Entry 1: Why Have We Monetized Baby Sleep?

I remember holding my six month old baby at 3am, her beautiful blue-gray eyes staring up at me wide open with a smile on her face. Tears stared to well up in my own eyes looking back at her. I felt all the love of a mama but also, pure exhaustion! The sentiment of a sweet moment with your baby is dulled when you insert 3am, 2am, 4:30am… as the time stamp. My heart said enjoy this moment with your baby while my brain, eyes, muscles said sleeeeeep. A few minutes of nursing and my baby went back to bed (or as I call it, “took a 2 hour night time nap”).

Once she was back asleep, I pulled out my phone and went down the dark rabbit hole of baby sleep techniques. Let me tell you, if you thought Hell was a long way down, you’ve never Googled anything related to parenting… Nonetheless, I was desperate to find a solution. Spoiler alert- the Internet did not save my sleep.

Small bit of context: I’m a first time Mom. My truly awesome husband works out of town some days so I am a part time solo parent. For his job, we didn’t live near family. Often it was me and my sweet baby taking on challenges together. She is freaking cute baby (best in the Universe according to her two parents) and is rarely fussy without a valid reason. My husband and I had a solid parenting plan before she was born that included sleep techniques. However, babies have a biologically engrained superpower of being able to humble their parent’s expectations. Continue reading for a first hand account of such humbling.

When you type “how to get your baby to sleep through the night” into a search engine, prepare yourself for a barrage of internet experts. After many nights of reading webpages dedicated to baby sleep, I found there to be two generally competing options. On one side you have the CIO method, which stands for Cry It Out. For this technique, you often put your baby to sleep in their own bed, walk out of the room and let them fuss/cry until they fall asleep. Its promoted as a fast, sure fire way to have your baby fall asleep on their own. Generally this method takes 1-3 nights and the baby often cries for no more than 20-30 minutes the first night, 10-20 the second night and less than 10 for the nights that follow. The general consensus is that once sleep trained the baby usually self soothes if they wake up during the night and sleeping stretches of 10-12 hours is not uncommon (Also known as a new parents dream). This method is considered “traditional” sleep training and can even be recommended by pediatricians (our own pediatrician recommended it to us).

On the other side, you have everything else that is not Cry It Out (CIO). This includes the ‘Ferber Method’ which is essentially CIO but with increasing incremental crying times and you usually stay in the room with your baby as a comfort measure. Another method is drowsy but awake. For this method you wait until the baby shows signs of drowsiness (heavy eyes, slow blinks, yawning) and then you put them in their own bed and pat/rock them into sleep. If they wake up, you do the process over again. There is also the rock to sleep method which is fairly simple- rock them to sleep and repeat if they wake up. There is also the notion that a baby is simply too young to sleep on their own or all the way through the night and sleep training should happen when the child shows their own signs of readiness. We are forcing unnatural development when we sleep train.

Ok. So now we have our two camps of thought. However both sides seemed extreme to me. CIO pulled at my momma heart strings too much. The thought of listening to my baby cry for what would seem like hours (i.e. 20 minutes) was not sitting well with me. The other side basically told me to say goodbye to sleep for a couple of years until my baby decided to sleep on her own. My tired eyes just refused to accept that sentiment either. So… cue capitalism to the sleep rescue??

Not quite. Although I almost fell for the scheme. Thanks to internet algorithms, my social media feeds started to flood with ads that suggested sleep training without having my baby CIO. Amazingly, ALL of these methods promised the same fast results as CIO without the “trauma” of prolonged crying or making my baby feel abandoned. I immediately clicked away at the links, hoping to find the “El Dorado” of baby sleep techniques. Click after click was a let down with the “fully backed research”, “save moms heart and sanity”, “finally a way to gently put your baby to sleep”, “don’t traumatize your child with CIO, use our better method today!”, “get your sleep back”, and then, the $200 price tag (on the CHEAP end). I saw sleep packages that were more than $1000. But hey, what’s $1000 for a full nights sleep back? I’ll tell you that for my family, it was not in the budget. Not even close. But now I felt MORE frustration. I don’t want to spend this money but does that mean I can’t afford to gently transition my baby’s sleep? Am I forever doomed to CIO?

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed wild to me that so called experts were holding hostage the sleep of desperate mom’s with a price tag. Why wouldn’t they though? We monetize thoughts in this country. An app, an idea, a life-changing theory/research is always available at your fingertips, for purchase. Now to be clear, I’m not anti-capitalist and I’m fully aware this is the economic system we use. On this website, I have my own little store. that sells digital downloads and merchandise. But those are tangible items or compensation for my time. Anyone can figure out how to use Google Sheets formulas. I’m not holding that secret to myself and charging people. I simply created a tool to make budgeting a little easier. However, the sleep packages were offering secret, life-changing ideas for a hefty price tag. And to the families that bought them, I sincerely hoped they worked for you. I suspect, though, that those families shelled out some serious dough to be left staring into the very awake eyes of their baby.

If I could find some actual research articles that were constantly being referenced but never produced by these ad’s, I would probably change my mind. After some pretty extensive internet digging (and I wrote many college papers that required me to site original sources) I could not find a legitimate study that proved a better method than CIO. I found several that indicated cry it out could have long term effects on the child (or even short term emotional impact), nothing stood out as ground breaking research. Several articles concluded that CIO did NOT have long term effects on emotional well-being but there was not another named method with similar results. First, any scientific research that is valid is published and therefore widely available. Hence the ease of finding CIO data. Second, many other paid site/apps that are made for parents would definitely jump on the bandwagon if a different method was successful. Admittedly, I use the paid version of “Huckleberry” the app and there is no reason they would not promote a gentle sleep method if it existed.

The simple truth that I have discovered for myself is that I can’t find a secret sleep method because it doesn’t exist. No one has unlocked a magic tool that evolutionarily changes the way babies fall and stay asleep. As a mom, I had two choices. Be tired and follow the current cues of my baby’s sleep patterns or try some method of CIO/Ferber. My sweet husband took one for the team and led the Ferber Method sleep training technique in our house. I prepped myself up hard. I was going to go to the car, with ice cream and possible a little wine and cry while my baby cried. Maybe she would feel my good intentions through osmosis and know that I did not abandon her. On the night we began, I was so anxious and once she started crying all my mom instincts went into high gear. My husband stayed calm for the both of us and we made it through. Next night was no easier but shorter… and the third night was no time at all. We had done it.

To my surprise, there were no signs of trauma either. I noticed zero behavioral changes in her except better sleep. Maybe her therapist will correct me in twenty years… but even more than that, my wallet was intact. I didn’t spend exorbitant amounts of money to get my baby to sleep. We, her parents, knew our baby well enough to understand what she needed and how to best provide. To any parent who uses another method that works, you should also be recognized for following your instincts. WE know our children. WE are the experts in our home. Take internet advice with a big grain of salt and remember, your choice is the correct one and don’t let anyone shame you otherwise.