The Decision That Finally Helped Us Enjoy Parenthood

I’ve avoided writing about sleep training for a long time, probably because it is one of those topics in motherhood where people seem to decide very quickly which side of the fence you’re on, and then somehow that choice starts being treated like a reflection of the kind of mother you are. Gentle. Responsive. Detached. Selfish. Informed. Cruel. There are so many labels attached to it that even now, knowing how much sleep training changed our family for the better, I still feel a little uncomfortable saying out loud that we did it. I still have moments where I question myself, where I wonder if I should have waited longer, tried harder, responded differently or pushed through a little more. And yet, when I look back at what life was like before and what it became afterwards, I also know that sleep training was one of the best decisions we made for our family.

I’m not writing this because I think every baby should be sleep trained. I don’t. I’m not writing it because I think contact naps, feeding to sleep, rocking, co-sleeping or any other way of helping a baby sleep is wrong. If it works for your baby and it works for you, amazing. Keep doing it. I’m writing this because sometimes it stops working. Sometimes you reach a point where you are so exhausted, so touched out, so emotionally drained and so far beyond your own capacity that continuing exactly as you are no longer feels like the kindest option for anyone involved. And I think there are a lot of parents sitting in that place while simultaneously being made to feel like even considering sleep training means they are failing their baby.

That was me.

I didn’t go into motherhood with some big opinion about sleep training. I wasn’t somebody who had read all the books and decided before birth exactly what we would or wouldn’t do. I just assumed we would figure sleep out as we went, the same way you assume you’ll somehow figure out feeding, naps and all the other things you have absolutely no clue about before you actually have a baby. And for the first few months, that was more or less what we did. We rocked her, bounced her, walked around with her, fed her, held her. We responded. We helped her sleep in whatever way worked at the time. I never looked at that as a problem.

Until suddenly it was.

Around three and a half months, when what people commonly call the four month sleep regression hit, everything changed. That was really the beginning of a stretch of months where sleep slowly started taking over our entire lives. Getting Bailey to sleep could suddenly take 30 minutes, 45 minutes, sometimes an hour. We bounced, rocked, swayed and walked laps with her. PJ did a lot of the settling because I was already spending so much of the day breastfeeding and doing contact naps, and it became this constant rotation of trying to get her to sleep, trying not to wake her, protecting the nap once we finally got one, and then starting all over again a few hours later.

Her naps were usually two or three times a day and could be anywhere from 35 minutes to an hour, but the problem wasn’t just how long she slept. It was everything it took to get there. Contact naps worked. The carrier worked. Sometimes her room worked if we were physically helping her to sleep. The car didn’t. The pram didn’t. We also had building noise going on throughout the day at the time, which made everything feel even more fragile because even when we finally got her asleep, you were constantly waiting for something to wake her.

We tried to fix the environment first. We put blackout curtains and blackout stickers in her nursery, used white noise and eventually added air conditioning so we could regulate the temperature properly. We tried different settling techniques. We rocked, bounced, swayed, walked, cuddled. We tried all the things people tell you to try when you desperately google why your baby won’t sleep. But nothing really changed the fact that Bailey needed a huge amount of help to fall asleep, and after doing it over and over again for months, I was completely at capacity.

I actually asked PJ recently what he remembers about that period because pregnancy brain has wiped out parts of it for me, and his answer was pretty simple. He said I was irritable, frustrated and exhausted. He said we were just surviving. And that is exactly what it felt like. I could feel my emotional regulation disappearing. I was starting to resent Bailey for refusing naps or screaming while I was trying to settle her, and then I would feel like the worst mother in the world for even feeling that way because obviously she wasn’t doing any of it to me. She was a baby. She needed help. I knew that. But knowing that didn’t magically give me more capacity when I had none left.

I didn’t want to spend my days dreading the next nap. I didn’t want to feel trapped underneath a sleeping baby and then guilty for wanting to move. I didn’t want bedtime to feel like another battle waiting for us at the end of a day we had already barely made it through. And more than anything, I didn’t want exhaustion to keep turning me into a version of myself I didn’t like. I could feel myself becoming less patient, less present and more reactive, and I hated that much more than I hated the idea of changing how we approached sleep.

That was really the point where sleep training stopped being this theoretical parenting debate and became something we actually had to consider for our own family.

This is our personal experience, not sleep or medical advice. Every baby and every family is different, and whatever approach you choose should still follow current safe-sleep recommendations.

The first thing I tried was Taking Cara Babies because I wanted something that felt gentle to me. The idea of leaving Bailey to cry made me feel awful, so repeated check-ins sounded like something I could live with. Except Bailey absolutely hated them. Every time I went back into the room, she escalated. Seeing me seemed to reset everything. I would go in, try to reassure her, leave again, and she would become even more upset than before. I had expected the process to look somewhat like the way it had been described, and Bailey just wasn’t responding that way at all.

It was heartbreaking.

I tried it for a couple of days on my own and eventually thought, no. I can’t do this.

So I stopped.

And weirdly, that failed attempt ended up teaching me something important. A method being described as “gentler” doesn’t automatically mean it feels gentler to every baby. Bailey has always been incredibly sensitive and very aware of us, and for her, the repeated check-ins seemed to make things harder rather than easier. Every time I walked back into the room it felt like I was starting the whole thing again instead of helping her settle.

When PJ was home, we sat down and decided that if we were going to try again, we needed to do it differently. I had thought about this decision endlessly by that point. I had worried about the crying, worried about attachment, worried about whether I was doing the right thing, worried about whether I was putting my own needs before hers. PJ said recently that he knew I would never knowingly choose something I genuinely believed could harm Bailey, and I think that is important because this wasn’t an easy decision for me. I was very conscious of the pros and cons and of what we were asking of her. But we also had to be honest about what our life looked like if we changed nothing. We were exhausted. We were irritable. We were constantly on edge. We were surviving rather than enjoying our family.

So instead of blindly following somebody else’s sleep plan, we took what we had learned from trying different approaches, talked through what seemed to make Bailey more distressed and what actually helped her calm down, and came up with something much simpler that felt more suited to her temperament.

We started with a very predictable bedtime routine. Low stimulation before bed, a lullaby while she got ready, her bedtime bottle, a cuddle, and then the same words every night: “It’s sleeping time. I love you.” We would put her down and leave the room.

We also decided that we weren’t going to do endless timed check-ins. We knew Bailey’s cries pretty well by that point and there was a very obvious difference between her whining or complaining and the cry she made when she was genuinely escalating and starting to panic. If she was whining, grizzling or clearly protesting, we gave her some space. If she escalated into that panicky cry, we went back in. We picked her up, cuddled her until she had calmed down, repeated the same words, put her back down and left again.

One reset rather than us appearing and disappearing every few minutes.

That was simply what we felt comfortable with for Bailey. It wasn’t some perfect formula and it isn’t me suggesting another family should copy what we did. It was us trying to find the line between giving her enough space to figure out how to settle and still responding when we genuinely felt that she needed us.

And that was the approach that finally made sense for her.

The first night was hard. Not because she cried for hours, because she didn’t, but because hearing your baby cry when you are deliberately not immediately fixing it goes against something very instinctive in you. Even when you have thought about the decision endlessly, even when you know why you are doing it and even when you have agreed on exactly when you will go back in, it still hurts.

She cried for maybe ten minutes that first night.

The second night it was closer to five.

And from there it just kept getting less.

Within about a week, there was no crying at bedtime anymore.

I think that surprised me because I had built sleep training up in my head as this huge, traumatic thing that would involve endless screaming and me sitting outside the room falling apart, and that just wasn’t what happened for us. It wasn’t easy on my heart, but it also wasn’t what I had feared.

Naps took longer and were definitely the last thing to fall into place. For a while we still had to work much harder for daytime sleep than bedtime, but slowly, as her sleep started consolidating and she seemed to understand what bedtime meant, things began to shift.

And not just for us.

For Bailey too.

She wasn’t as grumpy during the day anymore. She seemed more rested, more settled and just generally more content. Obviously I can only tell you what we observed in our own child, but that was probably the thing that reassured me the most. It wasn’t just that bedtime suddenly became easier for us. From where we were standing, she seemed happier too.

And then there was us. We stopped feeling like we were constantly bracing for the next nap or bedtime. We weren’t spending every waking hour thinking about sleep, we weren’t snapping at each other because we were exhausted, and we weren’t watching the clock wondering how long we had until we had to start the whole process all over again. There was this huge sense of relief, and I remember thinking that for the first time we were actually starting to enjoy parenthood instead of just surviving it.

I didn’t feel like a shitty mother all the time anymore.

That probably sounds dramatic, but it is genuinely how I felt before. I was so exhausted and overstimulated that I was constantly judging myself for how little patience I had left. I would resent the situation, then resent myself for resenting the situation, then feel guilty because none of it was Bailey’s fault. It was this horrible little cycle. Once I had some capacity back, I could be softer again, more patient, more present and more like the mum I actually wanted to be.

And that is the part of the sleep training conversation I think gets lost sometimes. We talk so much about what the baby needs that we almost treat the parent as if they should be able to function indefinitely on nothing, as if needing sleep, space, regulation or some predictability makes you less responsive or less loving. I don’t think it does.

Parents are part of the family too.

That doesn’t mean a parent’s convenience should always come first. Obviously not. But I also don’t think we should pretend that a parent who is completely depleted, resentful, dysregulated and barely functioning is somehow automatically better for a baby simply because they never allowed any crying.

That is where this topic becomes uncomfortable, because people want it to be black and white. Either you respond immediately every single time and you are a responsive parent, or you sleep train and you are choosing your own needs over your baby. Our experience didn’t feel anything like that. It felt like trying to work out how to meet everyone’s needs in a situation where what we were doing had stopped working.

And even now, after seeing how much better life became for all three of us, I still sometimes feel guilty about it.

I think that probably says more about motherhood than it does about sleep training. There are so many decisions we make as mothers where someone, somewhere, will tell you that you are doing it wrong. Breastfeed or formula feed. Co-sleep or put them in a cot. Stay home or go back to work. Hold them more. Put them down more. Respond immediately. Give them space. There is always somebody willing to tell you what a good mother should do, and when you care deeply about doing the right thing, that noise gets in.

I still sometimes wonder if I should have been able to keep going the way we were, if I should have tolerated more or somehow found the magical settling technique we hadn’t tried yet. But then I remember what our family looked like before and what it looked like afterwards, and I know I would make the same decision again.

Not because I think sleep training is the answer for every family. It isn’t. Some babies sleep beautifully without it. Some parents are completely happy contact napping or feeding to sleep. Some families co-sleep and love it. Some parents simply never reach the point we did. If what you are doing works for your family, then there is absolutely no reason to change it because somebody on the internet tells you there is a better way.

But I think the opposite should be allowed to be true too. If what you are doing is no longer working, you are allowed to admit that. You are allowed to take your own wellbeing into account. You are allowed to look at your baby, your family, your support system, your capacity and your circumstances and make a decision based on the reality you are actually living in.

If you are in that place right now, running on empty, second guessing yourself and wondering what to do next, I just want to say that loving your baby deeply and struggling with sleep deprivation can exist at the same time.

Maybe that is the reason I finally felt ready to write about this. Because I wish I had read something like this when we were in the middle of it. Not someone telling me I had to sleep train, and not someone telling me I absolutely shouldn’t. Just another mother saying: we struggled too. We thought about it deeply. We made the decision that felt right for our family. It wasn’t emotionally easy, but it changed things for us in ways I am still grateful for.

So if you are reading this completely exhausted, scrolling through opinions and wondering what the “right” thing to do is, I don’t think I can give you that answer. I don’t think anyone on the internet can.

But I do think you are allowed to make the decision that works for your family without turning it into a verdict on what kind of parent you are.

Love,

Charlie