What happens to poor sleepers who aren’t sleep trained?

[trinidad2014]

@ebveloz Mine just figured it out! She is still fed to sleep at 7 months but only wakes up once, occasionally twice to feed at night. She was up every 1-2 hours during the worst of the 3 month sleep regression. It was horrible. It lasted a couple months and then slowly got better. She went from doing 5 hour stretches to going even longer when she moved into her own room at 6.5 months.

“Drowsy but awake” has never been a thing for us. I was deeply uncomfortable with letting her cry. So we just white knuckled it out and she learned to sleep on her own. It felt like she would never figure it out at the time, but now it just seems like a blip in the grand scheme.

 

[seditthis]

@ebveloz The effects of sleep training don’t last much longer than a year, does that make your question less interesting?

per the same Australian study that found no correlation between attachment & sleep training

 

[leematthew1234]

@seditthis That is interesting. There are a few people self reporting in this thread that they are terrible adult sleepers and wish they were trained. Which is not what the science shows. Studies of 3 year olds found no difference in sleep duration or quality based on those who were sleep trained or not.

Also a number of people using anecdotes of other people's children to fit their narrative which is pretty flawed given that you never know the full background of a kid that's not your own, to attribute a snapshot of a problem to one singular issue isn't a good faith argument

 

[seditthis]

@leematthew1234 yeah when I read the studies showing that the effect of ST goes away I was SHOCKED. That’s not how people talk about it at all!

then i relaxed cos… one more parenting thing that can cause a lot of stress, but that you actually don’t have to worry about.

100% agree re: finding anecdotes to fita narrative. humans are too good at that for our own good!

 

[ebveloz]

@seditthis That’s super interesting and something I was just wondering about as I read through comments! My unscientific conclusion from this thread is good sleepers are good sleepers and bad sleepers are bad sleepers, regardless of what parents do (medical conditions excluded). Yes, maybe sleep training exasperates anxiety in anxious children but children with different temperaments might be unphased. My big takeaway: pay attention to your child’s unique needs and go from there!

 

[seditthis]

@ebveloz yep!

 

[nailis1]

@seditthis Do you happen to have a link to this article or remember the title/one of the authors? I would be very interested in reading it!

 

[seditthis]

@nailis1 here: yeah I found the link in an old email!

https://www.researchgate.net/profil...nfant-Sleep-Intervention-Randomized-Trial.pdf

 

[nailis1]

@seditthis Awesome!! Thank you!

 

[nymichelle]

@ebveloz Where I live sleep training (CIO) is heavily frowned upon so we didn't do it. My kid started sleeping short stretches by herself at ten months old (before that she would only sleep on/next to us). We moved her into her own room at 15 months old and she sleeps through the night now. Just like that

 

[heelo]

@ebveloz My 4yo sleeps perfectly and has for years - we happily still co sleep and I never sleep trained. We just have a huge bed so everyone can be comfortable. So I think not sleep training has been good - but I'm also very happy to continue co sleeping for the foreseeable future until he wants his space. My new baby sleeps in a crib beside our bed until they are old enough to come in the big bed, and 4yo sleeps right through most crying. Just my belief but I'd never do sleep training it goes against my instincts.

 

[creexpl]

@ebveloz My first was a frequent waker because of jaundice, and just naturally being an anxious little guy. He’s slept in his own room after 6mo, and at 18mo slept through the night consistently. He didn’t take to sleep training and I didn’t care for the methods, so I didn’t bother. Now he’s almost 4 and sleeps like a champ by himself. Kids are individuals, but I see more issues with parents doing improper bedtime routines/boundary setting, than I do “poor sleepers”.

 

[brianwrites15]

@creexpl I think sleep training is essentially having strict routines and boundaries like you say, regardless of how you go about it, and if you're consistent about whatever your approach is then you'll likely have more success than when you don't have any routines and just let them do whatever they want. It seems like sleep training gets a bad wrap but the core message is just to have a schedule and routine and stick to it - which it sounds like is what you did even if it didn't align to any specific method.

 

[creexpl]

@brianwrites15 It’s true, I suppose I am biased to assume most people talking about sleep training are referring to CIO, etc

 

[thewordiswisdom]

@ebveloz I can only talk for experience…. My oldest didn’t sleep well unless he was with us or held, he didn’t wake up after EVERY cycle but yes 2-3 times at night and would ask for milk…

We let him be and loaded ourselves with patience (no easy task!) and around 3 years old he started sleeping better, taught himself to sleep and only calls when he’s had a nightmare or something

 

[sarahsknight]

@ebveloz Anecdotal: my husband was never sleep trained, and coslept until he was 5 because that was the only way they could get him to sleep. He’s now a great sleeper who falls asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow.

Also anecdotal: I wasn’t sleep trained, never coslept, and I’m an awful sleeper with lifelong insomnia.

I really think sleep training isn’t necessary for everyone - I mean, from a logical standpoint, it was only invented a few decades ago, and sleep is necessary for survival. And we know teenagers are more sleep deprived now than they used to be, so it stands to reason that even though many of the teens alive today were sleep trained, it didn’t solve all of their sleep problems, right? https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2015/10/among-teens-sleep-deprivation-an-epidemic.html

We sleep trained both our kids and are very glad we did, but that’s like 80% because we adults were struggling to function due to sleep deprivation from soothing baby back to sleep. Only 20% of it is because being able to go to sleep and wake up well rested makes our kids so happy.

I want to say I saw something in one of the books I read that said sleep training was likely to slightly improve the odds of some beneficial outcome for kids, but can’t remember what the outcome was or how old the kids were when they measured it. It was probably either from Craig Canapari or Emily Oster (ducks, I know half the sub loathes her). If I can locate the citation, I’ll edit my comment to add it.

ETA from Cribsheet by Oster. Here are the papers she cites as identifying potential benefits and harms of sleep training. Her conclusion was that there are some benefits, mainly that babies and parents sleep better for up to a year afterward, and that there’s no evidence of harm, but also no long-term data on harm. She didn’t indicate that not sleep training was a negative, like it didn’t make sleep worse, just that sleep training did work to improve sleep.

Take everything with LOTS of salt, because this isn’t her area of professional expertise; she’s just a scholarly nerd with 2 kids.

Mindell JA, Kuhn B, Lewin DS, Meltzer LJ, Sadeh A. Behavioral treatment of bedtime problems and night wakings in infants and young children. Sleep 2006;29(10):1263–76.

Kerr SM, Jowett SA, Smith LN. Preventing sleep problems in infants: A randomized controlled trial. J Adv Nurs 1996;24(5):938–42.

Hiscock H, Bayer J, Gold L, Hampton A, Ukoumunne OC, Wake M. Improving infant sleep and maternal mental health: A cluster randomised trial. Arch Dis Child 2007;92(11):952–58.

Leeson R, Barbour J, Romaniuk D, Warr R. Management of infant sleep problems in a residential unit. Childcare Health Dev 1994;20(2):89–100.

Eckerberg, B. Treatment of sleep problems in families with young children: Effects of treatment on family well-being. Acta Pædiatrica 2004;93:126–34.

Gradisar M, Jackson K, Spurrier NJ, et al. Behavioral interventions for infant sleep problems: A randomized controlled trial. Pediatrics 2016;137(6).

Price AM, Wake M, Ukoumunne OC, Hiscock H. Five-year follow-up of harms and benefits of behavioral infant sleep intervention: Randomized trial. Pediatrics 2012;130(4):643–51.

Blunden SL, Thompson KR, Dawson D. Behavioural sleep treatments and night time crying in infants: Challenging the status quo. Sleep Med Rev 2011;15(5):327–34.

Middlemiss W, Granger DA, Goldberg WA, Nathans L. Asynchrony of mother-infant hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activity following extinction of infant crying responses induced during the transition to sleep. Early Hum Dev 2012;88(4):227–32. 16. Kuhn BR, Elliott AJ. Treatment efficacy in behavioral pediatric sleep medicine. J Psychosom Res 2003;54(6):587–97.

 

[a3yan]

@ebveloz My son was a brutal sleeper. We didn’t train and I 100% responded. He just reached the milestone on his own. Slept through the night later on. He just needed extra support at night early on.

Anecdotally as well, I was sleep trained with CIO. I had extreme night time anxiety. My parents ended up with more work than if they had responded when I was young because by 4,5-8 I was so scared of bedtime and being left alone at night. I had night terrors, I would stay up as late as I could to avoid them. I had to sleep on a floor bed in my parents room my whole childhood pretty much. I don’t know if that was directly related to the sleep training / CIO but I had sleep anxiety until I had my kids. This is what influenced my decision not to sleep train my kids. It felt like responding to them at night healed my sleep anxiety i still had.

Obviously not evidenced based. Solely my experience and don’t expect people to take my word for it.

 

[dedebeam]

@a3yan This is fair. I think a lot of people would intuit the same thing -- that training/CIO would lead to anxiety due to abandonment

 

[katrina2017]

@ebveloz My LO woke every 2-3 hours, every night, until he was 2. Breastfed back to sleep every time. He’s 26 months now and he does the first 4-5 hours in his bed, then climbs into bed with us and sleeps through. No rocking, nursing, etc. They all get there in their own time. I believe I read a Harvard study indicating there was statistically zero difference between sleep trained and non-sleep trained kids by the time they were three. The non-sleep trained kids slept better, and the sleep trained kids slept worse, evening out.

 

[cindyfernandez]

@ebveloz Possums sleep program (not sleep training!) Might be of interest.