12 weeks or older
When your baby is twelve weeks old, you can sleep train. Babies at this age take to sleep training rather quickly and can sleep through the night (10-12 hours) in as little as 3-4 nights. At 12 weeks of age (and beyond), your baby is capable of receiving all their calories during the day.
Attachment Based Sleep Training?
You can nurture both autonomous sleep and secure attachment in your baby. There is a tendency to believe that secure attachment depends on constant physical presence and soothing, but this belief is not supported by science. Attachment is all about being responsive to your baby’s needs. In the context of sleep, babies don’t need to be bounced, rocked, etc. This is a habit, but NOT a need. This is a habit that has become a “requirement”, but probably in your mind more than hers.
What about crying?
If we want to change our children’s habits, the needs we’ve created, we can’t expect them not to grieve the loss of what we take away. Parents should never feel they are failing because a baby cries. Crying relieves stress. Babies will never (and should never have to) be “no cry”. Parents should not feel pressured to go to any length to stop a baby’s cries. Crying is not to be feared, it is a healthy release.
Avoiding crying by fully assisting a child to sleep is one of the main causes of him waking and crying repeatedly through the night and catnapping through the day. If you believe allowing a baby to cry is unkind; your child will never try something new, never learn how to sit in his stroller or wait in his highchair, or eat more than three mouthfuls of food or drink from a cup or eat off a spoon. He may never want to go beyond his first day at daycare or school. Eventually, he will be under the impression that whenever he feels anything but happy, he needs to be rescued. And that someone else should be responsible for making those feelings go away.
The more we do for our kids, the less they are able to do for themselves. Sleep is no different. It is okay to let your child struggle in his efforts to fall asleep and return to sleep. He is already doing it in all areas of development, and he can handle it around sleep as well.
Let Me Sleep Train Your Baby!
The hardest part of sleep training is being the one to actually do it. I’ll take the stress out of it and walk you through the whole process. I’ll answer your questions along the way and customize a sleep plan that works for your family.