Yes, you did read that right. We are talking about sleep training from birth, but don't panic. You don't need to call child services. We won't be torturing any babies today or any day for that matter. Remember on our island, we can step away from all the chaos, confusion and hysteria of the outer world and leave it all behind for a while here.
We get to think clearly and feel honestly. We get to be curious and open-minded and today we'll be exploring how babies learn and how we can use that knowledge to gently encourage them to go to sleep quicker and stay asleep longer so everyone in the family gets more sleep.
There's a tropical storm blowing on our island today, so we're hunkered down in our main hut around a roaring campfire, so we've got plenty of time to talk as we wait out the storm. Basically, there is so much hysteria in the outer world about sleep training that everything has got mixed up and blown out of all proportion. So let's start with a nice clean slate. Firstly, the word training simply means learning or teaching a set of skills needed for a particular job or activity. Nice and simple.
We train in the gym, we train at work. When we learn a new language, we are training our brains. When we learn to ride a bike, we are training balance and coordination. When we learn a new hobby, we are training our brains and our bodies to learn how to do the new thing. Training is just learning. So when we sleep train a baby, that baby is learning how to go to sleep. When to go to sleep, how to stay asleep and how to resettle themselves when they wake. The trick is helping them learn these skills when they don't understand what we're saying to them.
Now, just in case you think the idea of a baby learning to sleep well from birth is crazy, you need to know that is exactly what I help babies learn with every client I work with. That's why they hire me, because they want sleep and calm and predictability and stability. That's why they hire me because they want sleep and calm and predictability and stability. They want to enjoy their babies from birth, not struggle for weeks or months. And when they get that, they tell their friends and their friends hire me. So it does work.
I figured it out over the years by watching babies, by listening to them, being curious about them, researching, following my instincts, using trial and error, and making so many mistakes that eventually I got to where I understood babies and how they learn. And everything I've learned, you can learn too.
And you know, once you really start studying your baby, you won't believe how amazing they are. So how do babies learn? They learn by spotting patterns. If something happens every now and again, it has no meaning for them. But if that same thing happens the same way, time after time, they start to make associations. It's how they make sense of the world, how they learn to fit into the society they are born into, how to learn the family's language, eat the family's food, learn the customs and traditions, and learn the family's daily routines and learn what is dangerous and safe in their world.
All baby animals do it. It's a survival mechanism honed to perfection over millions of years. They follow the herd or the group. They watch what the adults eat, they learn how to behave with other youngsters and how to respect their elder animals through discipline. They learn hierarchy and they learn about predators and prey and they do it all by watching what goes on around them and looking for patterns for predictability. And when something becomes predictable and when something becomes predictable, it becomes a known thing. It's knowledge that they can use.
Even though as adults we have language, we also learn through spotting patterns, but we are nowhere near as good as babies. They are phenomenal. And it's this pattern recognition and it's this pattern recognition they can use to learn language. And that's when a baby can learn several languages at once in a multilingual household. And this is this and this amazing skill starts as soon as they are born.
So if they're looking for patterns and we understand this, we can use that to help them learn things we want them to learn, like how to get off to sleep easily. I just never understand why some people say we have to wait for a certain number of weeks or months before teaching babies patterns when every other animal parent starts teaching from birth.
So let's use what we've just learned and talk about the thing that most parents dread for the whole nine months pregnancy. Sleep deprivation. Everyone loves telling you how terrible it's going to be. Forget your social life. Say hello baby, goodbye to sleep. Stay home and hold your baby for the first year. Expect to be a zombie. It's natural for babies to wake 20 times a night. The thing is...
My clients never go through that. Their babies nap well in their beds, sleep well at night in their beds, and wake mostly once or sometimes twice a night from birth. Yes, you did hear that right, from birth. And the babies thrive and the parents thrive, and they get to enjoy their babies straight away instead of suffering for months.
And this doesn't happen just occasionally, it happens with every baby I go to work with, hundreds and hundreds, so it's not a fluke. It's also not magic or baby whispering either. It's just simply understanding what babies need and how babies learn and putting the two together. And you can learn it, you can all learn it. It's all about meeting your baby's four basic needs. I call them the foundation four. Babies need to feel well-fed, well rested, secure and free from pain. So basically you feed them, give them lots of sleep, wind them well and cuddle them.
There's just too much to talk about all in one episode. So those I've covered more in depth in a free download PDF that I've created. And I've gone into more detail and I'll put the link in the notes below. But I want to expand here on what I think will make the biggest difference to all of you. And that is sleep signals. Things that make it very easy for baby to understand what we want them to do, what's expected of them.
Remember babies are looking for clues to make sense of the world. So the bigger and clearer we make our clues, the quicker they'll figure it out. And the more times we use those clues in the same way, the easier it is for them to make the connection. For instance, if you wanted to teach a baby the word for apple, you would show them the apple, then you'd say apple, but you can't just do it once.
You do it again and again and again and you always say apple and you always show them the apple. You don't sometimes say sausage or sometimes show them an orange and as I'm talking you're saying to yourself, yeah well that's crazy. I'd never do that, how could they learn? I'd just be confusing them. But that is exactly what you're doing without realising it if you aren't consistent.
if you do things some days are not others or some ways are not others. When I talk about sleep signals I'm meaning things like white noise, swaddles, sleeping bags, dummies, night lights, bedtime or nap time routines. These are all things you can use when you're trying to get your baby to sleep but most of the time parents choose one or two and use them haphazardly when they remember but you'll get a much better result
if you have a methodical approach. Plan what you're going to do and then be rigidly consistent because that is what will get you the sleep you all need. Okay, so let's go through why each sleep signal works. Just briefly, the swaddle works by controlling baby's arms so their startle reflex doesn't set their arms twitching and jerking, waking them up. It also prevents the hands touching the face around the mouth which would then trigger the baby's rooting reflex and might wake them up wanting food. Lower lighting in a quiet room reduces physical stimulation, which in turn reduces emotional stimulation, which in a tired baby could equate to stress. Dummies and pacifiers are calming and soothing and relaxing for babies. They love them, are familiar and reassuring so baby feels secure and safe.
White noise or any quiet rhythmic shushing noise reminds baby of their time inside their mother's body at a time when they mostly slept for months. So now you understand how each of these sleep signals works.
Now you understand how each of these sleep signals, or you could also call them props or crutches, might help a baby go to sleep, but they become even more powerful if you use them all together at the same time because they all provide something baby needs or wants. But to get the full effect you need to use all of them or as many as you can every single time you want your baby to sleep because when you do this, your baby will create an association between the signal and sleep, which makes it even more powerful. You're sort of getting the external effect from the prop and the internal effect from the baby's own brain, that same brain that spots patterns as easily as we breathe. Basically, you're giving your baby easy to understand clues you want them to sleep at the same time as giving them everything they need to sleep and that's how it works.
That is how you sleep train a baby from birth. I hope you noticed that there was no mention of crying or trauma or any other social hysteria. That's all just guff for the guff pit. Don't be afraid of the term training because we're all doing it every day. Training your baby to and taking them off the breast with a bad latch so they learn to relatch properly is breastfeeding training from birth. Changing your newborn's nappy even though they scream is nappy training from birth. You simply repeat the steps until they calm down and learn it's not that bad. Everything you do with your baby from birth is some sort of training because that just means learning is in progress.
So it's totally natural for them to start learning from birth. So why on earth do we think we can't help them along? And why is sleep learning any different? Let's get this really straight here. Sleep is not a luxury. We die without it. Plain and simple. And before we die, we suffer terribly. Our memory suffers. Our capacity to think straight suffers. Our thinking gets distorted.
We become more anxious and afraid and depressed. We hallucinate. Everyday things become magnified into unbearable pressures. We aren't safe to drive and our physical health suffers too. Think about visiting somebody in hospital after surgery. What happens? They're okay for a while, then they start to get tired and the nurse tells you they need to rest. That's because their body needs sleep in order to heal. We know that. We don't have a problem with it.
We just leave and let them rest. So why on earth do we think that somehow against all laws of nature and everything we know to be true, does society seem to think that new mums, new women that... So why on earth do we think that somehow against all laws of nature and everything we know to be true, does society seem to think that new mums, women who have just given birth, who may be struggled in pain for hours, had emergency surgery, maybe haemorrhaged or had other serious complications, don't need sleep? Think about that for a minute. Really think about it. Isn't it the cruellest and most stupid thing you've ever heard? Your body needs rest and sleep to heal. You need time and calm to adjust mentally and emotionally to becoming a parent. You need sleep, as much as possible, as soon as possible. It's not a luxury. Doing without sleep is not a badge of honour. You don't get a medal, you don't bond more with your baby, your feeding isn't better, you aren't happier. In fact it's much more likely to be the opposite.
Now don't get me wrong, if you are happy sitting and holding your baby every day and night for the first year, getting broken sleep, unpredictable sleep, If that makes you happy and you can cope because some people can, then do it. Just do what works for you. But for everyone else, my biggest tip is to use the steps in my great sleep from birth download and really focus on the sleep signals. My little extra tip for white noise is to use a phone or an app or a small baby machine. Make sure it's portable and easy to take with you if you travel and find a sound on it that won't drive you crazy when you hear it for hours at a time. It can be music, but noise does seem to work better. My favourite is waves on the beach because I find white, pink and brown noise actually wind me up and stress me out rather than calm me down.
Once you've found your noise, play it when you're cuddling baby to sleep. Don't get them to sleep and then put them down. Then leave it playing near them for the whole sleep, even overnight or in the pram so it becomes linked to sleep. You can do this more when you're first training them, but I just leave it playing overnight anyway. I've got to like it.
If you put all these things in place every sleep time. Within a couple of days you will start to see a difference which gets better and better the longer you do it, so do give it a try and stick with it, but don't forget the foundation for because no matter how good your sleep signals are your baby won't sleep if they're hungry or they've got tummy ache from wind. It's like a new recipe.
You know it feels complicated when you first try it but after you've done it a few times it gets easier and easier. It's hard to cover something as complicated and nuanced as sleep in just one short episode. But I hope this has given you some ideas and information to get you started and if you have any more questions or need any help please come and find me on Instagram and just DM me. The link is below in the show notes.
It looks like the storm has blown itself out now, so it's safe to head back off to the outer world and have a go at giving your baby some beautifully clear and supportive signals and props and let me know how you get on. Be sure to subscribe and share this with your friends and mum's groups who would love to get more sleep. Have a great week!