Young Sleep Support

I remember the first time a mum showed me a post warning her that every night she answered her baby’s cries was costing her baby’s future sleep. She was holding her phone like it was evidence against her.

This mum was often on the yoga ball at midnight, trying to get her baby back to sleep, responsive, present, exhausted. And genuinely terrified that the thing she’d chosen to do was quietly breaking something.

I’ve sat across from hundreds of parents in that exact place. And what I’ve watched again and again is this: babies who are never sleep trained still stop waking every 45 minutes. Biology doesn’t stall because a parent stayed responsive.

A 12 month old I worked with was waking hourly, cosleeping, mum was exhausted. Within weeks they were sleeping alone in their own cot. Biology-based work. No training involved.

What tends to keep sleep stuck isn’t the gentleness. It’s usually the timing that’s wrong for that specific baby, something that’s happening during the day, or a physiological red flag we might need to get help with.

Comment STARTERKIT and I’ll send you the free checklist of what to actually check first.

When I was a first-time parent, everyone told me it was a sleep association.

Every forum. Every sleep account. Every well-meaning friend.
“He’s learned to need you to fall back asleep. Break the association. Put him down awake.”

Except I was already doing that. He’d go down drowsy. Sometimes fully awake. Didn’t matter.

45 minutes later. Awake.

Every. Single. Time.

I felt like I was losing my mind.

What actually changed it? Figuring out he was chronically undertired.

He was going to bed without enough sleep pressure built up.

So his body would slip into light sleep, hit the 45 minute mark where the first sleep cycle ends, and have zero biological drive to link into the next one.

We stretched his wake windows by 20 minutes.

That’s it.

Within three days, the wakes stretched to two hours. Then longer.

This is what I mean when I say most sleep advice skips the biology and jumps straight to “fixing” behaviour that was never the problem.

It’s also why I get so fired up about the unregulated mess this industry has become. Confident strangers handing out one-size-fits-all advice to exhausted parents who deserve so much better.

You were never doing it wrong. The info you had just wasn’t right for your baby.

Comment STARTERKIT and I’ll send you my free checklist - the things to actually check before you change how you’re settling.