Sleep training 101: How to know if it's right for you and your child

It is a familiar scene for most parents.

You’re laying in bed, eyes closed, a wave of drowsiness washes over you. You’re just about to drift into sleep when you hear a loud cry.

You jolt awake, look over at your partner, and eventually trudge down the hall to where your child has just awoken from their crib. You slowly rock them back to sleep, hoping you won’t be too tired the next morning to go to work.

The good news: It doesn't have to be this way, because there is something called sleep training.

The bad news: It might not work for your child, or for you.

What is sleep training

Sleep training is an umbrella term for different methods that parents employ to get their child to fall and stay asleep. Some parents swear by it, and others find it difficult to maintain.

“Sleep training means different things to different people,” said Melisa Moore, a licensed psychologist who is board-certified in behavioral sleep medicine. She runs a pediatric sleep practice in Pasadena. Moore recently spoke to Austin Cross on LAist's daily talk show AirTalk to break down different methods of sleep training.

“To me, sleep training is really helping your child learn to fall asleep on their own and get back to sleep on their own during the night so they're not waking everybody up.”

Cry it out

Sleep training has garnered a negative connotation over the years, largely because one method known as “cry it out” has come to overshadow other aspects of the discipline.

With this practice, the child is put in their crib awake. If the child awakens in the night, the parents do not go into the room to help the child fall back to sleep. The child is supposed to learn to self-soothe.

Despite what the name would suggest, Moore said parents who use “cry it out” should not go the entire night without checking in on their child.

“You're always monitoring them for safety, monitoring them for illness, but you don’t get them out of bed until a certain time in the morning,” she said.

Moore said most parents come to her for help after they've tried the “cry it out” method, and are looking for ideas with a little more nuance.

Other methods

For parents looking for a more gradual approach, Moore recommends the Ferber method, or the chair method.

According to Moore, with the Ferber method, named after pediatric sleep doctor Richard Ferber, parents put their child in the crib awake and leave the room — to return five minutes later to check in with the baby. The next time, they wait 10 minutes. Then 15.

The idea is to slowly get the child acclimated to the parent’s absence when they're trying to fall asleep.

The chair method works in much of the same way, but typically used for older children, with a parent sitting in a chair next to the bed.

“Gradually, every few days, you're moving the chair toward the door so that you're eventually getting yourself out of there,” said Moore.

Moore said co-sleeping is also an option, where a child and parent sleep together in the same bed.

There's a lot of controversy around that because there's a thought they might always need you to be there to go to sleep,” said Moore.

But she cited studies showing that whether or not a parent decides to co-sleep or sleep train, usually by age six the child learns how to fall and stay asleep on their own with no discernible difference to the child’s development.

“If you don't want to sleep train, you want to sleep with your baby, don't have guilt,” she said. “You do want to sleep train... don't have guilt.”

A holistic approach to sleep training

“When you look at science, there isn't really clear evidence that one way is better than another. So it really depends on the family,” Moore said.

In her practice, Moore meets with the entire family to first understand their sleeping arrangements, work schedules, and overall values to tailor the training to their specific needs.

“What most people don't know is that we all have sleep cycles, including babies older than four months. They have the same kind of sleep cycles that we do,” she said.

These include light sleep, deep sleep, dreaming sleep, and then wakefulness.

“Our brains are waking up four to six times per night, every night,” she said. “So for most parents, it's not that their child is waking up more than other kids. It's that they can't get back to sleep on their own.”

Moore said the reason why adults don’t notice that they wake up so many times, is because we are so good at getting ourselves back to sleep.

For her, the main point of sleep training is to create associations to sleep that help the child return to slumber easily and independently.

“The reason bedtime, rocking, bottle, all of that is important is that whatever you have to fall asleep in the first place, if you don't have that during those normal night wakings, your brain kind of wakes up more,” she said. “Your baby's going to cry, they're going to be looking for that way that they have initially soothed themselves to sleep in the first place.”

To help create those associations without parental participation, Moore recommends tools like sound machines, night lights, and stuffed animals.

“Remember anything that you have at bedtime has to be there all night long in order for them to be able to get back to sleep from those normal night wakings,” she said.

Moore stressed that sleep is a necessity not a luxury — not just for your child, but for you, too.

Listen to the full conversation