Babies "self-soothing" is a wild misconception
The science of "self-regulation" and why they need our presence to return to connection and calmness.
If enough people believe an idea- whether that idea is grounded in actual truth or not- it will callus and become an unquestionable truth, a “fact” even. And never has this been more true and obvious to me as a parent with a baby trying to navigate the whole infant sleep situation.
I knew going into motherhood that my line of work would inform my parenting and my choices in unique and counter-cultural ways. In both of my master’s programs, I studied childhood development and I’ve spent the last 10 years learning about psychology, human development, attachment, and mental health. Am I an expert? Nah. But have I learned from many of them over the years? Sure thing.
The thing about being a parent is that you can’t actually be very prepared for many things and one of the things that I was like for sure not prepared for is how much the words “sleep training” would show up in my conversations. And for whatever reason before having a baby, I thought that the world had become somewhat woke enough, awake enough to know that it’s not a good idea to let babies “cry it out” anymore. Like I really, genuinely (and now I see, naively) thought that we’d moved on, realized how harmful that is for babies (because it is), and that it would be easy for me to find community with other moms who didn’t sleep train. And boy, I was way wrong.
I’m not going to lie - and I’m not going to sugarcoat it - I genuinely don’t understand how, given the data that we have now (that I’m about to unpack for you) and given the profound leaps we’ve made in understanding how paramount nurture and emotional attunement is for brain health and growth, we can still go around believing that letting babies “cry it out” so that they will “learn to sleep independently” is ethically sound advice. And believe me - I wish it were ethically sound advice. I’ve never been more tired in my entire life and even still, I’ve never felt more confident in the decisions that I’ve made and am making for our family and the emotional health of our child.
Sometimes I get scared to speak out about this because sleep training is incredibly polarizing. I don’t want moms who have chosen to sleep train (in whatever method or form) to feel judged or shamed by me. I don’t want to shit on parents who are doing the best they can. But I also feel really torn because what I do want is for all of us to look critically at the sleep training industry, and I do want basic information about how our brains work to be common knowledge. Terms like “self-soothing” and “self-regulation” are wildly overused and very misunderstood. And truthfully, I think we need to get honest about how beliefs that are really mainstream and seemingly unquestionable get to be questioned, and should be questioned. In case you haven’t noticed our society is pretty sick and just because an idea is popular (i.e.: sleep training) doesn’t mean that it’s beneficial.
So allow me to debunk some myths for you and teach you about how our brains work. Much of this will run contrary to what you read online on Instagram and TikTok (depending on who you follow). Which is sad. It’s sad that we live in a world where it’s almost impossible to know what to believe anymore because both sides are peddling the same narrative: we have the data to prove it. It’s so confusing, I know.
Sleep trainers and most mainstream medicine even will tell you that there is no objective data that shows that “crying it out” is harmful to babies (I literally heard a doctor make this claim on a podcast recently). Yes, it made my blood boil a bit (okay, a lot actually) because it (ironically, coming from a doctor) is based on an incredibly skewed and inaccurate view of science. It completely contradicts what we know about healthy child brain development.
So let’s look at the science, shall we?!
(*Before I dive into this, let me be clear: I don’t completely disagree with all forms of sleep training out there and I acknowledge that there are a lot of things that fall under the “sleep training” umbrella that are far gentler than “crying it out”.)
Your brain and “self-soothing”
When we use the word “self-soothe” what we mean is “self-regulate”. And what we mean by that is this when we’re talking about a baby and sleep is this: I want my baby to be able to recognize that they’re safe and secure, that I am just down the hall, and to go from a state of dysregulation (upset, scared) to regulation (safe, secure). Whenever we refer to the word “self-regulation” we’re referring to how we identify and attend to our emotions and how we go from a nervous system state of fear and anxiety back into a state of calm, security, and connection.
In order to “self-soothe”, we need our neocortex to be somewhat developed. This is the part of the brain that is responsible for rational and logical thinking, the part of the brain capable of thinking, “I know that I’m in this room all alone right now, that I’ve been fed and have a clean diaper; my parents will be back to get me in the morning.” In order for a child to truly self-regulate, this part of the brain must be able to be recruited, and this part of the brain only begins (yes, begins) to develop between 4-5 years of age.
Children learn to self-soothe/self-regulate through thousands and thousands and thousands of repetitions of co-regulation. Co-regulation is when an adult uses their brain and body (their nervous system) to calm and soothe a child. When a child in distress is met with nurture, connection, and compassion, they internalize - through an embodied experience not through rational thought - how to eventually do it on their own, at their own pace.
When a baby is left to “cry it out” or be in distress for a prolonged period of time without the help of an adult it is literally impossible for them to “self-soothe” because they don’t yet have the parts of the brain that are required for them to do so. They might stop crying but we have to stop using the word “self-soothing” to refer to the behavioral extinction of a cry - it is wildly inaccurate. Just because a baby appears calm or has stopped crying doesn’t mean they’re “regulated.”
So if they’re not actually “regulating” or “soothing” what’s happening? What are they learning?
In short, they’re learning to freeze. “Freeze” is the stress response that happens when we don’t have access to co-regulation and have not yet developed the brain architecture to self-regulate or self-soothe. Freeze, just like “fight or flight” is what happens when we don’t know how to resolve our stress and when fighting or fleeing isn’t working or available. The freeze response looks a lot like being calm. So while sleep training programs claim that they can effectively make your baby calm without co-regulation what they’re actually saying is that their methods induce a freeze response in a baby’s young nervous system.
There are so many studies now that show us that even when it appears that a baby is sleeping through the night, babies are still waking up periodically (because this is developmentally appropriate for baby and toddler sleep) and that their blood cortisol levels, the primary stress hormone, are still high (similar to what it would be for the baby who is still crying in distress).
The harsh truth is this: they are not calmed. Why would they cry if they’ve learned that nobody comes?
The absence of tears, of crying and calling out for help, is not synonymous with effectively self-soothing, and we can prove that now, scientifically.
Babies do not learn “how to sleep’ but what they do learn is learned helplessness, they learn not to voice their needs and they learn that when or if they do, their needs will likely not be met with connection and care.
This is why it drives me completely bananas when people say that “babies need to learn how to self-soothe.” This assumes that babies should be able to do a skill that they don’t have the brain architecture to do yet. We would never expect a 2-year-old to be able to read. Why? Because they don’t have the brain architecture to be able to master that skill yet and it’s not developmentally appropriate. And yet, we completely disregard developmental appropriateness when it comes to baby and toddler sleep.
We’ve all been duped…
No, but really, we’ve all been duped. Us mamas, in the year 2023, have been led to believe that if our babies aren’t sleeping through the night at some ungodly early age we’re doing something “wrong”, that there is something wrong with our babies, and that our only option is to sleep train or let them cry it out. And here’s what I’ve learned: the problem is not our babies- the problem is unrealistic expectations about our babies and the lack of support that we have as we navigate the world of new motherhood.
It makes me really sad that our culture is so nurture-starved, so emotionally aloof to the point that we’ve convinced ourselves that not responding to the cries of our babies is “good for them”, necessary for “teaching them a lesson” despite heaps of evidence that a lack of emotional attunement wreaks havoc on a child’s mental health. That should rattle us and leave us unsettled. This should have us questioning mainstream culture, not our biological instincts to attend to our babies when they’re in distress.
One thing that I’ve really sat with since becoming a mother, and putting the science aside, is that when I attune to what my body says to me when Emmy cries, whether it’s 7 PM or 3 AM and no matter how heavy with exhaustion I feel, it’s telling me to go attend to her, to pick her up, rock her, nurse her, sing to her - I’d move mountains for her to know she’s safe, held, and loved.
Nurture isn’t just tender, nurture literally grows the brain
Our brains are highly relational and without nurture, they literally don’t grow. Early childhood experiences matter so much in part because the brain grows the most and the most quickly during the first 3 years of life. In fact, your brain is 80% formed by age 3. We have a lot of pressure put on us as parents about literally everything (it’s hard, I know) but this is one area where (for better or worse) the stakes are actually pretty high.
There are several studies now that show a strong association between high parental nurture and greater hippocampal volume and amygdala function, two parts of the brain that are especially involved in behavior and emotion regulation.
If you want to learn more about how nurture grows a baby’s brain (and some practical tips for how to do that), check out this article. It’s a good read.
While there may not be any overt physical risk in letting a child “cry it out” or employing low-nurture sleep training methods (I mean, they probably won’t die from it), there are certainly psychological risks involved. I know that’s a harsh truth. But it’s a truth nonetheless.
But like, I’m so tired.
Me too, sis. Me too. This is all so hard and the sleep deprivation is a joke. And…
The reality is this: we cannot control the timing in which our infants and toddlers “get it”, and we don’t actually have to “teach” our babies to sleep. But what brain science makes crystal clear is that when a child has repeated (like thousands and thousands) of opportunities for co-regulation and when they are securely attached, trusting their caregivers to regularly and consistently meet their needs, they will learn to sleep through the night, no extreme “training” necessary.
Will this likely happen later than when is expected? Probably. Depending on who you ask, it’s “weird” that my baby is almost 15 months and not sleeping entirely through the night (we’re still at 1 and sometimes 2 wake-ups). But guess what - Emmy is normal, from a developmental appropriateness perspective. The fact that we’re asking babies who are like 5 minutes old (or 3, 6, or 9 months old) to “self-regulate”, to be able to have a skill mastered that not even most mature adults have mastered yet (or even care to attempt) is bonkers. It’s insane, actually.
A love note to my fellow non-sleep training mamas
We’re doing hard, brutal, and holy work. We’re making radical and counter-cultural choices to set our babies up for lifelong mental and emotional health. It’s hard to reject social norms, especially social norms that are so deeply woven into the fabric of how society operates that people don’t even think to question them anymore. How beautiful it is that we’re choosing to tune out the noise of the sleep training industry and instead tune into our God-given instincts to move toward our babies when they need us. Even when our bodies ache with exhaustion, even when people think we’re weird, even when we have to also work outside of the home, even when someone (yet again) mentions Moms on Call or some other sleep training Instagram account and you just want to crawl out of your skin.
It’s sad that it’s “counter-cultural” to have realistic expectations of babies and toddlers based on their developmental capacities and needs. We are so disconnected from our biology and our bodies, so obsessed with quickness and rushing milestones and the holy grail of productivity. Boy are we quick to rationalize our behaviors at the expense of our children, and I think we get to be honest about that, even if it’s inconvienent and difficult.
If you want more resources on not sleep training, here ya go:
And here are two more articles that are really good if you want to read more. One is here, second is here.