A Personal Post To Stop The Guilt

By: Dr. Jill Satin

This is a personal post. I’m sharing it in hopes that it will help even one parent. It is a post about sleep, but it is really about any difficult parenting decision we agonize over. In my case, baby sleep has been my kryptonite. I love and adore my two kids (a 5 year-old-son and a 2.5 year old daughter) but I am still recovering from the sleep deprivation.

Before having children, and even in the first few months of my eldest child’s life, I was anti-sleep training. It sounded harsh, selfish, and just plain unnecessary. In those first few months, my maternity leave was reserved solely for figuring out how to be a new mom. Looking back, I was extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to be so open to that new experience and all that it entailed. My son woke three times a night to nurse and I managed like that for several months. I was exhausted but not the soul-sucking kind of exhausted that I came to experience later on.

Fast-forward to month 6 of waking three times a night (not to mention that my son would only nap consistently if I walked for hours with him in the stroller) and the next thing you know I tried sleep training. How I went from point A (“I would never sleep train”) to point B (“sleep training starts tonight”) is a blur, but I know it involved a good dose of desperation and googling. My son took three nights of cry-it-out to become a champion sleeper. We’re talking 7pm-7am no night waking for several years and he remains an excellent sleeper. Those three nights were very tough, but, given the outcome, my husband and I do not regret sleep training for my son for one second.

Enter baby number two. Rambunctious, spunky, watch out everybody, baby number two. Her sleep was similar to my eldest, waking the standard three times per night for several months. Somewhere between month 5-6, we decided we would sleep train like we did with our first. You have probably heard that every baby is different, right? Well, I learned this the very hard way. It may not be accurate to say the sleep training ‘didn’t work’, but rather that I simply could not tolerate her crying. It was louder and seemed to not relent. When I heard that cry, I felt an extremely strong urge to ‘rescue’ her. You have likely heard that mothers can tell the difference between their babies’ cries (hungry cry, tired cry, etc.). Well, I couldn’t. I feel sheepish to admit it, but I just couldn’t reliably tell the difference. I now wonder whether this is another myth meant to make mothers feel inadequate. When I heard my daughter cry, I almost always interpreted it as an emergency.

I cannot say what I ‘should’ have done at that time. I think it’s important that I tried to honour my own instincts and at the same time, it was really brutal. What I can tell you is what happened next. I began to doubt myself big time. I was plagued by judgements I had heard from other moms that sleep training is harmful. Even though I found no research supporting these claims, I worried that the studies just haven’t shown this yet. I began to feel very guilty for the weeks I had subjected my baby to crying for no benefit. My husband and I began to argue in the middle of the night (the absolute worst time to have a discussion when you’re sleep-deprived), because we no longer had an agreed-upon consistent game plan. I would yo-yo between sleep training and nursing back to sleep. One week I would night-wean and even develop mastitis and the next I would decide that the ‘right’ thing to do was to respond to every cry with what she wanted— which was nursing. My baby must have been confused and she definitely learned that to get what she wanted she had to cry really loud.

I don’t recall exactly what the straw was that broke the camel’s back, because my husband and I had been feeling pretty broken for a long time. Eventually my daughter was old enough to use words to express what she was feeling (probably what she had been feeling for some time). The words were “I don’t like this”. Did those words break my heart? Actually, no. Not because I’m insensitive but because It helped me to know that she was not in pain and she was not afraid. She didn’t like that I wasn’t nursing her back to sleep. I am not diminishing her feelings here. Toddler feelings are big and real, but the effects of sleep deprivation on myself and my husband cannot be diminished either. I wish I could say that after that I found a trick that didn’t involve crying. I really really searched for this. The truth is, we went right back to where we started. Maybe the difference was that my baby was now ready, or that I was finally ready and/or that we finally hired a sleep consultant. I knew most of the info (though there were a few tips that were new and helpful), but really it was that I needed the confidence to know that I had a solid plan when I started doubting myself.  Once I could be consistent, we finally started sleeping. My husband and I experienced significant mood benefits. Now the only reason I don’t get enough sleep is that I watch too much Netflix.

I feel vulnerable sharing this but I’m not embarrassed. Many parents are suffering, really truly suffering, because they think that sleep training is cruel or that it will harm their baby. In some moments, I too thought this. But I have yet to find the research that sleep training is harmful, and my lived experience tells me this is not true, at least not for my own children. If anything, I noticed a host of positive changes when they started sleeping through the night. I do fear judgement from people who are against sleep training, some of whom are my colleagues and friends whom I respect. The idea that they would judge me as ‘selfish’ or ‘neglectful’ or somehow not totally committed to my children’s well-being really does get me in my gut. But as a clinical psychologist who focuses on postpartum mental heath, I feel a sense of responsibility to share my perspective on this because it affects parents so much, and it affects parents struggling with their mental health even more so. I have seen parents try to function on so very little sleep and try so very hard to be the best parents they can be. I truly feel their pain.

I am not on a mission to have everyone sleep train their babies. I have no intention or incentive to do so. Some babies sleep through the night without much issue and some families find other ways to manage sleep that work for them. This was not my experience. I write this for any parent who has experienced the kind of ambivalence and guilt about any parenting decision like I did, and for those struggling with these decisions now. I just had to share my own story so you know that I understand how painful this process can be, and that parents who choose to sleep train and parents who choose not to sleep train are not so different.

Parenting decisions are hard. It would be easier if there were ‘right’ decisions and ‘wrong’ decisions. If this were the case, there would be one definitive guide to parenting and I would be the first to buy it. Like most things, there are shades of grey where we want things to be black and white. In Emily Oster’s clear-headed book Cribsheet, she gives an explanation for why parents become so emboldened in their ideas (aka the ‘mommy wars’) and I fully agree with it. She explains that when we make decisions such as whether to breastfeed or bottle-feed, sleep train or co-sleep, etc, these decisions have a profound impact on our parenting experiences and they each present unique challenges. Because these decisions each cause some hardship, we mentally justify our decisions to ourselves to convince ourselves that we are doing the ‘right’ thing. What we need to appreciate is that you can choose the ‘right’ thing for your particular family, and this can be different from what someone else will find works for them and their family. In other words, mind your business and respect each other. While you’re at it, please remember to respect yourself for your own thoughtful decisions too and have compassion for yourself when things don’t go according to plan. If we can respect other people and ourselves for the decisions we make, we can begin to stop that awful guilt.