadn't figured out yet why he had colic. Turned out it was reflux from a dairy allergy, so he was really fussy often in the newborn phase. And then once we kind of figured that piece out and had a dairy-free diet that I was on since I was breastfeeding, and we got his tongue tie released and we were doing things that we thought would help and that should have helped, and they did to a certain extent. So he, after the first couple of months, started to sleep a little bit longer stretches, he would take a dream feed, he would go down in his bassinet or his crib once in a while, and then that kind of typical newborn phase passed, the easy phase or “easy” phase passed, and he started to become more wakeful. So this was what I didn't know at the time was the four month sleep regression. So that period of time right around three or four months where baby sleep cycles are actually changing, the sleep architecture in the brain is changing, the sleep cycles are maturing. So babies are going from two stages of sleep to now four, just like we have as adults, and that can really throw baby sleep for a loop. So lots of times parents think, oh, I have the best ever newborn, my baby is so sleepy all the time, this is great, we've got this down. And then they just don't really know what they're in for. And this doesn't happen all the time, of course, but it does happen pretty regularly, and I just had no idea, I had never heard of that before. So we resorted to things like putting him in a rock-and-play, which is so dangerous, and those are now recalled. We tried a million different swaddles, we probably spent hundreds of dollars on different swaddles. We had to bounce him forever to fall asleep. I even tried giving him formula in a bottle at night to try to make him sleep longer; obviously that was a fail. And then we went the route of sleep training because people wouldn't stop asking me if he was sleeping through the night and pitying me that I had a baby who was no longer a newborn, but he still wasn't sleeping all night.
He was under four months old and he was still waking up at least two or three times I want to say, which again, totally normal, to be expected, and I just couldn't stand the fact that this was such a huge topic of conversation. So it kind of just made me spiral with this anxiety and this sense of shame and embarrassment, and I just wanted to fix it. So like I said, I had read everything. I had consumed every piece of content out there and back then, Instagram, TikTok, very different things barely even existed. So when I say that I was consuming content, I mean blogs and things that I could find at the library, and so I know I read all of those terrible books that give you rules and schedules and that are so rigid and unrealistic. I eventually found a very popular sleep training program, you know I mentioned before that I paid a pretty penny for a nice little PDF that kind of looked like a first grader or second grader had made it. Anyway, you probably all are familiar with this type of sleep training. It was a version of the Ferber Method, which I had heard before, obviously I feel like the Ferber Method and cry-it-out, those kind of terms that are in pop culture, people kind of hear about them, but until you're a parent, you don't really understand what it entails or what it would actually feel like to implement. And look, I have friends who have sleep trained and it's worked wonderfully for them. I've talked with families who maybe sleep trained one of their kids, but it wasn't right for the other kid and they were totally happy with their choice. And it is never my thing to judge parents for doing what they had to do because obviously I am telling you right now, I did it too. I tried it.
But I think what needs to be said and what needs to be more widely known is that it really does not work for every baby or for every family. Our experience with our first baby with sleep training was so horrific and traumatic. We still regret it to this day. It was such a terrible experience in every way, and lots of people ask, well, did it work? Yeah, it was bad, it was hard, but was it worth it? Did it work? I will be honest and say that it helped in some senses. So it helped in the sense that he would go down drowsy but awake, which should be a whole other episode to talk about drowsy but awake. But he was always a little bit more of a soother, anyway, he loved his pacifier. So after we were through the first round of sleep training, that was one thing that did go easier, was that we could give him his pacifier, rock him or feed him until he was almost asleep and then put him down in the crib and leave. So bedtime I guess, and nap time did become a little bit easier. That honestly wasn't even one of our goals. I loved feeding him to sleep. I was back at work, so it was one of my only times during the day to do his bath and his bedtime routine and to feed him to sleep and cuddle and sing to him, and I actually really loved that so I wasn't really even looking to change anything at bedtime. That was fine. But anyway, that was one thing that I guess came out of the sleep training that was, you could say, positive. But, and this is what you don't hear about, it was absolute torture to get to that point. And would I do it again? No. I've had two other kids since then, and even though I now know, oh, it's actually kind of sweet when you can put them in the crib and walk away, it makes life a lot easier. I still wouldn't do it again because to get to that point required so much crying and I hated that. So I do have to wonder, okay, that might've worked a little bit, but at what cost? What were we really teaching him? And he still needed to wake up at night to eat. So he was a really big baby, he could not go 12 hours without a feeding, and that's totally normal, whether your baby is big, small, whatever. Babies need to be fed throughout the night for a variety of reasons, and they're not all ready to drop their feedings at a certain arbitrary age. They're just not. So I was left feeling like we'd failed. We tried to do cry-it-out in the night to try and drop those feedings. My husband would go in increments and try to reassure him, but he wasn't allowed to pick him up per this program or touch him, and it was just so cold and rigid and terrible. I remember literally sobbing in the fetal position in our bed listening to my husband go in, listening to my baby, kind of have that sigh of relief that someone was there and then have my husband just being like, shhh, it's okay, we're here. And just talking to him without picking him up, and he would start to scream again because he's like, why aren't you picking me up? Why aren't you feeding me? And it really just felt like we were just kind of not giving him what he needed. It felt like we were kind of ignoring what he was asking us for and what he needed from us, and we were just disregarding his feelings and his needs and it just felt so wrong to us. So obviously now I know that he was just hungry and that was okay and he was waking up and needing me, which was also okay.
I also know now that he's more sensitive in temperament. I didn't know that at the time, and I still feel so guilty about putting him through this because babies who have sensitive temperaments like this or more sensitive sensory systems or things like that, they are not going to respond very well to sleep training. They are not those success stories that you hear about. So I wish that I had known that at the time that those 99% success rates are absolute bullshit and that this will not work for everyone, not even close. And even if it does work, it is likely only going to work for a very short period of time, and that is just a fact. We know that from research that sleep training interventions like this are short-lived. Most parents have to retrain several times throughout that first year or so that they do it, and then by age two, we know that the effects of sleep training are essentially gone. So once your baby enters toddlerhood, there's no difference between how well they sleep versus another child who was not sleep trained. So that's why these sleep trainers come out with their toddler courses because it stops working. So it's really just unfortunate that you don't hear that side of things. I did try and get support because I was so confused about why it wasn't working for us because again, I was told “we have a 99% success rate and it works so well and it's so gentle and your life will be so much easier after seven days,” blah, blah, blah. But my baby was still waking up in the night, and so I was still trying to get support for that, and then I was blamed for a lack of consistency. They said, I must not be following the plan, I must not be consistent enough, I needed to basically stay home 24/7 to get on the perfect schedule. I tried to go into the Facebook group to get support and they deleted my comments. Oh God, those Facebook groups are so toxic, by the way. Oh my gosh. There are some Facebook groups that have the words “respectful” in them to talk about sleep or sleep training, and they, oh my gosh, if you do a deep dive into some of those, they're terrifying. They'll say things like, it's fine if your baby vomits during sleep training. Doing cry-it-out with newborns is totally cool. They're so unsafe. So just PSA, please don't join any groups like that because they are giving trash advice and most of the people in there are not qualified to be giving advice at all. And if you want or need sleep train, there are better ways to do it. I still don't personally sleep train my babies, I don't use sleep training methods with our clients. I don't teach about it on, Hey, Sleepy Baby, because we don't have to and we don't want to and not every parent wants to, and that is totally valid. So I basically started that page because I wanted people to have other options. Some people want to sleep training and that's fine. Some people want to do gentle sleep training, whatever that means to them, and that's fine. And then there are some people who just want to say, fuck it, I don't want to do any of that stuff, I just want to enjoy my baby and stress less about sleep and kind of just follow their lead and make sure that they're getting healthy sleep and all of that stuff. So that is kind of the gap that I saw in the market was that there weren't enough people talking about, okay, well what do we do if sleep training a) doesn't work or b) just feels wrong for our family? So lots of families obviously want a different approach, and so I'm so glad that I've been able to provide that and that so many of my friends with other sleep pages like mine or other pages that talk about bed sharing or whatever a family is looking for, they should be able to find quality, evidence-based information that doesn't make them feel like shit as a parent. So I'm so glad that more resources exist now than when I first became a mom, and lots of people don't even need their baby to sleep all night long without ever waking. So we also need to consider that every family has different goals and what one family might consider a great night, another family might not. So lots of parents don't mind feeding to sleep or comforting their baby at night or co-sleeping. Really what's happening is they're just future tripping. They're scared that because they're doing this now means they're going to have to do it forever, and that's where sleep trainers come in and prey on that. So they tell you things like, oh, you're going to have to nurse forever or you're going to have to rock your baby until they're five if you're doing it now. That is total BS, and I even hear pediatricians telling this to parents all the time, scaring them about these bad habits and how they'll supposedly last forever and it's just so wrong. Long story short, this is why and how I started. I was basically googling baby sleep at 3:00 AM one night. I was pregnant with my middle baby Noe and I had pregnancy insomnia, so I was just like, I'm going to figure out this whole sleep thing. I so desperately wanted to avoid that clusterfuck from the first time around. I didn't want to sleep train. I also was really scared of sleep deprivation. I did not do well on no sleep. I was really struggling in those first few months of waking up all night, and even on the nights where I was only waking up a few times, going back and forth to the nursery and feeding and then trying to fall back asleep, that was really tough on me. And so that was how I ended up finding the first sleep certification that I went through and started my whole page. I was on maternity leave with her, it was COVID and like, what a time to start a new business, it was pretty wild, but obviously I was kind of in the right place at the right time and there was a demand for what I was talking about. It was COVID and we were moving and I was learning more about bed sharing and the benefits and how to minimize the risks. I still didn't need to bed share because my daughter, Noe, was a pretty good sleeper as a newborn, and I actually really loved those nights with her just picking her up and feeding her and then she would go back down really easily. It was so nice and so quiet, just her and I, and then the four month regression hit again and I almost forgot how brutal and torturous it was, but I realized that if I started bed sharing with her, I felt so much more rested and I kind of just fell into it out of a) necessity and b) having the proper education on how to do it because with Otto, I fell asleep with him in so many different unsafe positions, just trying to feed him and trying to stay awake, and I'd fall asleep with him in the recliner or on the couch or sitting up in my bed and I just now shudder to think about what could have happened if he had rolled off or fallen or something like that or gotten wedged in between something. It could be so dangerous. I'm so glad that I had that knowledge to be able to do it more safely with Noe and to have her actually in my bed. We felt more rested. I found that it really helped with my anxiety. I would get, like many of you do probably, the sunset scaries where the sun starts to set and you start to think, oh shit, how many times am I going to wake up tonight? How bad is this night going to be? And you get that pit in your stomach that just does not go away. When I tell you I have not had that when I've been bed sharing, I've never had it. So I've never had that feeling with my third baby since we've been bed sharing the whole time. And once I started doing it with Noe, I didn't feel it, and this is not an episode on bed sharing. I do really want to do some episodes on bed sharing, the data and how to do it the most safe way possible and all of the research about it. Just know, a little disclaimer, this is not me telling you that you should bed share. This is not me saying that bedsharing is the best, most safe thing in the entire world and everybody should and can do it, I'm just sharing my journey and my truth with it.
So then I did want to change. When she was around four or five months, I started practicing having her go down in her crib for naps, and then we started practicing the crib for bedtime. That really worked well for us for a long time because we had our evenings together, my husband and I, where we'd put her down with her brother, they'd be asleep for a couple of hours and we'd have time to chill or work or whatever, and then we would also bedshare for part of the night. So whenever she would have her first wake up, I would just bring her into bed. It felt like a perfect balance for us for a while, and then we eventually didn't want to do that anymore. So it's like everything is just a phase. I eventually got to a place where I was really over the night nursing. She was a very, very boob obsessed little kid and I was just done. We also had kind of decided around that time, she was almost two, she was maybe like 20, 22 months when we started that process and we decided that we maybe wanted to try for a third baby, so we definitely wanted to get her weaned and out of our bed. That whole journey, it's kind of a long story, so I share about that in detail on my Hey, Sleepy Baby page, but she did end up sleeping through the night in her own room. It was still intermittent for a while like she would still come into our bed once in a while or need support back to sleep in the middle of the night sometimes. But overall, she was just kind of ready for that. And so the basic takeaway from all of that is that if it's working for you right now, then it's working. There are no bad habits. You're not doomed to be doing something forever just because you're doing it right now. There are ways to make changes that don't involve things like cry-it-out. You don't have to do any of that.
I also want to talk a little bit about what is normal sleep anyway, because I feel like we have such a warped sense of what it really is because most people are either lying about it or they’re sleep training or they're older and have forgotten what it's really like, and so we really don't have a good sense in our society about what most babies would actually be doing if left to their own devices and if not sleep trained. So the data that we have on infant sleep, and this is from a very large study, and one of the most robust studies we have on infant sleep, shows that babies and young children are waking and needing more support at night, much more than you might think. So let's look at Night Wakings for example, because this is the golden question that every parent wants to know that I get asked every single day over on, Hey, Sleepy Baby, when will my baby sleep through the night? Or when will my baby stop waking up? The truth, honestly, is that it varies so widely. There are babies, those unicorn babies that we hear about who start sleeping through the night from days or weeks old. I also hear from parents with kids who are three or four and have never or very rarely slept through the night without support. It really has very little to do with what we do as parents. That might be a relief to hear or not, but it is the truth. So okay, let's think about what an average baby is doing then. Well, first let's talk about what sleep through the night actually means, because most people assume it's 12 hours overnight where you're just completely off the clock as a parent, you don't have to do anything for that 12 hours, your baby is just in their room sleeping the whole time. You don't have to go to them, you don't have to feed them, and that's actually not really accurate. That's a social construct that has really been brought about by sleep training people. There is nothing in the baby sleep literature that says we should expect 12 hours of sleep overnight or that it's a gold standard or that it's healthiest or best, most beneficial, safest way for babies to sleep. No, none of that. Not at all. So the research actually says that sleep through the night for babies is defined as a five or six or sometimes eight hour stretch. So it depends on what research study you're looking at, but most say it's five, six or eight hours at a time without either calling out or requiring a feeding, et cetera. That's right. So there's no research on infant sleep that defines sleep through the night as 12 hours in a row where baby is sleeping without cueing or without feeding. So that's really what I want to drive home to parents about normal baby sleep is that it is so variable and it is so individual and it is based on so many different factors. Sometimes on TikTok, don't go on TikTok if you want to stay sane as a parent. That's all I'll say. Sometimes on TikTok, I see these videos of moms with the perfect bedtime routines and the title of the video will be like, “here's my routine for how I get my eight week old baby to sleep through the night” or “come do a night in the life vlog with me and my six kids and they all sleep through the night and they have since they were three months old, no sleep training.” And I'm like, what? Even for me, with all of my background knowledge, training, research, working with real families, even with all of that under my belt, I've been doing this for three years now, I still look at those and think to myself, I wonder what I'm missing if I have that self-doubt that creeps in. I look at them as if, oh, they must know so much more than me. They must have cracked the code. I can only imagine what the average mom who doesn't have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours on infant sleep research and training under her belt must think and feel. It must be so freaking triggering and anxiety producing, and actually I know it is because it is even for me, and I think that that is such an important thing to remember when you're looking at social media or when you're talking to your friends in real life, you could be doing everything. You could have the exact right sleep environment. You could have a perfect bedtime routine, you could have an amazing schedule and you could be doing everything right and you still might have a baby that struggles with sleep. Maybe they have a really hard time winding down for bedtime. Maybe they take really short naps, maybe they only want to sleep if they're touching your body. Maybe they wake up to eat 12 times a night. So there are so many different things that baby sleep could look like or that a baby sleep problem could look like, and that's true across the board whether you're doing all of those right things or not. A lot of this is outside of our control, and I think that that is such a scary thing for parents to understand and to accept because we want to believe that it is controllable and that if we just follow all the rules and check off all the things on the list, that we will have a baby that sleeps and that by having a baby that sleeps our life will be infinitely easier.
We look at sleep through the night, for example, as this finish line for parenting. So it's something that is celebrated, it's something that's looked forward to, it's a goal that we have and it's almost like a medal that people wear when they say, oh, my baby slept through the night, or, oh, my baby sleeps through the night now, or, oh, I just can't wait for my baby to sleep through the night. And we think that once that happens, everything else in our life will just get magically better, and I'm really sorry to burst everybody's bubble. Yes, when you are getting good rest, you feel so much better. There are so many different aspects of your life that will feel better when you are well rested, but your baby doesn't need to sleep 12 hours all night for that to happen. There are other things that we can look at either in our own sleep hygiene or in how we bring in support into our life or how we involve a partner or another caregiver or how we fill our own cup when we're not with our baby.
There are so many other factors to consider when we're talking about how well we feel and how well we are able to function that are not necessarily dependent on how our baby sleeps. There are also things like actual anxiety or insomnia, things that you might actually really need support with that are again, not directly linked to how your baby is sleeping. So those are all really important things to consider is that sleep through the night is not necessarily a finish line. The other thing about sleeping through the night is that it's not guaranteed to last. I hear from parents who are following me for the first time on, Hey, Sleepy Baby with their toddler and they say, my baby was actually a really good sleeper, but then they turned two or they started daycare or their new baby sibling arrived or whatever it is, and things just went totally south. And so sometimes you have this baby that seems like they're an amazing sleeper and then they hit toddlerhood and it's like, bam, okay, now I'm going to be up all night, or now I've decided that I can walk right out of my room and I'm going to come into your bed every single night and refuse to sleep unless I'm next to you now I'm going to be afraid of the dark now I'm going to wet the bed every night. There's always something with parenting, and so I think it's also just really important to not get into that trap of, okay, once my baby sleeps through the night, I'm done parenting and I'm never going to have to go through anything hard again or my child's never going to need me again. I think that that's a really easy trap that we can fall into, and I just really want to let everybody know that that might not actually be the way it happens.
Sleep and parenting little kids in general is not a linear journey, so it doesn't start out super duper hard and then just get easier and easier and easier until they're 18 and they leave for college, right? There are going to be periods that are harder, there are going to be periods that are easier. There are going to be periods that are more intense emotionally or that require a little bit less from us. It's always kind of ebbing and flowing and we really just have to keep that in mind so that we don't get whiplash when we're hit with something new that comes up because it will. It always does, and that's not a bad thing. It's just part of the deal. It's part of what this all is.
So to you, dear Mama or Dad that is listening, I just want to say this, your baby is perfect, and so are you, you two are a beautiful team and sometimes it just takes a little while to figure this out together, and that goes for sleep and everything else. Just because it's hard does not mean that you're doing it wrong. It just is really hard sometimes, and that does not mean that you are failing. It doesn't mean that you should be doing it some other way. It just is, and in many ways it does get easier. It's just so important to remember that it's not you that's failing in so many ways. It's society that is failing you. I am with you and everyone else in this community of, Hey, Sleepy Baby, and now the No One Told Us Podcast is also with you.
For more information on biologically normal infant sleep, a holistic lens on infant sleep and gentle and respectable sleep strategies, check out Hey, Sleepy Baby.
