![]() My advice today is to embrace the fact that it IS your fault! You are a loving parent. That doesn’t make you a bad parent, that makes you a loving parent! My Advice… You sacrificed your sleep to help your baby get hers. ![]() You replaced that pacifier ten times per night, so your baby could get the 12 hours of sleep he needed every night. You’re a loving dad who rocked your baby to sleep every night when she cried hard every time you stopped. You became a loving mom who decided to breastfeed to sleep when your baby wouldn’t sleep any other way. You see, all of these things are your fault. Now that it’s been so long, is it really fair to just let her cry it out? You realize you’ve helped some habits to remain habits, but haven’t been able to break them, no matter how many things you’ve tried. If your baby is now a toddler and hasn’t outgrown the sleep challenges, you start to wonder if it is your fault. Your baby won’t sleep all night like your friends’ babies or other babies you read about on the Internet. When your baby was 9 months old, you wondered if your baby still needed night feedings or not. Often it feels like your baby won’t nap and won’t sleep through the night. You might have started to wonder if your baby’s naps would start to lengthen like other babies you heard about. Or you enjoyed going with the flow, throwing a strict schedule to the wind. You might have dreamed about a baby’s schedule that was almost the same every day. When your baby was 6 months old, you might have started dreaming about what it would be like to be able to plan activities in the day. If your baby won’t sleep longer than 1 or 2 hours, you might have trouble functioning in the daytime. Perhaps you were unlucky, and 3 hours straight sounded pretty good. If you were lucky, you were starting to wonder what it would be like to sleep for more than 4-6 hours in a row again. When your baby turned 4 months old, perhaps sleep started to go downhill. You wonder why your baby won’t sleep through the night, too. Some of your friends might have started claiming their babies were sleeping through the night. ![]() When your baby was a couple of months old, sleep was fine, so you felt like super mom (or dad). You started to wonder whether you should be feeding your baby on a schedule or feeding her on demand. Only now your baby won’t sleep without it, and you might be running in every two hours to replace it. When your baby was a few weeks old, you decided to try a pacifier and that worked quite well. You fed him to sleep every nap and night after that until you thought he’d outgrow it. Here’s why: When your baby was 3 days old, your baby wouldn’t sleep in any way but breastfeeding or with the bottle. I’m Here to Say That it IS Your Fault Your Baby Won’t Sleep. If you don’t do it “their way,” you are not a good parent. Many of them make you feel guilty for nursing your baby all the way to sleep or using a pacifier or co-sleeping or not co-sleeping. This is also a common theme in many of the sleep books out there, too. The bottom line is their baby won’t sleep and they feel it’s their fault. Perhaps they knew they weren’t supposed to do, but didn’t know what else to do. Maybe they were first time parents and didn’t know what they were or weren’t “supposed” to do. A common theme when I read the first e-mail in a one-on-one consultation or when I first talk on the phone with a new client is that the parent feels somehow responsible for the fact their baby won’t sleep and for the sleep trouble they’re in.
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