Is Sleep Training Useful?

Q: Dear Jan,

We have a beautiful 8 month old baby boy! We co-sleep with him, and have done for the last few months. I nurse him down and nurse him about every two hours at night. We have chosen not to ‘sleep train him’ (and we DO have rituals, the bath, the story, etc.), but we wonder, will we have to sleep train him when he gets older? Do older babies still need sleep training? I have no interest in letting him cry it out. He’s our guy!  A pediatrician told me I was doing him a disservice and not teaching him a life skill.

Please tell me what you think.

Kind regards,

Caring Mama

A. Dear Caring Mamma,

The best “life skill” one can have is the capacity to love and trust others. This skill is not taught by sleep training but by love and compassion shown to him throughout childhood. A child who is sleep-trained learns to distrust others, and concludes that he must be unlovable or others would help him when he cries out.

If you cosleep until your child no longer needs that, there will never be a need to train him. Children are already “trained” by Mother Nature to know that they should sleep with their parents! And most children in the world do cosleep (see Cosleeping Around The World: http://www.naturalchild.org/james_mckenna/cosleeping_world.html )

More articles:

Ten Reasons to Sleep Next to Your Child at Night
http://www.naturalchild.org/jan_hunt/familybed.html

When Will My Baby Soothe Himself to Sleep?
http://www.naturalchild.org/jan_hunt/sleep.html

I hope you can find a more knowledgeable pediatrician.

Stay a caring momma and you’ll never need to “train” your child – everything he needs to learn he will learn with joy, when he’s ready.

Best wishes,

Jan

Jan Hunt, M.Sc., Director
Natural Child Project
http://www.naturalchild.org

1 Comment
  1. Dee says

    Hi, our ‘little guy’ is now 15 months and we co-slept with him up to about 4 months ago and he began to sleep through the night in his cot about 3 months ago without any sleep training. It was really his decision to move beds, he just began to seem uncomfortable at night so we tried him in his own bed and that was it! You’re doing the right thing – you don’t need to sleep train, in my experience (I have 3 children ranging from this little one to a 12 year old) routine or bedtime ritual is a good positive thing, our children defiantly have sleep ‘associations’ around this, but the ‘training’ is unnecessary.

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