By Annie Littlehales, Founder of Nurture & Thrive Sleep
“Don’t tell me to follow my instinct! Just please someone tell me how to help my baby sleep!”
This is the best way I can describe my entry into motherhood. A traumatic birth ending in emergency c-section. Struggles with feeding. My baby losing weight. Postnatal anxiety. Totally confused and stressed by all the differing views from support people and information available.
Frankly, I felt like a total failure.
Other mums made it look so easy; their sleepy, easy-to-feed babies on their shoulder while they laughed among mum friends in the cafe. I hated feeling out of control, that life was now so unpredictable. What do you mean I won’t know how long my baby’s nap will be? What do you mean I can’t fix this?
It wasn’t helpful for me to hear, “Just go with the flow. Follow your gut. Trust your instinct.”
My natural instinct as a new mum was to be drawn to exact things. Exact guides, plans, sleep and wake times. These would give me the peace I was looking for, right? Surely this would make me feel like I had control of life with a newborn, and I was doing it the ‘right’ way.
It was a false security. I became obsessed with how to help my baby sleep, entrapped and stressed by the very things that were meant to bring me freedom, calm and peace.
If I could go back to my earliest days of motherhood and know what I know now… To find the balance that can exist for parents who struggle to ‘go with the flow’; who want to go deep with knowledge and feel confident, empowered and guided by instinct, knowledge, kindness and nurture.
It’s okay for parenthood to be a journey towards this.
Today, my greatest joy in my business is enabling parents to worry less, feel empowered and calmly confident about how they can help their child or baby sleep. To be able to thrive. To help parents find their way in a way that suits their way of doing life.
Here are 5 truths that inform my approach to supporting parents and their baby’s sleep:
1: Many factors influence your baby or child’s sleep.
Sleep is about so much more than how your child falls asleep.
2: The way your child falls asleep may be linked to what happens with their sleep and in the night.
It’s why I help many families make changes to how their child falls asleep, but never as a singular blanket focus for all, and always in the context of the other truths.
3: The way your child falls asleep may not be linked to what happens with their sleep and in the night.
This is why many parents come to me with frequent wakings with a child who is already self-settling. And equally why many times there are improvements to sleep for families I support where we make no changes whatsoever to how a child is falling asleep.
4: Infant and child sleep hasn’t changed, but our world has.
On the one hand, we cannot deny that babies and children sleep how they always have – sleep biology has not changed over time. However, we cannot divorce ourselves from the world we live in, which today, is one with greater pressures, greater isolation and many challenges to parenting.
5: Rested families and children come in all shapes and sizes.
You, your child and your family are unique and there is no single ‘right’ way. So why limit the tools in your toolbox?
The challenge is these statements are not all in harmony with each other, but they are all true. That’s why today, my work centres around helping parents optimise their child’s sleep based – by accepting these truths and allowing them to co-exist.
And I’d love to share this approach with you too!
Learn more about how to help your child or baby sleep at Nurture and Thrive Sleep or via one of my self-guided courses inside Mama Perks.
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