Ep #49: Sleep Training Part 1: The Bedtime Process

It’s still winter, you’re bored, nothing’s really going on. What better time to sleep train your baby? Stay tuned. And I am going to delve into all the secrets of what I do and how I do it and how you can do it too.

Welcome to Parenthood Prep, the only show that helps sleep-deprived parents and overwhelmed parents-to-be successfully navigate those all-important early years with their baby, toddler, and child. If you are ready to provide the best care for your newborn, manage those toddler tantrums, and grow with your child, you’re in the right place. Now here’s your host, baby and parenting expert, Devon Clement. 

Hello and welcome back to the Parenthood Prep podcast. This week, I am going to be talking to you about the meat and potatoes of sleep training. I know I’ve talked about a lot of topics related to sleep, and I’ve talked about how I do sleep training and how we do sleep training, and I’ve kind of danced around some of the different areas of it, but I am just gonna straight up give you the steps to sleep train your baby, or at least to get started sleep training your baby, because I don’t feel that there’s a one-size-fits-all approach.

And a lot of what I do when I’m with a client is I really tune into what’s going on with the baby, what the parents want, and what’s gonna work. But there’s some fundamentals that are really going to apply in every situation. And so we’re gonna talk through those.

First of all, I highly recommend if you’re planning on sleep training your baby, getting some support. You know, we talked about the four C’s, confidence, commitment, consistency, and communication. So what’s really going to build your confidence is having some support. So whether that’s your partner, which we hope if you’re parenting with a partner that they are on board, if there’s someone, you know, in your life, a friend, a family member who has done this before or who might be going through it at the same time, really link up with them and try to do this together if you can.

Maybe even go to like your due date group or your parenting group on social media and see if anybody wants to kind of try to tackle sleep training with you. I used to run a group, I called it Baby Sleep Club, where parents would get together and all sleep train starting at the same time with my guidance and support. But really, once I explained the logistics, the biggest thing was just them supporting each other and seeing where other babies were coming out ahead maybe, going to sleep a little faster, or where maybe their baby was doing things a little bit faster than the others, and that every baby kind of goes at their own pace, but that they will get there and learn the skills.

When I’m sleep training with a family, I go there in person and I’m there for three nights, three days, and we bang it all out. Nights, naps, night weaning, putting themselves to sleep, everything. But that’s because my entire focus and my entire job for those three days is supporting the family and getting that baby sleeping. And they do, they get through anywhere from 85 to 100% of the process while I’m there with them.

But I don’t actually recommend that parents try this on their own because you have a lot of other stuff going on besides sleep training your baby. And what I super don’t want, the number one thing that I don’t want you to do is break away from the plan, throw in the towel, give up in the middle of the night, and just go back to what you were doing before, because that’s going to confuse your baby. And we remember that other C, commitment. We want to stick to the plan, but that doesn’t mean we have to stick to it 24 hours a day.

We can start, and we’re going to start, by just sleep training bedtime. We’re gonna get them putting themselves to sleep on their own at bedtime, and that’s where they’re gonna develop that skill. And you are gonna have a lot more patience to wait for your baby to fall back asleep at 7, 7:30, 8:00 p.m. than you are at 3:00 in the morning. So to start out, we don’t have to go all night. All we have to do is bedtime. Yay, isn’t that so great?

And I know it sounds like it’s inconsistent if sometimes you’re responding and sometimes you’re not, but it actually is fine because what we’re not gonna do and what a lot of people do when I think they get stuck in this weird limbo is they let their babies cry and try to fall asleep and then it doesn’t happen, so they give up and they just go in.

Like, I’ll talk to somebody who wants my help sleep training and they’ll say, oh, well, you know, when she wakes up in the middle of the night, I don’t go in right away. Like I wait 10 minutes and I see if she’ll go back to sleep and I say Oh, does she ever do that? No, no, she never does. Okay so then all you’ve taught her is that she has to cry for 10 minutes and then you’re gonna come in and that’s like a waste of everyone’s time. 

So I would rather see you go in right away when they wake up, feed them, rock them, hold them, respond to them, than give them this confusing message that you just have to cry for a certain amount of time and then I’m going to come in 100% of the time. Because you know what happened in that case? The baby trained her. 

And it’s true. We joke about it like, oh, you’re not here to sleep train the kids, you’re here to sleep train the parents. But everyone just gets used to things being a certain way, babies and adults. So you’re both getting into this routine where you’re waiting 10 minutes or waiting 15 minutes.

Or sometimes people tell me, oh, I tried to let her cry and I just couldn’t do it and it just didn’t work. And I’m like, well, walk me through it, what happened? Well, it was 1:00 in the morning and I had been rocking her and every time I tried to put her back down in the crib, she would wake up and then every time I would pick her back up and rock her again and then every time I put her down in the crib, she would wake up and finally I just said, screw you. And I threw her in the crib and I just left her and she was just crying and crying. 

And I went in the other room and I started crying. And then, you know, she screamed her head off for 10 minutes and it was forever and she never stopped. And then I felt so guilty that I just ran in and scooped her up and nursed her back to sleep. And that is not sleep training. That is losing your shit.

That is unhelpful for the baby, it’s unhelpful for you, and it doesn’t get you anywhere other than feeling guilty and making your baby more upset and crying than they ever have. So, you know, you might think, well, bedtime’s great. People tell me that all the time. Bedtime’s great. I just rock her to sleep or nurse her to sleep and I put her in the crib and she’s totally fine. I don’t need to fix bedtime. But you do, because when they are falling asleep in your arms or on the bottle or on the boob, that’s what they’re thinking of.

I have a whole episode about sleep associations. You can go into that to learn more about that. But they’re having these lovely sleep associations, and then when they wake up, they’re upset, they’re anxious, they’re confused. They’re like, where is the nipple that was in my mouth? Where are those arms that were holding me? Where is my rocking motion? Why am I alone in this crib, you know, with nothing around me? 

Oh, I had a pacifier in my mouth and now it’s gone and I’m either too young to find it or it’s on the other side of the crib and it’s pitch black in here and I have no idea what I’m doing, and they’re not skilled enough to search around the crib for their pacifier.

So you’re basically leaving them with no tools and no strategies to get themselves back to sleep. So when we start with bedtime, we are helping them learn that skill of going to sleep on their own. I have had babies have a great bedtime and then sleep longer and more than they’ve ever slept in their lives. And that’s amazing. And all I mean by having a great bedtime is that they put themselves to sleep.

So how are we gonna make that happen? First of all, I want you to forget you ever heard the term drowsy but awake. We’ve all heard that, right? Every freaking sleep blog and sleep book says it. That is a unicorn that is A, really difficult to catch and not always there. I mean, do you wait until the exact moment that your head is going to hit the pillow and you’re going to fall asleep to even get into bed? I mean, before you had kids. Now I’m sure your eyes do close as soon as your head hits the pillow.

But like, remember back to those halcyon days when you used to get a full night’s sleep. Sometimes you get in bed and you look at your phone for a while or you read or you, you know, get busy with your partner or get busy by yourself or, you know, whatever. Maybe you get up again. Maybe you go – I always have to go pee one last time. You know, maybe you’re doing all those things. Your baby might need to do that too. 

And if you’re waiting for them to be that perfect amount of drowsy, it’s not going to happen at the same time every night. So what ends up happening, I think, is that parents overcorrect, or as I heard someone say once, over-rotate, which is like something you do in gymnastics, and I love that expression. You over-rotate, and the baby is basically asleep or mostly asleep. 

Like people will tell me, oh, she’s putting herself to sleep. I’m like, oh, is she wide awake when you put her in the crib? Well, no, she’s drowsy in my arms, but when I lay her down, she opens her eyes. I’m like, oh, and then is she awake for a little bit? Well, no, she closes them again pretty much right away. So that is getting your baby to sleep and then putting them in the crib. 

We don’t wanna do that. We want them to be basically wide awake. I mean, certainly tired. We don’t want them to have woke up from a nap 30 minutes ago but we want them to be quite awake when we’re putting them down for bed. And that is because we want them to be aware of their surroundings, aware of what’s going on, and aware of what our expectations are for them that they’re going to fall asleep on their own. 

And what we’re gonna do is put them down in the crib. So you’re gonna do your bedtime routine. You’re probably gonna have to make some changes to it, especially if they’re used to feeding to sleep or rocking to sleep. I know everybody says make the room really sleepy, make it dark, turn on the white noise, make it really calm. We’re going to actually do the opposite of that. You’re like, Devon, you’re crazy. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I do.

I swear I do. You have to listen to me. When you have a tiny newborn and you’re creating a bedtime routine and you’re creating a bedtime association, yes, feed them in the dark, get them ready. I did a whole episode about turning off the lights and what a game changer it is. But when you are sleep training, what we are doing is we are shaking the Etch-a-Sketch.

I compare it to planting a garden. We have to pull the weeds out of the garden before we can plant the seeds. My colleague who is one of our sleep coaches, she compares it to cleaning out your closet. If you want to organize your closet, you kind of have to take everything out and get it all out of there before you figure out what you’re gonna keep, what you’re gonna throw away, and put it all back in nicely. And you know what? While all that stuff is out of the closet, it is a mess and you hate it. And I know this because I’m organizing one of my closets right now and it’s driving me nuts. But you are only going to be able to get to the root of the problem if we can empty out all of those things. And in this case, we’re talking about the habits.

So we are trying to break the habit of falling asleep feeding, and we want that baby to be wide awake when we’re putting them down. Couple things you can do is keep the lights on. You can feed in a different room. You can start the feed early. Like if you do a bath every night, you can start the feed before the bath. You can finish up the feed after the bath. 

You can do a bottle if they’re used to breastfeeding. You can have a different person give the bottle. There’s lots of ways you can do it, but I want you to ask somebody who’s there with you or who’s watching you, does it look like she’s falling asleep? Because they probably are and you don’t even realize it. So we want them to be wide awake.

Now, sometimes they’re just gonna doze off during the feed no matter what. I’ve had babies that I was practically dangling upside down by an ankle during the feed, and they were just dozing off. So in that case, it’s not the end of the world. I would just then break up.

I wouldn’t put them in the crib in that drowsy or asleep state. I would break it up a little bit. I would finish the feed, give them a burp, do a diaper change, hold them upright on your lap, read a book for a little while. That’s another thing. If your baby has reflux and you have to hold them up on your shoulder after a feed and they always fall asleep during that part, you don’t want to do that. So you want them to be wide, wide, wide awake. 

You can hold them facing out on your lap. Instead, read books together, sing songs, tell stories. You don’t want to get them riled up. I mean, I say wide awake, but I don’t mean like screaming with glee. I just mean eyes wide open, very aware of what’s happening and in a good place to go to sleep. So you know whatever their wake window normally is around there but not to the point where they’re rubbing their eyes or yawning a ton. I mean maybe a little. I know I’m being very wishy-washy and I’m sorry. This is like a little bit hard to explain. 

But basically you just want them to be awake. You don’t want them to be falling asleep. And ideally not at the point of tired where they’re like super fussy, because that just makes the bedtime routine miserable for everybody. You want them to be in a pretty good mood and it’s probably, especially this first night, gonna take them a little while to fall asleep in their crib. So you’re gonna just have to probably start the routine a little earlier. 

So you’ve done your bath, you’ve done your feed, we’re in pajamas, we’re in a sleep sack maybe. I love a sleep sack. The sleep sack is great because it keeps them cozy, it signals for them that it’s time to sleep, and when they get a little bit older, it keeps them from climbing out of the crib, you know, it keeps them from throwing a leg over the side, it keeps them from walking around as readily in the crib. Don’t get the one with the weight on it because I want them to be able to have total freedom of movement as far as like rolling and getting into a comfortable sleep position.

I don’t want them to have freedom of movement to like walk around or climb in the crib, but I do want them to be able to roll around as much as possible. So make sure that if you’re using a sleep sack that it fits them, you know, comfortably. And then we’re gonna, you know, do a last whatever, a little song, kiss, say goodnight, and you’re gonna put them down in the crib awake.

And I know that sounds crazy. You’re like, but what? Something my colleague said a while ago is a client said to her, she won’t let me put her in the crib. And she said, what do you mean she won’t let you? Does she pull a gun on you? They’re going to have feelings about this process, especially this part of the process. They might have those feelings right away, or they might wait a little while and then start to tell you about these feelings.

When people say, I don’t want to let them cry it out, I agree. I don’t want to let babies scream until they’re blue in the face. I don’t want to give them trauma. I don’t want to confuse them and make them feel anxious. Putting them down awake in the crib is not doing any of those things. It’s not traumatizing them. It’s not giving them nightmares. And if they are fed and changed and burped, they are fine. They don’t need anything from you.

They want things. They want to maintain the routine that they’re used to, which is probably you rocking them to sleep or whatever, but they don’t need those things. And now I want to talk just a little bit about some of the different methods of what you could do here.

So there’s a methodology, basically every sleep training methodology is going to try to get you to teach your baby to fall asleep on their own, which is the cornerstone of the whole process. Even Dr. J. Gordon, which is like touted as the most gentle attachment parenting, whatever method, is a way to pull back on the support, on the sleep associations with your child until they are more independent sleeping.

When you’re trying to be “gentle,” and I put it in quotes because I don’t actually believe that it is gentle to stay in the room with the baby or do something where you’re like rubbing them or patting them, but then you’re stopping and leaving. Because all that’s doing is changing the sleep association from rocking them, bouncing them, nursing them, feeding them to now you’re padding, now you’re rubbing. And trust me, I have done this with so many kids. 

Before I was a sleep trainer, back when I was a babysitter, back when I was a nanny, even when I started out as an overnight caregiver, we were doing all of these things, and all that was happening is that the babies were crying more and more, and we were getting more and more miserable, and the nights were absolute torture for everyone involved, because the babies would be like, well, when are they gonna leave? I’m so anxious, I’m so worried. When are they going to leave?

As soon as she lifts her hand to scratch her ear. You know, how many people have said, oh, I wish I could just leave my hands behind in the crib with my baby. I’ve said that myself a million times. We don’t want the baby to need your hands in the crib with them. We want them to be independent sleepers. And the good news is they’re so capable of it. They are so capable of getting there. And I have seen it like 100% of times. I have never seen a baby who could not learn to put themselves to sleep.

So when we say, people say, oh, cry it out is cruel, it’s because a lot of the time people are doing it in kind of a mean way, whether they’re doing that like throwing them in at 2 in the morning, super frustrated, or they’re getting them most of the way to sleep and then putting them in the crib and they’re shocked awake and they’re, where’d you go? And they’re losing their marbles because you’re gone and they are so confused. Like, you know, I say this all the time, like sometimes when you’re staying in a hotel and you wake up in the middle of the night and you’re like, whoa, where am I?

Like that’s how your baby feels when they are like drowsy in your arms and then they wake up in the crib. So by putting them in awake, you’re showing them, hey, this is your crib. You feel comfortable here. This is the environment where you’re going to be sleeping. Maybe they haven’t been in the crib before, or maybe they have, but they know their room, they know you. You’re going to convey that confidence. You’re going to communicate. You’re going to convey that confidence to them, and you are going to put them down wide awake and then you’re going to see what happens.

So from here, you have a couple of different options depending on what your baby does. I don’t genuinely think there’s a big difference between doing checks, like according to like the Ferber method or a method like that, and not doing checks. You can do them if they feel good to you and you wanna do them. You don’t have to do them if you don’t want to or if you don’t think your baby needs them.

People make a couple of major mistakes when they choose to do checks. First of all, what is a check? You are just visually and verbally checking on your baby, reassuring them that they’re okay, making sure that they’re not stuck, making sure they don’t have a poop. If you suspect they might have a burp, you can quickly check and see if they have a burp.

But what a lot of people do is for the check, they go in and they comfort the baby. They pick the baby up, they calm them down. And then the baby says, oh, thank God you’re back. I was so nervous. I didn’t know what was going on. And then what do they do? As soon as the babies calm, they put the baby back down. And then the baby starts all over again from scratch. And now they’re like, what the hell? Mom, you came in. What the hell, dad? You came in and you picked me up. And then that was it. You put me back down. And then the whole process starts over from the beginning.

But if you’re in there and you just reassure them and you say you’re doing a great job, I have to tell you a lot of the time when I go in and check on a baby because I’m worried about them and I’ll tell you how I get to that point in a little bit, those little jerks stop crying and look at me with a huge smile like, hey, hi. So you’re fine. You’re fine. They’re just having feelings that they are allowed to have. They are allowed to feel frustrated. They’re allowed to feel upset and they are allowed to tell us that they feel upset. 

And this is really such a learning experience in teaching them emotional regulation and learning it for yourself because we want so badly to make it stop. We want to plug it up with a pacifier. We wanna scoop them up and shove a boob in their mouth or just hold them in our arms and rock them and just get them to stop having feelings. And that is not great. We don’t wanna teach them that it is not okay to have feelings. 

There’s a great article, I will send the podcast producers a link to it and we can put it in the notes, about positive stress. A long time ago, there were some research, “research studies” about sleep training and letting babies cry, but they actually were not about sleep training. They were about babies who were in orphanages in like Eastern Europe. I think it might’ve been Romania specifically. There’s a million babies there and like only workers and not parents. And these babies were not being attended to like all day, every day. And of course they were having trauma. Of course they were having attachment issues. 

And I think it’s a little bit insulting to people with actual abandonment trauma to say, I don’t want to give my baby abandonment trauma by attending to her needs 99.9% of the time and then for three nights in a row, putting her down awake to put herself to sleep, which is a skill she’s perfectly capable of. 

So there is negative stress, which is like your parents are screaming, fighting all the time because they’re super tired. There’s negative stress of your parents are screaming at you all the time, or your parents are not safe driving the car and you get in a horrible car accident because your parents are too tired to be awake behind the wheel and drive the car reasonably.

So it’s really not a big deal if your baby is having some feelings in the crib. The other thing is that as parents, you’re very attuned to your baby’s feelings and sounds and all that stuff. And you’re gonna hear it so much louder and so much worse than an objective observer.

A big part of the time that I am there, I am reminding the parents or even just informing the parents that no, your baby is not screaming right now. Your baby is not even crying. Your baby is fussing or they’re yelling or maybe they cried for a minute, but then they stopped and then they cried for another minute and then they started again.

So I want you to really take a step back and look at this like a scientist. And if you are a parent, especially the person who gave birth to this child, you are going to have a really hard time with this. And that’s why it is really great to have someone there with you so that you can take a break if you need to, so that you can step out.

Because you know what, torturing yourself by listening to the monitor at top volume is not gonna help your baby, and it’s just gonna make the process drag out longer and take a lot longer. So when you go in and you pick that baby up and you rock them and you get them settled down and then you put them back down, all you’re doing is undoing all of the work that they and you have just done.

I’m not saying you can never do that, but try not to do that, especially not when you’re just doing a check. The other mistake that a lot of parents make when they’re doing a check is usually you do it on an interval schedule. Like the Ferber method will give you an interval schedule. Say you go in after three minutes, then you go in after five minutes, then you go in after 10 minutes, until finally by like night three, you’re waiting like 20 minutes and you’re barely going in at all.

But that doesn’t just mean looking at the clock, it also means looking at your baby. So any point where your baby stops and calms down or takes a break. Even if it’s only a few seconds where they’re like, huh, or they roll into a comfortable position and then they flop back out, you need to restart that clock and a lot of people don’t do that.

So then you’re not really going in after five minutes of crying, you’re going in after like one minute of crying because four minutes ago they were crying and then three minutes into that they took a break. My math is probably all over the place, but you know what I mean. And then you’re like, oh, it’s the five minute mark, even though they took a really good pause one minute ago, so you’re only going in after one minute.

So if you’re going to do checks, totally fine to do checks, make sure you or someone is watching that monitor like a hawk to be sure that they have been like crying the whole time. What if they’re screaming? What if they’re hysterical? What if they are like red line? I don’t want you to let them do that. I don’t want you to let them scream until they’re blue in the face. I want them learning skills and figuring things out, and they’re not gonna do that if all they’re doing is screaming hysterics.

However, they might mix it in. They might pepper in some screaming hysterics into the process, and I want you to just be able to take some deep breaths and let that be part of the process. I don’t do checks when I’m sleep training, but if I have a baby that’s just like red line for five minutes, 10 minutes, I’m gonna go in and I’m gonna check on them and make sure they don’t have a burp. I’m gonna, you know, make sure they can calm down. Honestly, a lot of the time they calm down pretty much instantly and then I’m like, okay, you’re just a screamer. Sometimes it’s just their personality.

I’ve had parents where I’ve been concerned about the crying and they’ve been like, oh no, this is just her. She does this all the time, even when I’m holding her, even when we’re playing, whatever. I was helping a friend sleep train her baby and he was pretty upset for a while. And she’s like, this is what he does every night in my arms anyway. So it’s not really that different for him to do it in the crib. So if this is unusual behavior for your baby, and if they are just like blue in the face, you can go in and you can check on them and you can even comfort them. I would like you to put them back down awake if you can, but if it’s a really extended period and you’re just beside yourself, maybe this is not the night for sleep training and you have to give it a break and then maybe you need to call me.

I honestly I know what to do when I’m there but that’s the part where when I’m trying to advise people this is why I’ll never write a sleep training book because I don’t know what you should do in every situation, in every possibility, in every outcome, I only know all the information that I know when I’m there and what I would do. The book would be 10,000 pages long because I would come up with 10,000 different scenarios for what could possibly be happening. And then your baby would manage to choose the 10,001st scenario.

So you’ve put your baby down wide awake. They’ve been fussing. They’ve been crying on and off. If they’re old enough, maybe they’ve been rolling back and forth. Maybe they’ve been sitting up if they’re like seven, eight, nine, ten months when they’re just sitting up and kind of falling asleep that way. I call it holding a sit-in. Just let them do it. Just leave them. They’re going to look like they’re drunk, especially if you could see them from the top on the video. They kind of sway back and forth and they end up keeling over. Sometimes they wake up immediately and sit back up. Sometimes they fall asleep that way. That’s totally fine. However they fall asleep is totally fine.

I had a mom that I went in to help with sleep training and she’d been working with one of those online companies that just gives you a plan to follow. The baby was six months old and every time she rolled onto her tummy, the mom would go in and flip her back over because she knows that they’re supposed to be placed on their backs for sleep. And at no point in this plan did it say, hey, if your baby is independently rolling, you do not have to flip them back. That’s the thing, right?

Like if they are getting themselves independently onto their stomach, they’re allowed to do that. Ask your pediatrician, ask any pediatrician. There is no doctor in the world that’s going to tell you to be a pancake chef all night long and keep flipping your baby onto their back over and over all night. It’s not sustainable and it’s ridiculous. Once they’re strong enough to roll themselves, they’re totally fine and you can leave them.

And pretty much as soon as we made that change, the baby started sleeping great and wasn’t really struggling anymore because it was that flipping that she was doing, which I didn’t know she was doing until I was there in person. So whatever they’re doing physically, you wanna leave them.

When they get older, toddlers, you’re working with them, they fall asleep on the floor, leave them. Just leave them. They’re fine. They’ve chosen this for themselves. Most of the time, the first night is a lot of practice, so they might wake themselves up in a little bit, or they might stay asleep and get themselves comfortable, or they might sleep the whole night like that. But don’t mess with them because you’re much more likely to wake them up than to make your life easier.

How long should you let them cry for? That is the question that everyone asks. And the answer is, how long is a piece of string? I don’t care about time. I don’t care if they are awake in the crib for two hours, as long as they are not hysterical the entire time. As long as there are breaks, as long as there are pauses, as long as there’s periods where they’re doing something other than shrieking. Periods of fussing, periods of finding their hand and sucking on it, periods of talking to themselves. There’s no time limit on that. They can take as long as they want.

If they’re just red line hysterical, not doing anything else, again, that’s when I would go and sound the alarm and kind of do something else. I think a lot of the time, part of being a sleep trainer is also kind of being the flight attendant. Like if you’re on a plane and there’s turbulence and the flight attendants are just calmly pushing the drink cart and they’re like, “This is fine, it’s all fine, you know, no worries, we’re great.” That’s reassuring.

You’re like, okay, it’s bumpy, but the flight attendants know what they’re doing, and if they were concerned, I’d be concerned. And if there’s a situation where the pilot’s like, I put on the fasten seatbelt sign and flight attendants, you need to buckle up too. That’s when we know we’re dealing with something that’s a little bit more dramatic, but we’re still not worried. You look at the flight attendants who are buckled up and they were like, nope, it’s time to buckle up so I don’t fall over with the drink cart, but it’s fine. 

And if there were a real emergency on that plane, the flight attendants would be the ones who are guiding you through getting your inflatable vest, opening the door, you know, in the emergency. That’s who you want them to be. But in an ideal situation, in an ideal flight, the flight attendant isn’t doing much other than checking on you to make sure you’re okay and serving you drinks.

So there shouldn’t be a lot of, what do I do now, what do I do now, what do I do now, especially during that first bedtime. And eventually your baby is gonna fall asleep and you are going to be so thrilled. I don’t wanna tell you how long it’s gonna take. I am not telling you how long it’s going to take. It could be 10 minutes. It could be two hours. It could be two and a half hours. They could fall asleep for five minutes and wake back up and then it’d be another hour. That is very unlikely. 

What I see more often than not is from put down to asleep, and this does not mean crying the entire time, from put down to asleep is somewhere in the range of 45 minutes to an hour. Does that mean at the 45 minute mark you should say, Oh, this hasn’t worked and throw in the towel? No, no, no. But when at the 35 minute mark, you’re like, oh my God, this is forever, this is torture. My baby’s been in the crib for 10 years and I can’t go into them. You can say to yourself, okay, this might take a little bit longer and that’s fine. 

I really want you to look at the clock. I think the checks are helpful for that in the sense that you’re actually paying attention to how long it’s truly been because so often parents will say to me, “Oh my God, this has been going on forever.” I’m like, “Ma’am, it’s been going on for six minutes. It’s really fine.” And then, you know, I point out to them, “Look, you know, she’s rolling onto her side. She’s playing with her hair. She’s getting her pacifier. She’s grabbing her sleep sack. She’s, you know, doing all these things that show me that she’s trying to go to sleep.”

So that’s really where I feel like that flight attendant attitude is helpful and why having someone there besides you and possibly besides your partner would be helpful. When I work with parents like with my baby sleep club or coaching them remotely, I would have them kind of designate who’s the one who’s gonna be stronger right now. And that might switch, that might switch off. One parent might say, “Oh, I want to go in” and the other parent says, “No, we’re not doing that right now.” And then, you know, maybe half an hour later, the other parent says, “Oh, now it’s time I want to go in.” And you’re like, “No, we’re not doing that now. We made it through my freak out. Now we’re going to make it through your freak out.” And eventually your baby’s going to fall asleep.

And then that first night, after that, you can do whatever you want. Pop the champagne, eat the ice cream, do shots of tequila, you know, whatever feels good for you. That should actually be a C, comfort, but not for the baby, for you. And then the next time they wake up you can go in, you can do whatever you want. No, you can’t do whatever you want. You can’t leave them to cry and then go in. So either go in right away or don’t go in at all.

This has already gotten really long so I’m gonna cap it here and call this sleep training part one the bedtime process and then we’ll take it from there. I would love to hear your questions. You can catch us on Instagram or go to the website at happyfamilyafter.com and leave us a voicemail where you can ask a question or send us a baby roast.

I would love to hear sleep training baby roasts. That would be amazing. I have a few that I will share in another episode. So good luck and we are here for you and take care.

To be sure you never miss an episode, be sure to subscribe in your favorite podcast app. We’d also love to connect with you on social media. You can find us on Instagram @happyfamilyafter or at our website HappyFamilyAfter.com. On our website you can also leave us a voicemail with any questions or thoughts you might have, and you can roast your baby. Talk to you soon.

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of Parenthood Prep. If you want to learn more about the services Devon offers, as well as access her free monthly newborn care webinars, head on over to www.HappyFamilyAfter.com.