How to prioritise your baby's sleep needs as well as your own wellbeing

Sleep and development educator, chiropractor and mama of two, Dr Ainslee, shares the vastly different sleep journeys of her first and second babies.

This is a tale I hope you won’t relate to. The tale of a baby who didn’t sleep, and as a result, a mama who also didn’t sleep. It is a story full of physical, mental and emotional hardships that filled a human with dread and despair. But never fear, the mama didn’t go totally spare. 'My baby will sleep well' I thought naively before having any babies of my own. If I am completely honest, I quietly judged friends when they said they let their kids sleep in their beds or told me how they took the long way home in the car to keep their baby asleep.

However, as most of us find out the hard way, having kids is often like being served humble pie on repeat. And I got a huge serving of it when it came to sleep (or lack thereof) and my sweet little baby.

Boy oh boy, that kid could wake, I mean if waking through the night was an Olympic sport, he would beat your kid, hands down. We made it to the 6 month mark and, I'll be honest, I was LIMPING along mentally, physically and emotionally, the world had become shades of grey. I just felt a bit numb, and of course looking back I realise I was in the depths of sleep-deprived induced postpartum depletion, which quite frankly, isn’t spoken about enough is it?

I felt like a failure across the board because I could not get my kid to sleep, and naturally, how your child sleeps is a direct reflection of your parenting ability right?

“Just put him down drowsy but awake, that’s what I do and it works so well” they said.  Well I'd like you to come and try that with my child, drowsy but awake turns into screaming banshee baby in 0.4 milliseconds and then continues to escalate. “If he wakes up, just let him cry, he will go back to sleep. My little one fusses for a few minutes then rolls over and I get another hour out of their nap.” Great advice but leaving my child to 'fuss a little' turns into FULL NOISE resulting in a vomit.

Despite having tried the above tips, and everything else under the sun, at the 6 month mark I needed help. I looked around and it seemed my only option was to try sleep training.

I wasn’t keen on ‘crying it out’ methods as I had dabbled, and you can see above how that worked out. But mayyybe I hadn’t done it 'properly', so we jumped in feet first to the sleep training realm using intermittent soothing as our settling weapon. I say 'we' because I had to ask my husband to restrain me from busting through the door to get our crying child so we could follow the strict clock timings. It was as hard on him as it was on me, and our baby. The result? It filled a gap and it worked to a point.

Here comes the kicker. I, once again, naively thought that sleep training was a one and done situation – let them cry for a week or so alone and they'll figure it out, we'll never have to do it again, they'll be a great sleeper for life, well done parents. LOL. Every new tooth, every new skill, every sickness, we had to sleep train all over again. And it SUCKED. SO MUCH. No one talked about how sleep training wasn’t a one and done thing, no one talked about doing it on repeat. I felt like a failure, my mental health worsened.

Being an adult, I had the ability to switch off and numb myself. That’s the thing about having a fully formed brain, I can choose how to regulate myself; in this instance I went for numb rather than regulation. My sweet little baby didn’t have the brain capacity to regulate himself. Heartbreak moment. 

We sleep trained on and off, for well over a year. I assumed it was what a lot of people had to do, and they just didn’t discuss it. Over that year, while I was getting more sleep, I was riddled with anxiety and the majority of it revolved around sleep.

My days were inflexible and I would turn down much-needed coffee dates and social outings because if sleep didn’t go exactly to plan then my entire day would be thrown off and that meant the nights were abysmal.

One night, I cracked. Enough was enough. I picked up my crying child and carried him into the spare bed where we both settled and slept together all night. The little button (I have other words to use here that aren’t magazine appropriate so let’s go with 'button'), slept for seven hours straight. That’s the first time I’d slept seven solid hours since before he was born. So I tried it again the next night, and he definitely didn’t wake as much, and when he did wake it was faster for all of us to get back to sleep because I didn’t have to get out of bed to apply the intermittent soothing techniques that always left all of us rattled and stressed. I was shell-shocked, why hadn’t we just done this earlier? Because bedsharing is dangerous, irresponsible and downright negligent of the parent right? Not to mention incredibly lazy! Oh how wrong my beliefs were about bedsharing that had been drummed into me from our western society obsessed with infant sleep being controlled and looking a particular way.

We threw caution to the wind, broke all the sleep 'rules and guidelines' and over the next two months his sleep improved dramatically and he started sleeping through the night regularly. This kid was on a roll, and his mama (that’s me) was starting to feel human again. I was healing, recovering, reconnecting with the world and my son again. WAHOOOOO.

I got curious and started looking into sleep training accreditations and found two that were rooted in evidence-based science taking into consideration brain development, attachment science and the basics behind how sleep works from a physiological perspective. I signed up for both of them to find out more. I had to know why my son started sleeping so much better when we leaned into connection rather than away from it.

These two accreditations opened my eyes to a whole new world. A world where infant sleep revolved around what worked for each individual child, there were no age-based 'ideal nap routines', and there were no 'rules' to make sleep work. There was simply a depth of knowledge in understanding how sleep works, genetic factors that impact sleep, how the brain works, and what babies need to sleep well.

Fast-forward four and a half years, and we were graced (in the front seat of the car, may I add, because the girl was in a HURRY to arrive), with a gorgeous little girl. This time, I promised to myself, would be different. I wasn’t going to let sleep control my life. I had a vast knowledge of infant sleep and had been supporting families for a few years now. Also, in anticipation for baby girl’s arrival I felt it necessary to enlist the help of professionals to help me unpack, process, repair and prepare for the next baby and whatever sleep journey we would go on with her. It was through this process that I realised what I went through with my first really was a kind of trauma.

And so she arrived, and while she is similar to her brother in temperament, she is her own powerhouse of a personality and we are taking the path of least resistance at every single corner when it comes to sleep. We have fed to sleep, room shared, bedshared, had naps in carriers, and have utilised the pram and even car rides for naps as well.

Baby girl is 6 months old now and has not yet had one nap in a bassinet or cot. The result? I am well slept. I have energy for life. I am enjoying my family and delighting in my baby girl.

This is a vastly different journey from what I had with my son where at the same age my world was shades of grey, I found it hard to care for him and I was limping along in a state of postpartum depletion. I am grieving the experience I could have had with him had I known. However, where there are clouds, we must look to silver linings. I am on a mission to support those who feel that sleep training doesn’t feel like a good fit for them. I am on a journey to educate as many humans as I can so they have a choice. A choice I didn’t feel that I had when my son was younger, and let’s be honest, life feels better when you make choices that fit with your values and who you are.

If you are reading this and you have a new baby on the way, or you are in the sleep trenches, or you are feeling anxious and stressed about sleep, I am here to tell you that it is absolutely okay to do sleep in a way that suits you, your baby and your family. For some families that will be traditional sleep training, for others it will be bedsharing and carrier naps, and others may be somewhere in the middle. It is okay for each sleep journey to be unique and look different from family to family.

If this journey has taught me anything at all, it is this – parents need to stand united in the messaging that doing what works for your baby and your whanau is celebrated and supported, regardless of how different that looks journey to journey. We don’t need black and white rules instructing what sleep 'should' look like. We need support to figure out if our unique baby really needs a two hour lunch nap, or whether that is taking away from their night sleep quality.

Gone are the days where sleep training is your only option, we have so much more information and research on brain development, attachment science and how infant sleep actually works. We now have a choice about how we want to raise our babies, and that starts with having options about how we feel sleeping works best for us and them.

Dr Ainslee is a responsive infant sleep expert and chiropractor who focuses on holistic support and education for families. Follow her on Instagram @babysleepwithainslee or check out her website brainunderconstruction.co.nz. 

Photography: Elizabeth Little