Sleep training. Sleep learning. Infant sleep. Baby sleep. Toddler sleep. Cry it out. Extinction. Modified cry it out. (Soothing) Ladder method. Ferber. Modified Ferber. Gentle method. Don’t feed your child to sleep. Motion naps are a fraction of the value of stillness naps. White noise machine. Dark room/blackout curtains. Sleep regressions (or “progressions” if you want to reword the very same phenomenon) happen. Sleep begets sleep/well rested babies rest well. ALL WRONG. I will no longer be recommending or representing any of my previous advice and knowledge on sleep; that’s the beauty of things, when you know better you do better.
All of the above are based on something called First Wave Behaviorism. Have you heard of Skinner and his Applied Behavior Analysis, which has been uncovered as abusive? You’ve heard of Pavlov and his famous dog experiment, surely? These are the figureheads of First Wave Behaviorism. Well, to some extent, young children aren’t so different from dogs and *can* be trained through classical conditioning. But that isn’t actually a skill; skills cannot be lost and they don’t regress. The dogs weren’t actually hungry – they just salivated and ate against their own satiety cues and needs. Children aren’t actually sleepy – they just stop signaling/crying and enter sleep against their own tiredness cues and sleep needs. And this *looks* like success.
But, what happens as a result is that the child is so caught up and full of sleep that when night time comes and we parents desperately want to get a nice, restful, recovering slumber ourselves, even the conditioning cannot overcome the absolute lack of tiredness the child has thanks to their daytime performance, and they engage in night wakings, sometimes so often that we call it a sleep regression. And we as parents become yet more tired and yet more desperate for a sleep system that works — hence the BIG business of baby sleep consultants.
How do I know? Well, in between Skinner and Ferber, the two big names of First Wave Behaviorism, and 2023 when I’m writing this mea culpa, technology advanced so much that an instrument called the functional MRI (or fMRI) was introduced and experimentation was allowed on children. That instrument uncovered the difference between performance and meeting needs.
There is, at present writing this mea culpa in December 2023, only ONE child sleep method which is backed by research and aligns with what is going on inside of the child. It is called Neuroprotective Developmental Care (or the Possums programs) and comes out of a lab in Australia (hence “possums”) and is FREE for anyone to learn and use as that is the aim of the charity/nonprofit who owns the intellectual property.
I’ve been using it with my little one and can confirm that we have had none of the typical sleep regressions that I’ve accepted as standard as a nanny. Not a one. But it also leads to incredibly tiring days which is something I miss about previous behaviorism — I don’t get the down time I used to. As a result, I’m happy to discuss my own PERSONAL experience with this care method, but I am not yet putting the weight of my professional reputation behind recommending it.
Please accept this mea culpa and this statement of having learned new information as a sign that all advice, all parenting advice, even my own, is always open to adaptation, question, and recall, as we advance our technology to learn what our children are incapable of saying to us.
The wise man reconsiders; the bullheaded man stays the course.