@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.
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