Author Bio: Roselin Raj is a journalist and a writer. She has been writing extensively on health and wellness related topics for over a decade. Besides her professional interests, she loves a game of basketball or a good hike in her free time to fuel her spirits. “Health is wealth” is one motto of life which she lives by as well as advocates to every reader who comes across her blogs.
In the months leading up to my first delivery, I had many emotions ranging from excitement to fear. The idea of delivering a baby was daunting and had occupied my headspace completely. Though I had a consulting doctor and limitless information on the internet, getting the personal assistance and care from a doula did the trick.
According to What To Expect, “Doulas, who offer non-medical emotional support, are growing in popularity in the delivery room (or birthing center), but many also do postpartum work, helping new moms navigate the stressful, bleary-eyed early days of parenthood. Here’s why you may want to consider hiring a postpartum doula to help you through the fourth trimester.” With the rising popularity of doulas, let us understand what a postpartum doula is and how they help expectant mothers through and post pregnancy.
What is a Postpartum Doula?
As mentioned earlier, a doula is a trained professional who guides mothers with information, emotional and physical assistance before, during, and a short while post birth. The guidance and assistance are given to expectant mothers to make the process a healthy and less stressful experience. However, a postpartum doula extends their assistance until the baby has adjusted with the family.
A postpartum doula is skilled to assist with a variety of needs and requirements according to each family. For instance, once the baby is born, all the attention is directed towards the new bundle of joy. But the physical and mental health recovery of a mother is very important. A postpartum doula can help the mother ease into motherhood, provide necessary information on caring for the baby or help with breastfeeding issues, and much more. But a postpartum doula is not a nanny and helps the mother emotionally to recover after the birth of the baby, bond, offer newborn care, sibling care, and lighten the load of household tasks.
Benefits of a Postpartum Doula
The work of a postpartum doula extends post birth, unlike a birth doula. The postpartum doula’s main purpose is to make the mother comfortable with the baby and support her in doing so. The tasks may vary from mother to mother, and she is equipped to do the best in any situation. Here are a few of the tasks a postpartum doula can provide:
Postpartum Care for the Mother
Once the baby has been delivered, the mother requires a lot of caring and help. The basics involve eating healthy food, drinking water at regular intervals, and most importantly, rest. A postpartum doula will help in cooking, running errands, etc. to allow the new mother to recover. In the case of c-section delivery, she can assist the mother with the newborn, household tasks, offer support and resources, rest and healing, and aid in hassle-free recovery.
Women are usually emotionally weak post-birth with chances of depression and anxiety. Postpartum doulas can help create a stress-free environment, take care of the baby, and be emotionally available for the new mothers.
Breastfeeding and Newborn Support
Postpartum doulas are equipped with complete knowledge of handling newborn babies, and they help mothers to ease the process of parenting. The next big challenge after giving birth to a child is often breastfeeding. And as you are probably aware, it can be a challenging experience for both the mother and the baby.
In such cases, the doula helps with information on newborn behavior, soothes the process of breastfeeding or transitioning to bottle feeding. If further breastfeeding support is needed, she can offer local resources to an IBCLC (Board Certified Lactation Consultant).
Finding the Perfect Doula for You
Doulas can be found through word-of-mouth or going through service providers to find certified doulas as per your needs. The idea is to get a suitable doula who is certified, experienced, and well-synced to you and your family requirements. Before hiring a doula, talk to the agency regarding their qualifications, certifications, insurance, etc. to get a clear idea of who you are hiring.
Doulas or the agencies usually charge for services by the hour, location, services required, and the experience of the doula. There may be provisions to use your Health Savings Account (HSA) to hire a doula. Clarify with your insurance provider or the doula agency before going ahead with the plan.
Chris Emmer, a former client, talks about her sleep journey with daughter, Sam, and working with Alyssa. She started when Sam was six months old and cannot believe she waited so long to seek help. In a sleep-deprived fog, she finally called in “the big guns” for help! You can listen to this complete podcast episode on iTunes or SoundCloud.
Alyssa: Welcome to Ask the Doulas Podcast. I am Alyssa, and I am so excited to be talking with Chris Emmer today. Hello, Chris!
Chris: Hi!
Alyssa: You were a client of ours. You did birth, postpartum, and then sleep with me. So we’re going to focus in on sleep today.
Chris: Let’s talk about sleep, the most important thing!
Alyssa: So when did you realize that you needed help with sleep? How old was Sam, and how did the beginning weeks or months go with sleep? Were you like, “Oh, yeah, this is great, no problem”?
Chris: Okay, definitely wasn’t, “Oh, yeah, this is great.” It’s hard to say because honestly, those first couple of months – I call them the blackout period. I kind of don’t remember what happened. I know I wasn’t sleeping. I know I cried a bunch, and I was breastfeeding, like, 24/7. But I don’t know; it’s all such a blur in those first couple months, and I remember doing a lot of research on everything. So before I had her, I did a lot of research on car seats and cribs and diapers and all the things you buy, but I did zero research on sleep and breastfeeding – the two most important things! So after she was born, I felt like I was doing a crash course in how to have a kid. And after doing a lot of internet searches and downloading ebooks and taking webinars, all these things, I was feeling so overwhelmed with information. My baby’s not sleeping. I feel like I’m going to lose my mind. Like, I just need to talk to a person! And that was when I reached out to you.
Alyssa: And how old was she? Six months?
Chris: I think she might have been six months, yeah.
Alyssa: That’s what comes to my mind.
Chris: I think so.
Alyssa: So do you feel like you had six months of just pure sleep deprivation? You were just gone?
Chris: Absolutely. Yeah. There was no day and no night. And I remember very vividly sitting in my chair in the corner of the nursery breastfeeding, and when I got out of the bed and went to the chair, watching my husband just sprawl out and take up the entire bed, and just shooting daggers out of my eyes at him. And sometimes coughing loudly. “How was your night?” I would say to him in the morning. But yeah, we just had no strategy was the thing, and there was a ton of crying on her part, as well. She wasn’t just having a fly by the seat of her pants good time. She was not a happy camper, either, so we were like, okay, let’s step this up a level. We’ve got to do something here.
Alyssa: Right. I think the crying part is a big part of sleep deprivation for the child that the parents don’t think about, because they’ll call me and say, “I don’t want to do cry it out.” I’m like, “Good, I don’t do cry it out. But you have to understand that crying is just a healthy part of how a baby communicates, and in these sleep-deprived kids, your baby has done a heck of a lot more crying than they’re going to do while we get them on a schedule, and then there will be no crying.” So if you think about, cumulatively, how many hours of crying she did over those past six months because she was sleep deprived, and maybe you have to deal with a little bit of it during sleep training. I want to kind of hear about the journey from six months until now because we had some ups and downs with sleep. We’d get her on track, and then a new developmental milestone would happen and you would be like, “Help! What’s going on?”
Chris: That’s me, frantically texting Alyssa! So around six months – I honestly think before that, she wasn’t taking a single nap during the day, and when I talked to you, you were like, okay, psycho, you should be doing actually three naps a day. Here’s what time they are; here’s how they go. And then in the beginning, you gave us the shush-pat technique, which was what we did for a while there. And it ended up working super well. I think before we decided to call in the big shots, which is you, we were like, oh, sleep training; what a scary word. We better stock up on wine for the weekend we do that! You know, we thought it was going to be this traumatic thing, and we would both be scarred, and our child would be emotionally scarred. But she cried less the first weekend we did sleep training than she did any normal weekend when we weren’t doing it. Like, significantly less. I think she only cried for 15 minutes the first time, and then she fell asleep. Like, what??
Alyssa: I remember you saying, “How is this possible? What did you do to my child? Whose baby is this?”
Chris: Yeah, what’s happening? Did you possess my child? So yeah, we were just shocked that it worked almost right away, and it was not traumatizing whatsoever. What we were doing before was much more traumatizing, and we were doing that every single day! So once we had a few successes, it became much easier to stick to a more planned-out schedule, so that was around six months.
Alyssa: I remember the best was the photo you sent of me – I think she was now taking regular naps. It was the third or fourth day in a row, and you were like, oh, my God, she’s an hour through this two-hour nap. We’re going to hit the hot tub. And you sent me a picture of two champagne glasses on the edge of the hot tub, and you were like, yes! We did it!
Chris: That’s one of my favorite parenting memories! It was the greatest success because really, I feel like sleep is probably the most important thing.
Alyssa: I think it is!
Chris: Yeah, especially in terms of sanity for mom and dad. My emotional state was not stable when I was super sleep deprived. I was just forgetting everything, crying at the drop of a hat. It really affects you.
Alyssa: On so many levels. Your relationship; your child’s not happy, so you can’t even bond with your child effectively because you’re both sleep deprived and unhappy, and then you’re like, why are you crying? I don’t know what to do, and you just want to sleep, and we end up getting in these really bad cycles of, well, I just want to sleep, so let’s just do this, whatever “this” ends up being, whether it’s cosleeping or breastfeeding or holding or rocking or driving in the car. You just kind of get into survival mode.
Chris: Yeah. And I would just nurse her to sleep. I think I spent – oh, my God. I feel like I spent the entire summer sitting in my nursing chair trying to breastfeed her to sleep and then slow motion trying to drop her into the crib, and then she would just wake up one second later, and I’d be like, ugh, that was an hour and a half of work, and now she’s wide awake! So yeah, that was the beginning.
Alyssa: And then I didn’t hear from you for a little while, and then probably maybe eight or nine months, you think, she had another development milestone where she was sitting up or something?
Chris: Yeah, she started sitting up and then she started crawling. I remember when she first started crawling, that was a huge change because she would just do laps around her crib. She was running a marathon in there, and I would just watch her on the monitor and be like, oh, my God, I can’t shush-pat her anymore. She hates that!
Alyssa: Yeah, it’s way too stimulating.
Chris: Yes, which I wouldn’t have known if I didn’t text you again! I was still in there trying to shush-pat her for hours.
Alyssa: She’s, like, get away from me, lady!
Chris: She’s like, all right, chill, Mom; stop! So at that point – what did we do at that point? We stopped shush-pat. Oh, we started the timed-out interventions.
Alyssa: Yeah, just going in after a certain amount of time, increasing intervals. Yeah, and I think that worked the first day.
Chris: The first day, yeah. I think the longest that I went was 15 minutes, and again, it’s like – I previously had thought 15 minutes of my baby crying – sounds like hell! But once it was happening, I was like, oh, wait, I do this all the time. Like, I’ve done this a million times. I’ll actually just put away the dishes and make a snack and then, oh, look at the monitor – she’s asleep! It was super easy, and she got the hang of it almost immediately. So once I stopped trying to shush-pat her and wake her up from her ability to put herself to sleep, it was not a big deal anymore. But yeah, same thing; that milestone came up and totally changed the sleep game.
Alyssa: So where is she at now?
Chris: Oh, my God, she sleeps through the night!
Alyssa: Yay!
Chris: I’m so happy!
Alyssa: And how many months is she?
Chris: She’s going to be 11 months next week, yeah, and she’s been sleeping through the night every night for, I don’t know, a couple weeks at least.
Alyssa: Awesome.
Chris: Yeah, it’s amazing. And she goes down super easy for her morning nap. It’s not even an issue anymore. I remember I used to, in the beginning of the week, I would count how many times I would have to put her down for naps that week, so there were, like, 3 per day, 5 days in the week – the week where I’m home alone – so that would be 15 nap put-downs, and I would be, like, okay I’m at 6 out of 15. I can do this! And now it’s like, it doesn’t matter who puts her down for a nap because I just set her in the crib.
Alyssa: Yeah, her body just knows it’s time. She doesn’t fight it. Incredible! Yay!
Chris: I know, it’s a game changer!
Alyssa: And you’re feeling good?
Chris: I’m feeling good!
Alyssa: Your husband’s feeling good?
Chris: Yeah, well, he got to sleep through the night for a long time.
Alyssa: Yeah, not that it affected him too much, right?
Chris: I was just watching him. But I wondered this: how long do you think it takes after your baby sleeps through the night for you to feel well rested again?
Alyssa: That’s funny because a lot of times we’ll do sleep consultations, and we’ll say, how did you sleep? And I had one dad tell me that he heard phantom crying all night and couldn’t sleep because he was just so used to waking up. I think their babies were 9 or 11 weeks or something. So two months straight, you know; it’s not six months, but it’s two months. It took them a good week or so to get back into their own groove. So you just need to figure out your groove again. So maybe you’re trying to stay up too late.
Chris: I don’t know. I do still wake up to any little noise on the monitor. I’m like, oh, is she okay?
Alyssa: So turn the monitor off.
Chris: What? You can do that?
Alyssa: Yeah! As soon as my daughter started sleeping through the night and was old enough that I was like, she’s so fine – monitor off. Actually, monitor not even in my room anymore, and earplugs in. She’s just down the hall. If she starts crying, I’m going to hear her, but I don’t want to hear every little wakeup. I don’t want to hear every little peep, and I still do that. Earplugs in.
Chris: Oh, my God. That’s genius. Because if she’s really crying, we can absolutely hear her.
Alyssa: You’re going to hear her, absolutely.
Chris: But yeah, the little rumbles in the night wake me up, and then I’m like, oh, is she okay? And then I just watch the monitor like it’s a TV show.
Alyssa: No, she’s good. She’s good. Yeah, you’re causing yourself more anxiety than you need by checking that monitor.
Chris: Yeah. Okay!
Alyssa: They’re lifesavers in the beginning and especially during training because then you don’t have to get out of bed. You can go, oh, she’s just rustling around; okay, she’s calming down; okay, she’s back asleep. And you didn’t have to get out of bed. But now that she’s steady and she’s got a nap schedule and she’s sleeping through the night – she’s good.
Chris: You’re going to change my world!
Alyssa: Go buy some earplugs when we leave!
Chris: Yeah!
Alyssa: Yeah, because you don’t want to wake up at every little peep. And as a mom, it’s just that we’re always going to do that now. Every single little noise: oh, are they okay? Are they okay? They’re okay.
Chris: I love that.
Alyssa: And my daughter is six now. I always check in on her. I’ll put her to bed or my husband will put her to bed, and I still, before bed, check in on her once or twice before I go to sleep because I just like that peace of mind. I’m going to sleep now. I’m putting my earplugs in. I want to get a good night’s rest. She’s okay.
Chris: Wow. When do you think they started making video baby monitors?
Alyssa: I don’t know. Good question!
Chris: Because I often wonder, like, what did my mom do?
Alyssa: Not that long ago.
Chris: Not that long ago?
Alyssa: I think it’s kind of new, like within the past decade. Yeah, because they just had the sound ones when we were little.
Chris: We survived!
Alyssa: Yeah! So what’s one tip you would give somebody about sleep training?
Chris: Oh, my God. Get a plan ASAP!
Alyssa: Don’t wait?
Chris: Don’t wait! I honestly sometimes want to have a second kid just so I can nail it on certain things that I really struggled with this time, and one of them is sleep. First of all, I would have gotten out of her room. We slept in her room, a couple feet away from her, until January 1st. She was born in June!
Alyssa: That’s eight months!
Chris: We slept in the same room as her for eight months! Is that crazy?
Alyssa: Yeah. Well, the AAP says that you should room share for twelve months. That’s their safe sleep guideline. For most parents, that’s not conducive to their lifestyle. You have to get up early for work; you have older kids. But some people do room share for six to twelve months. It does make sleep training a little bit more difficult because you’re hearing them and they’re hearing you. So it’s really up to the parent. It’s not crazy that you did it, but I think it definitely didn’t help your situation.
Chris: Right. Yeah, I found that we were doing exactly that. We were both keeping each other up all night. So when we got out of the room, that was a huge game changer, but just getting even more consistency for naps and just having a game plan instead of just all the crying for nothing. You know, all the crying for just a hot mess and no nap. It just feels like a waste, so then when it was, like, a few minutes of crying for a reason, it was so much easier to do because I knew it was for her good, and for my good, as well.
Alyssa: Well, and crying just to cry does you no good. I have clients come to me and say that they’ve tried cry it out; they’ve let her cry for two hours. I’m like, that was for nothing. That’s absolutely for nothing. And that is doing your child harm and giving her unnecessary stress. You have to have a plan, and you have to have somebody, an expert, telling you: here is the plan. Here’s how it’s going to work. Here’s how we execute it to get good results, because if you just try it on your own, it is all for nothing. And it’s so hard because people give up. Parents just want to give up. “I tried it; didn’t work. I give up. I throw in the towel. I’m just going to give in and do X, Y, and Z.” So it’s really hard. Or people will say, oh, I did this online course. I’m like, well, that online course doesn’t know you. They don’t know your baby. They don’t know your parenting style. They don’t know what you’ve tried. They don’t know what works and what didn’t work. So it’s really hard.
Chris: I downloaded, like I said, a million ebooks; did all these online courses; like, everything. And it just, like you said, it wasn’t my baby. I read it, and I was like, yeah, it sounds awesome to be able to do that, but my baby would never in a million years do that. So I read all the things that I was supposed to be doing, and honestly, those just made me more anxiety because it made me feel like more of a failure.
Alyssa: Right. “I did it, and I’m still failing, so what is wrong?” Or maybe that method would have worked, but they didn’t tell you how to execute it for your baby.
Chris: Yes, or how to troubleshoot. Like, okay, I went in and did this, and now I’m out of the room and she’s doing this – what’s next? And when you just have a book, for me, what would be nice is to go in and grab her and breastfeed her. Let’s get a boob in her mouth and see what happens!
Alyssa: Well, that’s why having my one-on-one support is great because when that happens, you can text me and say, oh no! This is not supposed to happen; what do I do? And I can say, yes, this is supposed to happen; you did totally find; you did exactly what you needed to do. Let’s just wait it out for five minutes.
Chris: Yep. The text message support over the weekend – we did that twice, right?
Alyssa: Yeah.
Chris: That was the 1000% game changer. Like, I cannot even recommend that enough because those minutes when you’re feeling like you’re going to break, you know? You’re like, oh, I don’t know what to do; I’ve got to go in there! Instead, I would text you, and you would say, you got this! One more minute! Or you’d say give it ten more, and if it doesn’t work out, then go get her. And I’d be like, okay.
Alyssa: Or let’s try this, and if it doesn’t work again tomorrow, we’re going to think of a plan B.
Chris: Yeah. The text message support was the absolute game changer, and just having a human also holds you really accountable because I knew that you were going to –
Alyssa: Yeah, I was going to text you and say, hey, what’d you do last night? How did it go?
Chris: Exactly, yeah.
Alyssa: Did you move out of that room?
Chris: Yeah, so the accountability to actually implement the things that you’re learning makes it so that you can’t back out without being a liar!
Alyssa: Right. I’ll know! I’ll be checking your Instagram feed! Make sure you’re not lying to me about this!
Chris: But yeah, that was the biggest and best thing that we did in parenting, I think, was to figure out sleep.
Alyssa: It’s huge. That’s why I love it so much. I mean, it can be detrimental to your health and your relationships to have bad sleep. Anything else you want to say?
Chris: Definitely don’t wait to do sleep training would be what I would say! Next time around – well, if I do a next time around – I’m going to start sleep training immediately!
Alyssa: There are ways to start healthy sleep habits from the beginning! It’s not sleep training; a six-week old baby can’t sleep through the night, but just helping to develop good habits.
Chris: Yep. Because we had no clue. I mean, I look back at the beginning when we first got home from the hospital, and I would have her in her bassinet in the middle of the living room, middle of the day, music blaring, and I’d be like, why aren’t you going to sleep? Just go to sleep!
Alyssa: And now to you that seems like common sense, but when you’re in a fog and you’re sleep deprived and all you’re worried about is breastfeeding this baby and trying to get sleep, you’re not even thinking clearly enough to realize that this baby is in the middle of the room in daylight with music blaring; why won’t they sleep? Like, it doesn’t even cross your mind that it could be an unhealthy sleep habit.
Chris: Exactly, yeah. So my advice is, when you are in your sleep deprived brain fog, don’t rely on your own brain! Rely on someone else’s brain!
Alyssa: Right. “I’m going to do this myself, because sleep deprivation is a good place to start.” It’s not! Statistically, one and a half hours of lost sleep in one night, you are as impaired as a drunk driver.
Chris: Is that for real? One and a half hours of sleep lost in one night and you’re as impaired as a drunk driver?
Alyssa: Mm-hmm, and we drive around our kids like this. Yeah.
Chris: So then what is considered a full night’s sleep for an adult?
Alyssa: Probably eight hours. I mean, some of us need nine; some need seven. But for you and what your body needs, if you lose an hour to two of sleep…
Chris: Wow, that’s crazy!
Alyssa: Yeah, it’s like buzzed driving.
Chris: Scary. I believe it, though!
Alyssa: I feel it. Yeah, if I’m sleep deprived, you can feel almost your head just kind of goes into a different space. That’s like when you’re driving and you miss your exit because you weren’t paying attention.
Chris: Yeah, I’ve missed my own road! Seriously, multiple times! Or you get home and you’re like, how did I get here?
Alyssa: Yeah, you’re in a fog!
Chris: Good thing she’s sleeping through the night now!
Alyssa: Awesome. Well, thanks for joining me today! We’ll have you on again another time to talk about your business!
Chris: Awesome!
Alyssa: Thanks for listening. Remember, these moments are golden!
Today we talk to Courtney of Building Blocks Therapy Services again about how speech delays affect sleep in older babies. It’s a short one, but packed with good information! You can listen to this complete podcast on iTunes or SoundCloud.
Alyssa: Hello! Welcome to Ask the Doulas. I am Alyssa Veneklase, and I’m here with Courtney again. She is a speech and language pathologist with Building Blocks Therapy Services. Hello!
Courtney: Hello!
Alyssa: Today I want to talk to you about sleep because I think communication is huge, and when kids can’t communicate, they throw tantrums, and tantrums don’t only happen during the day, right?
Courtney: Correct.
Alyssa: So it can really affect how a kid can fall asleep and how they get themselves back to sleep or their ability to get back to sleep.
Courtney: Yes.
Alyssa: So what would you say to parents who are struggling with maybe a speech-delayed child who’s having tantrums during the day and problems or issues at night with sleep?
Courtney: I would say that routine is one of the biggest things to stick to, because that is really going to help the kid understand expectations. A child who has a language delay might have difficulty understanding everything that’s happening around them, because not only are they trying to take in visually what’s happening, but there’s also so much that we provide to children auditorily, and if they’re not able to understand what we’re saying to them, then they tend to get heightened anxiety; they tend to get more tense. As we all know, as we get worked up, it’s harder to fall asleep. And so if routines are established, then a child is able to know what to expect. They start to pick up on these routines, and then they might start to build that confidence and the ability that they want to help complete these routines.
Alyssa: Yeah, kids really thrive on routine, and I always tell parents to start really early, talking to your child. I remember talking to my daughter — like, I would narrate everything to her, everything I was seeing, everything I was doing, and she always knew where we were going. She knew that it was time to change her diaper or time to put PJs on. I guess it’s setting an expectation from the beginning of what to expect, which leads to a level of trust because they know that you are saying what we’re going to do; I’m already telling you. There won’t be any surprises, and I’m going to react accordingly. I don’t know; I just think it’s the basis of this foundation of trust between parent and child.
Courtney: Absolutely, and that follow-through because it pulls at that trust that the child has. We are going to sleep; it’s time for sleep. I also think that children who do have a language delay or disorder tend to take in things more if you support them visually. That helps them build on auditorily what they’re hearing, so even pictures of brushing our teeth; reading —
Alyssa: You’ve sent me those before, and I love that. Explain that a little more. So maybe a 12- or 18-month-old that is speech delayed and isn’t really talking, but wants this routine, and maybe the parents are trying to set this routine. But they can understand pictures?
Courtney: Yes, they can! You know, as we help children develop, we give them picture books and we talk about those books, and as you can probably see, you know, a 12-month-old can open a book and pretend they’re reading the book and point to different things, and so they take those things in visually. They tend to learn better visually, and that’s not going to hinder them learning auditorily in any way; it’s going to help support that. They’ll start to associate, “Time to brush your teeth!” if you show the picture of brushing your teeth. They’re going to go right to the bathroom and know what to do. If they’re thirsty, to get that drink, or oh, now it’s time for bed. They start walking into the bedroom. And they will typically start to complete that routine without you having to say it, and their body will be at a calmer state. In essence, that’s going to help a child be able to fall asleep a little bit easier.
Alyssa: Yeah, having anxiety around the bedtime routine and then waking up — like, then the parents have anxiety because they’re dreading putting this child to bed, and they’re dreading when are they going to wake up? Are they going to wake up at midnight? Are they going to wake up at 3:00 AM? How long will they be awake? And then both child and parents have anxiety, which they feed off each other. It’s a vicious cycle.
Courtney: Exactly, and I’ve brought up before that when you go to a different country and you don’t know the language and you’re trying to communicate, you get so dense and anxiety-ridden, and you just kind of wonder, well, something doesn’t feel right, especially for a 12-month-old. They’re not going to know exactly what doesn’t feel right, and so they tend to act out because that’s how they’re going to release that energy.
Alyssa: Well, for the clients who are working with me on sleep, I’ve recommended some of them to you, so I will continue to do in the future! If anyone has specific questions for you, where do they find you?
Courtney: I have a website. I also have a Facebook page at Building Blocks Therapy Services, and you can email me at buildingblockstherapyservices@gmail.com
Many of the tips I give parents during a sleep consult for their child apply to them as well. Although a baby’s sleep cycle is different from a toddler’s, and both are different than an adult’s, let’s talk about a few tips that apply to everyone and some that definitely do not!
Sleep tips for babies that transfer to adults:
A consistent schedule. This is #1 for ensuring proper rest at any age. If you have a job that you wake up for every week day at a specific time, you may notice that on the weekends you wake up at that time anyway, without an alarm. Some people may be able to fall back asleep, but if your body is used to a very structured schedule, more than likely you’re up for the day. This can be frustrating when you’ve stayed up late on a weekend and really want to sleep in, but your circadian rhythm is at work here! No matter what age, try to keep a consistent bed time and wake time.
Your sleep environment is important. With children we look at darkness, temperature, sound, and safety. Your room should be dark and cool. Crack a window or turn on a fan to circulate the air and cool you down. It’s better to have a cool room and get cozy in bed with the covers; if your room is too hot you are more likely to wake up. If you are a light sleeper, think about having a sound machine on or wearing ear plugs at night. A sound machine is also great for babies! Crank it up! We don’t want to put covers on a baby though (keep that crib safe!) so think about a sleep sack, or if your baby is small enough to be swaddled, use one!
A good bedtime routine is critical. With children we want this to be calm and soothing. We do things like read a book or sing a lullaby. We do not jump on the bed, wrestle, or play video games. This would stimulate the brain and make it harder for the child to fall asleep. As adults, we need to think about turning off electronics 30-60 minutes before we want to fall asleep. Stop working, put your phone away, and do something that calms you. Read a book, listen to a podcast or meditation, or watch some Netflix (as long as that isn’t too stimulating).
Be active and get sunshine during the day. This helps set our natural circadian rhythm. Our bodies need light and darkness to produce serotonin and melatonin. No matter what age, getting enough activity, exercise, sunshine, and fresh air during the day will improve night time sleep.
Sleep tips that don’t transfer:
Many parents think that if they keep their baby awake all day, they will sleep better at night. This is not true! This works for us as adults, but a baby’s body and brain cannot cope with this. They actually become overly tired which makes them fight sleep more!
Parents also tend to think that keeping a baby up later will help them sleep in later. This is also not true! Remember what I just said about being overly tired? If you let your baby stay up later, they will definitely become overly tired. This means they wake more in the night and it usually makes their morning wake up time even earlier. Eek!
Night time cravings can wreak havoc on adult sleep. If you need a snack after dinner, try to do it 1-2 hours before your bedtime, no later. For babies though, they do need to eat right before bed. We want them to go to sleep with a fully tummy so they can maximize the amount of time they can sleep at night before another feeding.
Some people can do all the “right” things and still not sleep well. There could be a number of factors, including physical and mental health, that play a part in how well you sleep. Reach out to your health care provider if you are struggling with chronic sleep problems.
You can find more tips for healthier adult sleep habits on the Pine Rest blog.
If you’re seeking help for your child’s sleep, you can find more info on the Gold Coast Doulas website. No matter where you live, our Certified Infant & Child Sleep Consultant can help you with phone and text consultations. If you live in West Michigan, we can also combine a customized sleep plan with overnight postpartum doula support to help parents get the rest they need while the doula sleep trains overnight.
Many of our clients and listeners don’t fully understand what overnight doula support looks like. Kristin and Alyssa, both Certified Postpartum Doulas, discuss the kinds of support their clients look for and how their team of doulas support families in their homes. You can listen to this complete podcast on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also learn more here about overnight postpartum doula support.
Kristin: Welcome to Ask the Doulas with Gold Coast Doulas. I’m Kristin.
Alyssa: And I’m Alyssa.
Kristin: And we’re here to chat about what an overnight postpartum doula does, as that is a question that we get asked often by our clients and our podcast listeners. So, Alyssa, my first question to you is, as a postpartum doula and sleep specialist, what do you see as the key benefits to a family in hiring overnight postpartum doula support?
Alyssa: Whether they hire for sleep or not, it helps the parents get sleep. So let’s say they’re not even hiring me for a sleep consult. Parents don’t understand what sleep deprivation means until their in the midst of it, probably at least three weeks in. Like, our bodies are designed to survive a couple weeks of this, sometimes even three or four, but after that, our systems start to shut down. So if you think about overnight support being this trusted person who sleeps in your home to take over all those overnight responsibilities so that you can get a good night’s rest. Even a six-hour stretch or sometimes even a four-hour stretch makes you feel like a whole new person the next day when you’re used to only sleeping maybe one- or two-hour chunks. A four-hour stretch seems amazing in that moment, whereas right now if you told me I could only have four hours of sleep tonight, I would cry. I would be miserable the next day. And you, Kristin, as a birth doula, you know that feeling. If you’ve had one night of no sleep, you’re just wrecked. So you’re running on adrenaline. You’re sleep deprived. So having a doula come in and take over all that responsibility at night — obviously, she can’t breastfeed your baby, but you have a couple different choices if you’re a breastfeeding mom. If you’re a bottle-feeding with formula mom, you can literally go to sleep at 10:00 PM and wake up whenever you want because the doula can just feed that baby every three hours.
Kristin: Exactly, and clean the bottles and change the diapers and burp the baby, all of it.
Alyssa: Yeah. So if your partner is feeding in the middle of the night, you’re certainly not going to wake up to clean bottles and parts in the morning. The doula does do that. But for a breastfeeding mom, you can choose to pump instead of breastfeeding because it’s usually a lot quicker. So you pump and you set those bottles out for the doula. The doula wakes up when the baby wakes up; feeds the baby; burps the baby; changes the baby; gets the baby back to sleep — and Mom’s sleeping this whole time. Or, if Mom chooses to breastfeed, the doula can bring Baby to Mom so Mom doesn’t even have to get out of bed. I was just talking to Kelly Emory, our lactation consultant friend, and she was saying that when she was nursing, she would just side lie and her husband would bring the baby to her. She would lie on her side, so she didn’t have to get up. She didn’t even have to open her eyes if she didn’t want to. She was still kind of in this half-sleep state, and then when Baby was done on that side, her husband would take the baby and she’d roll over and she would feed on the other side, and then the husband would take the baby away, change the baby, burp the baby, and do all that stuff. So she said it was amazing. She took over one shift of the night, and he took over the next, so she would get a six-hour chunk of sleep and would feel amazing in the morning. So you’re able to tackle all those everyday tasks during the day because you didn’t have to also worry about those at night.
Kristin: Yes! And I’ve also had overnight clients who prefer to come into the nursery and sit in a rocker and feed their baby rather than have me come in and disrupt their husband’s sleep.
Alyssa: Sometimes they’re sleeping in separate rooms, too, because they’ve become used to that. So oftentimes, my goal as an overnight doula is to have both parents sleeping in bed together again, or wherever you were before this baby arrived.
Kristin: Right, no more partner on the couch or in the guest bedroom.
Alyssa: Right.
Kristin: So as far as other tasks of an overnight postpartum doula, sleep is one. So we can get Baby back to sleep and if they’re working with a certified sleep consultant, like you, then they can implement that.
Alyssa: Yeah, I guess I didn’t answer that initial question. So if they do work with me as a sleep consultant, you can hire an overnight doula in conjunction with. So I offer this customized sleep plan for your family, and then our doula knows that plan, understands that plan, and implements that plan overnight.
Kristin: That’s amazing.
Alyssa: So you wake up again refreshed because you’ve slept, and then you have the energy to implement the sleep plan during the day. And then the doula comes in at night and implements that plan overnight. So it’s consistency because that’s always the key with any sort of sleep consult is that you have to be consistent. You can’t just do it during the day and then give up at night because you’re tired. Your plan will fail.
Kristin: And so who hires a postpartum overnight doula, and how often do they use the doula support?
Alyssa: Who hires them? Tired families hire them! You get to the point of exhaustion. I don’t think when you’re pregnant you’re thinking about an overnight doula because you truly don’t understand what you’re in for. But newborn babies sleep all the time, so they could sleep up to 22 out of 24 hours a day, so you’re thinking, well, of course, like, newborn babies sleep all the time. I’m going to sleep when the baby sleeps. They’re going to be feeding every two to three hours!
Kristin: They get up a lot!
Alyssa: Which means all day and all night, you will be up feeding every two to three hours, at least. So your sleep becomes these little tiny chunks. Because if you think if you have a newborn baby that’s eating every two hours, and it takes you an hour to breastfeed, and then after the breastfeeding session, you have to burp; you have to change the diaper; you have to get the baby back to sleep. You’ve maybe got 30 to 45 minutes, if you’re lucky, to sleep before the baby needs to feed again.
Kristin: And some clients hire us for one overnight to get a good night of sleep and catch up; other clients hire us every night, and we bring in a team, in and out, or have one doula consistently. And some of our clientele have a partner who travels a lot, or I’ve even supported a family where the mother was going back to work from maternity leave and was traveling for her job, so as an overnight doula, I supported the husband as he cared for the toddler that was waking; I was caring for the baby. And so there are a lot of unique situations, but a lot of our moms who have partners who travel a lot want that extra support, whether they have a new baby or other kids in the household that need support, as well.
Alyssa: I think it depends on resources. So if someone is sleep deprived and they’re like, I just need one night of reprieve, and that’s all we can afford and that’s what we’re going to do, then that’s what they do.
Kristin: Exactly.
Alyssa: Even if they don’t have the resources, oftentimes during pregnancy, if parents have the foresight to ask for postpartum support as a baby shower gift, they can have several overnights gifted to them by friends and family.
Kristin: Which is better than all the toys and clothes they’ll outgrow.
Alyssa: I always tell them, you’re going to get mounds of plastic junk that you’ll literally look at and say that’s hundreds of dollars’ worth of stuff I’m never going to use, and you could have had an overnight doula in your home so you could sleep.
Kristin: Easily!
Alyssa: So I think it’s just based on resources because, like you said, we’ve had people hire us for, you know, two overnights and we’ve had two months straight. So I think it just depends. I mean, I don’t know that it’s a type of client. I think that’s just kind of based on resources available.
Kristin: And we certainly support families who are struggling with postpartum mood disorders and anxiety, but that is not all that we serve as far as clientele. But for moms who are being treated in therapy, then we certainly are able to give them much-needed support and rest as we care for their baby, and we do have a package where we are able to lower our hourly rate for clients who are in the Pine Rest mother-baby program or are seeking therapy.
Alyssa: Yeah, sleep deprivation is considered to be the number one cause of perinatal mood disorders, so all these moms with anxiety, depression, up to postpartum psychosis — when you’re sleep deprived, you’re literally torturing your brain and your body, and it’s really hard to function. So sleep is such an imperative thing, and for your baby, too. If you’re not sleeping and your baby’s not sleeping, physiologically, that baby needs sleep in order to grow, for their brain to develop, for their immune system to function properly. It’s so critical for both parents and children.
Kristin: Agreed. So, really, anyone can benefit from it. Our shortest shift would be coming in at 10:00 PM and leaving at 6:00 AM, but a lot of clients extend that time.
Alyssa: I’ve found that a lot of people like you to come a little bit earlier, especially if they have older children. So if there’s older siblings, let’s say 6:00 comes around and you’re trying to get dinner on the table. You have a two-year-old, a five-year-old, and a newborn.
Kristin: That’s a lot!
Alyssa: That overnight shift tends to, when parents say, yeah, yeah, come at 8:00 or 9:00 when I’m going to go to bed — that very quickly changes to 5:00 or 6:00. So either that shift moves up, or it just lengthens. So the doula can come from, a lot of times, 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM, and they do a lot of 12-hour shifts because they’re there for the hustle and bustle of getting dinner, wrangling toddlers, helping with the newborn, and then helping with bedtime routines for two or three children and then taking that infant newborn and helping them get to sleep. Usually, it’s in that order. Like, the doula will take the baby and put them to sleep, and then the parents get to spend some quality time with this toddler who is usually lashing out because they are used to being the only child, if there’s only one, and are really, really seeking that one-on-one attention that they’re not getting anymore.
Kristin: Yeah, that’s the perfect time to bond, and they can read them a bedtime story and sing songs; whatever their nighttime routines were before Baby arrived.
Alyssa: Yeah, and that’s one thing I stress, too, with my sleep consults is just having a really good bedtime routine, and even if I’m doing a consult for one child and there’s others in the household, I usually ask about them, too, because if you’ve got three kids who all have a different bedtime, and each bedtime routine is taking an hour, certainly whoever’s last on that list is going to bed at 9:00 or something, which is way too late for these little kids. So trying to consolidate and have a system in place and just get a schedule that works for the family, for everyone in the family, is a really big goal.
Kristin: Awesome advice.
Alyssa: So you mentioned earlier that a doula sleeps when the baby sleeps, and sometimes parents wonder, well, what do you mean? What does that look like? Depending on the house, we’ve had doulas sleeping on sofas in the living room.
Kristin: Yes, that’s what I’ve done.
Alyssa: We’ve had doulas sleeping in a spare room. We’ve had doulas sleeping in a spare room on the same floor, in a spare room on a different floor, and you can make anything work.
Kristin: With monitors and technology now, you know the second a baby stirs.
Alyssa: So parents are always like, oh, shoot, I don’t know how this is going to work. How am I going to do that? We’ve had blow-up mattresses in the nursery. Ideally, you want the doula to be as close to the nursey as possible, so they’re the one, when they hear that baby, they’re up; they’re there.
Kristin: No one else gets woken up in the household.
Alyssa: Yeah, you want the parents to be as far away. So sometimes I even tell them if you have a spare bedroom in the basement, go sleep there, because even with one of my most recent sleep clients, the first night we did the sleep consult, the doula was there overnight, and I contacted them the next day: how did you sleep? And they were like, oh, I wanted to so bad, but I kept hearing this phantom crying. Even when the babies weren’t crying, they hear it, anyway. So it does take, as parents, who are used to not sleeping for week after week after week — it takes time for your body and brain to adjust back to, oh, I’m able to sleep again. So it’s not instant. It usually takes at least a couple nights to get your brain to say, I can sleep. It’s okay to sleep through the night. I don’t have any responsibilities tonight. This doula is taking care of it. And it’s just a matter of them getting sleep in two-hour chunks instead of the parents getting sleep in two-hour chunks. So a doula can usually do two or three in a row before they’re too exhausted.
Kristin: Just like a birth doula. We can do a couple nights with a client in the hospital without sleep, and then we’re done.
Alyssa: Yeah. So for those clients of ours who we’ve had for two weeks straight or two months straight, it’s several doulas taking turns. Otherwise, they’re just too exhausted.
Kristin: Right, and that’s where we sometimes will bring in a team if it is continuous care.
Alyssa: But I think ideally, with sleep training, I would love to see every parent have a sleep plan and then a doula for five nights. That would just be — I don’t know; I think the mental well-being of these parents would increase drastically if they were able to do both.
Kristin: I would have loved an overnight doula with my kids being 21 months apart; having a toddler and a newborn. It would have been amazing.
Alyssa: Well, and some people, too, think it’s weird to have somebody sleeping in your home. I mean, always, when they meet the doula, they’re totally fine with it, but it is a weird thought to have this stranger come into your home who’s going to care for your babies. That’s why I think we’re so adamant about talking about our training and our certification process, and we’ve done background checks for people who want us to.
Kristin: Yeah, and we’ve shown immunization records and CPR certifications and so on and liability insurance. We have all of that.
Alyssa: Yeah, because especially with a mom with anxiety who needs to sleep and knows she needs this help, but now she has anxiety because a stranger is going to be sleeping in her home — we need to do whatever you have to, to make that mom feel comfortable to be able to sleep.
Kristin: Yes, and we’re there to do just that. So feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions about overnight doulas. We’d love to work with your family! Remember, these moments are golden.
One of Alyssa’s past sleep clients tells us her story about hiring an expert to solve her daughter’s sleep issues. She is honest about the fears she had going into it, the misconceptions and myths about sleep training that were dispelled while working with Alyssa, and how on the first day they saw improvement! You can listen to this complete podcast episode on iTunes or SoundCloud.
Alyssa: Hello! Welcome to Ask the Doulas. I am Alyssa Veneklase, and today, I’m super excited to be meeting for the first time and talking with Dominique. She was one of my past sleep clients. Welcome!
Dominique: Thank you for the welcome! I’m excited to be here!
Alyssa: Yeah! So I want to hear a little bit about what was happening at home and with sleep before you reached out to me.
Dominique: Yeah. So she is 11 months now, and before we reached out, it was getting to a point where she wasn’t taking naps, and if she was taking naps, it was, like, 15 minutes at a time. She was fussy all day. We were having to rock her to sleep for every single nap and bedtime, and that took 20 minutes.
Alyssa: So you would spend 20 minutes to get a 15-minute nap?
Dominique: Yes. Yes! So it was getting to a point where she didn’t seem like she was getting good sleep, and then we were just getting so frustrated. And I know you can’t expect a brand-new baby to sleep amazingly and to sleep through the night all the time, but she was not getting enough sleep, so it was just…
Alyssa: And she was nine months when you reach out? Does that sound about right?
Dominique: I think she was seven months when we reached out, yeah, just because I had read that if you were doing some sleep training, to kind of wait until about six months, so we decided to reach out around seven months, yeah.
Alyssa: I have different opinions about when to reach out!
Dominique: We may have waited a little too long!
Alyssa: Well, even by six months, that’s six months of forming some really bad sleep habits. And so before then, it’s really more of healthy sleep habits. You can’t really train a nine-week old baby. They’re not ready to sleep through the night, but there are some really healthy things that you can start incorporating during the day and at night to set yourself up for success at six months. So, yeah, it would have been a lot easier if you’d reached out earlier, but I’m glad you didn’t wait until 18 months!
Dominique: Yeah, I’m glad too, and I think if we have more kids in the future, we probably will incorporate some of the stuff that we learned, yeah.
Alyssa: Start a little earlier, yeah. So were you hesitant to start? What kind of fears or maybe even misconceptions did you have about sleep training before I worked with you?
Dominique: So I guess the biggest thing was that doing research and reading, I read a lot about crying it out and how it increases cortisol levels in babies, so they’re stressed out, and then they are learning how to cope on their own and they stay elevated, so they’re not learning how to be comforted, and instead they’re just crying themselves to sleep. So I was like, well, I don’t want to do that! I don’t want to set her up for not wanting to reach out to us for comfort, but then it also seemed like she was not happy because she was fussy and irritable all the time because she wasn’t sleeping.
Alyssa: So she was still crying all day, anyway.
Dominique: Yeah! So I was like, okay, there’s got to be some other ways to do this.
Alyssa: It blows my mind that people can still find information about cry-it-out online because I don’t know any sleep consultant who — I mean, letting a baby cry themselves to sleep just doesn’t even make sense to me. They don’t cry themselves to sleep. They might fuss themselves to sleep because they’re hearing themselves chatter, but yeah, those elevated cortisol levels for crying for two hours? No baby should sit in the crib alone and cry for two hours. I can’t stress that enough. I don’t even know who recommends that.
Dominique: And people say, well, oh, so you just let her cry in her crib? Well, no, we don’t just let her cry in her crib, but she had no self-soothing methods. She wasn’t self-soothing at all, so it was just like she doesn’t know how to go to bed unless we rock her.
Alyssa: So from what you remember, how long — well, I’ll go back. When you got my plan, was there anything that you were like, oooh, I don’t know about this? Or did it make sense?
Dominique: I think it made sense, all the different methods that you had mentioned to us. They all seemed pretty reasonable. The method where you sit in the room and kind of back out —
Alyssa: Oh, a gradual withdrawal?
Dominique: Yeah, gradual withdrawal, yeah. It seemed worse. When we were in the room, it was like she — it wasn’t — she wanted to lay down and know that we were right there. It was like, why are you in the room and you’re not picking me up? So that did not work for her.
Alyssa: Yep, you have to figure out and know your baby’s temperament. It’s first and foremost what drives the sleep method you use, because oftentimes these ones where the parents are in the room with the child, it’s way too stimulating. Baby is either like, you’re here; why aren’t you touching me? Why aren’t you holding me? Or, hey, it’s party time. I’m going to get up and I’m going to sing and dance in the crib because you’re here. So I’m glad you noticed that.
Dominique: Yeah, we kind of figured out that it was better for her that we didn’t sit in the room, but it did help for us to go back in periodically and soothe her.
Alyssa: So how long, do you remember, until you started to see results?
Dominique: Oh, man. The first night! So I think we started with bedtime, not her naps, because we got your plan, and I was going to be off work for a few days, so that first night, instead of rocking her for 20 minutes, we did her bedtime routine, which was another thing that we incorporated. Instead of nursing her to sleep, I was nursing her and then we would change into pajamas, wash her face, read her a book, and then put her to bed. And so that very first night, we laid her down, and she cried. We did three minutes, and then went in for 30 seconds, and then three minutes. And I think it was two rounds. So she cried for three minutes; I went in; she cried for another three minutes; I went in; and then it was quiet in her room.
Dominique: And I looked over at my husband, and I was like, this can’t be real!
Alyssa: Are you kidding me, right?!
Dominique: So it was amazing. She went to sleep, and I think that first night, she slept for about six hours, and then she got up to nurse, and then she went back to sleep fine. So yeah, the first night!
Alyssa: Yeah, so a lot of times, it’s just allowing them the opportunity to fall asleep on their own. I can’t tell you how many parents are like, oh, my baby has to be nursed; my baby has to be rocked; I don’t let my baby cry. Well, three minutes of crying — it’s not a lot, right?
Dominique: No, no.
Alyssa: If you consider all the crying she’s done because of lack of sleep and overtiredness, three minutes is nothing.
Dominique: Nothing!
Alyssa: And that’s all she needed to literally soothe herself to sleep. That’s what she did!
Dominique: Yeah, and we felt good about it. It wasn’t like we felt like we were neglecting her by letting her cry in her crib. It was just like she put herself to sleep, and now she’s getting a good chunk of sleep. So we were really happy with it!
Alyssa: Yeah, sometimes it’s just kind of looking at sleep a different way and realizing that cry-it-out means you put your crying baby in a crib; you shut the door; you walk away, and you don’t go back in. And nobody wants to do that! I don’t want to do that! But, you know, talking about cortisol levels, it’s a natural response to anything. You know, your baby goes to the doctor; you go to the dentist. Our cortisol — it’s a flight or fight thing. The thing with a baby that helps bring that back down is a loving caregiver, so she has you and Dad right there. You’re the buffer in this situation, so even crying for three minutes, her cortisol levels might rise a little bit, but then you came in after three minutes, and she saw you were there. And I talk about sleep cues sometimes, like saying goodnight, I love you. You know, you have these sleep cues that you repeat, and then their cortisol levels go back down. And then they might fuss for a few more minutes, and then they’re out. It just happens!
Dominique: It was amazing!
Alyssa: Is there anything else that you had maybe thought that I would have told you — I guess were there any other surprises from those misconceptions? Anything that you felt like, oh, I can’t believe she’s telling me to do this, or I can’t believe she’s not telling me to do that?
Dominique: I guess in the first email we got with the plan, I think you had said her first nap should be 60 to 90 minutes, and then her second nap should be 90 to 120 minutes, and I was, like, there’s no way she’s going to sleep! Up until that point, her naps had been maybe a half an hour during the day, and she was getting maybe two naps a day. So then we tried it with her naps, and she did sleep an hour that first nap, and then we got a couple of longer hour and a half naps. We’ve only gotten a few two-hour naps out of her, but that was a big shock because I was, like, man, she really hasn’t been getting as much sleep as she should have been getting.
Alyssa: Well, and it’s funny because we think she’s so tired during the day; she’s not napping; she just has to be tired enough to sleep all night. And it’s counterintuitive. They need sleep during the day so they don’t get overly tired, and then they don’t fight sleep at night. So right now, at 11 months, though, that morning nap should only be 30 minutes, FYI. I don’t know what you’re doing right now.
Dominique: So her naps have still been a little bit of a battle, and we’ve kind of gotten to a point where we’re letting her sleep for that first nap because that seems to be her best nap of the day, and if we cut it short, sometimes she doesn’t take a good nap the rest of the day. So we’re still kind of tweaking that a little bit because —
Alyssa: Is she sleeping through the night with one feed, then?
Dominique: Yes, and we’ve cut out her nighttime feed now.
Alyssa: So she can go all night, like a full twelve hours?
Dominique: Not a full twelve. She will sleep from about 6:30 and then she’s still waking up around 4:30, 5:00, so then we put her back to sleep. So it’s not perfect, but we haven’t quite figured out how to make those little switches. So shortening her first nap, lengthening her second nap, and then putting her to bed closer to 7:00.
Alyssa: Yeah, so having a really long morning nap encourages that early morning wakeup. So I would try for a later bedtime; 7:00, 7:30. And don’t let her sleep longer than a half an hour in the morning.
Dominique: Okay! All right!
Alyssa: A little added tip there!
Dominique: I trust you! I’ll try it!
Alyssa: Yeah, we want her to sleep from — I mean, not every baby will sleep the full twelve hours, but if she’s going to bed at 7:30, I would think no earlier than 6:30. That’s eleven-ish hours depending on when she falls asleep.
Dominique: And that would be nice because getting up at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning is not ideal.
Alyssa: And then remember that 2-3-4 rule. So after she wakes up, she’ll be tired after about two hours, and then three hours after that wakeup. So let’s say you have an ideal — let’s say she wakes up at 7:00 in the morning. She should go down for that first nap at 9:00 and sleep from 9:00 to 9:30, and then three hours after that, which would be 12:30, she should have a two-hour nap. An hour and a half is fine; not all babies sleep two hours. But at her age, she should want to sleep about an hour and a half.
Dominique: Okay, and we have been doing that, the 2-3-4. It’s just she’s been getting up so early, so if she gets up at 6:00, we’re putting her down for her first nap at 8:00 in the morning, which does seem really early to us.
Alyssa: But she’s also going to bed really early. 6:30 is pretty early.
Dominique: Yeah, and sometimes by 6:00.
Alyssa: And you can’t just put her to bed at 7:00 tonight if she’s been up since 5:30. It’s a slow, 15 to 30-minute increments. But you have the added fun of daylight savings time, which messes everybody up. And probably by the time this episode airs, it will be past daylight savings, but we can still talk about it. And it might actually help you. So let’s see: spring forward. 7:00 is really going to 8:00, so her 6:00, 6:30 bedtime is going to be 7:30. So you might not want to push it too far.
Dominique: Yeeha, I think our situation is a little unique for that because we need to adjust her bedtime, whereas some people, they want to keep their kid on their 7:00 schedule, so they have to adjust backwards.
Alyssa: Yeah, you have to do it slowly. Like, with my daughter, I’ve been putting her to bed early; every night, a little bit earlier, to get her to that point. But yeah, I would try for a later bedtime, and that morning nap is what’s screwing up your morning wakeup. It’s just too long.
Dominique: Yeah, unfortunately! I’m like, okay, her morning nap — I’ve got to get stuff done!
Alyssa: Well, make it in the afternoons, instead, because that’s the nap she’s going to have until she’s two, three, maybe even four, that afternoon nap. And think about when you go to childcare; you know, naps at 12:30 or 1:00.
Dominique: All right, we’ll make some adjustments!
Alyssa: Anything else? What would you tell people about sleep consults that you think people need to know?
Dominique: I would say it’s worth it, and I’ve had a lot of people say, you know, what did you do for sleep, and then I explain what we did, and I say, “But we needed some help.” Like, it was just getting too frustrating, and I would just say it’s not cry-it-out like you think it is, just shutting the door and letting them cry, because I do think that’s a big misconception. So I would just say, look in to a sleep consultant, or just don’t take everything you read on the internet and apply it!
Alyssa: Well, and there’s so much information, but again, adjusting it to your specific family and your specific child, because I could have just given you, hey, my method is gradual withdrawal, and there you go. And then you’re doing this with your child and she’s like, this is not working. Yeah, it’s way too stimulating for her. So you can’t just give an end-all, one-fix method for every family. So that’s the hard part. You could read a hundred books, but you would need to have the ability to discern which method works for your family, and then have somebody there coaching you and holding your hand. And a big part of what I do is holding you accountable. Did you do this? How is it going? So that nap… We’re not working together anymore, but I can’t help myself; I have to tell you that nap is too long in the morning!
Dominique: But no, it was definitely worth it, and it was nice that you kind of explained the different methods and we could figure out which one would work best.
Alyssa: Sometimes, I know that there’s one that’s going to work, and that’s the one I suggest. Sometimes, I’m like, okay, based on your personality and your parenting style, I’m going to give you a few options. Here’s what I would recommend, but I want the parents to feel comfortable moving forward, and oftentimes, I still know which one I would recommend. Like you, you need to go through and say, oh, well, gradual withdrawal seems really more my parenting style, and I understand that it’s going to be a slower process. But you’re like, nope, didn’t work. So let’s move on to this one; let’s try that. Nope, didn’t work. But oftentimes what happens is a parent tries that one; it fails, and they give up and they’re done. They think sleep training didn’t work and it’s junk. So I get it.
Dominique: No! Keep going!
Alyssa: I get why parents feel frustrated. And how is she doing now?
Dominique: She’s doing really well. She’s starting to walk. Well, she is walking, so she’s very busy, so we’re keeping up with her now. But yeah, she’s doing really good!
Alyssa: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I love hearing stories from clients! Did I ever get a picture of her? I love getting pictures of babies. You’ll have to show me before you go.
We had a client recently tell us that our costs are too low for what all we offer for pregnancy and birth support. We certainly agree with him as we are on call for clients 24-7 from the moment they sign a contract with us. Some births are two hours and others are multiple days. We miss holidays, birthdays, and plan our vacations around client due dates. We love this work, but it does take a toll on us emotionally and physically. Doulas often add the “unless I am at a birth” clause to every social invite. This work is rewarding, but very unpredictable.
Our Gold Coast Doulas team is worth much more than our current rates, but we want a teacher to be able to hire us without a huge financial strain. We go above and beyond to make all of our clients feel like VIPs because they are. Even with our exceptional service, clients often ask us how we can help make doula support work with their budgets.
We are thrilled that most HSA and FSA plans now consider birth doulas as a qualified medical expense. Many Gold Coast clients choose to allocate their HSA or FSA funds to pay for doula support. Unfortunately, standard insurance doesn’t cover doula support in Michigan at this time. Hopefully that changes in the near future.
We are finding more and more grandparents or friends wanting to gift postpartum doula support or classes to our clients. We can make custom baby shower inserts and can create gift cards for any of our services. We are also on the online and in-store baby registry at Ecobuns Baby & Co in Holland. Why not reduce the baby shower clutter and ask for a postpartum or birth doula instead? We aim to make your life easier during a time of many transitions.
Gold Coast offers payment plans for most of our services once the standard deposit is made. We also accept credit cards, cash, money orders, and checks. We are a professional business and as a result do not barter for chickens or canned goods, although we do believe in supporting our local farmers with our own money.
We offer packages if you purchase one or more classes or services as we want you to feel supported and prepared as you start or grow your family. This makes adding on services more affordable and gives you the VIP support you are looking for. We are happy to customize any options just for you. Please reach out and email us info@goldcoastdoulas.com with any questions or fill out our contact form. We are here to help.
Doctor Janna Hibler, ND talks to Alyssa and Kristin about how a naturopathic doctor treats pregnant and postpartum women, body and mind. You can listen to this complete podcast episode on iTunes and SoundCloud.
Alyssa: Hello, welcome to Ask the Doulas podcast. I am Alyssa Veneklase, co-owner of Gold Coast Doulas, and I am here with Kristin, my business partner today, and Janna Hibler. She’s a naturopathic doctor and clinical nutritionist. Hello, Janna!
Janna: Hi, how’s it going, guys?
Alyssa: So Kristin and I met you at a little gathering of the minds at Grand Rapids Natural Health Recently. We kind of hit it off, and then you and I got coffee, and we hit it off even further. We got to chatting forever, so we were like, let’s just pause this and record our conversation! And today, first, I want to know a little bit more about what you do, but when the two of us were talking, we spoke quite a bit about postpartum depression, and I want to talk about what happens leading up to that, even before you get pregnant, but then during pregnancy, too. What does that look like? What do depression and anxiety look like? How do we nip that in the bud?
Janna: Yeah, definitely! So it’s really important for all of us mamas and future mamas to know that how we are before we get pregnant and give birth is a good indicator of how our health might look like after we give birth. Things you mentioned such as anxiety or depression tend to get more severe after we give birth just because of the extreme stress and sleep deprivation that we are under, having a newborn. I like to emphasize to my patients that this is nothing to feel bad about. It’s just when you don’t sleep, you don’t release the same neurotransmitters and have the same brain chemistry with certain levels of uppers and feel-good hormones. So it’s kind of…
Alyssa: I’m obviously a big proponent of sleep for babies and parents. So what would you tell a parent who says I’m not even pregnant yet; I’m thinking about getting pregnant. How does a person even know if they have depression or anxiety? And what do you do about it? Let’s say that I’m kind of a depressed person or I get anxious about things at work or with my friends or my family. What do you recommend? And then let’s say I came to see you as a naturopathic doctor.
Janna: So again, I like to really emphasize that you are normal and this is a normal part of being a female. If we’re talking evolutionarily speaking, we were made to be out in nature, and so when we’re put in the city, even if we’re out half an hour from Grand Rapids downtown, there’s a lot of lights. There’s a lot of noises. There’s a lot of things going on that cause an overresponse, and that can lead to anxiety and depression. So some symptoms might be feeling nervous in certain situations or some OCD tendencies, or a lower mood display and laughing less or getting less excited about certain things in life. These can be very mild, but if you look at them over the course of the day, if you have a lot of little things, they do add up. So when you walk into a naturopathic doctor’s office, something I really love and take to heart is that we have our medical concentration, but we also have a lot of education with psychology and knowing how the brain works. So I would ask you a bunch of questions; the normal medical questions you get, but in addition, we’re going to ask about your sleep cycles, your exercise, your diet regimen. All these play a part in our mental health, and my end goal is for everybody to feel their best all the time. In order to find out how people are feeling, I like to run a series of either urinary or blood tests. This can give us an indication of brain chemistry, hormone levels, cortisol, in addition to the normal things like checking sugar and red blood cells. I really like to hone in on these specialty tests because by checking our brain chemistry, I can find exactly what neurotransmitters might be high or low, and we can treat appropriately.
Alyssa: So when you talk about neurotransmitters, what does that mean? What are you looking at and what does that mean to you?
Janna: So our neurotransmitters; there’s the common ones we’ve all heard of like dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, epinephrine, even histamine. There is a whole slew of uppers and downers, and basically, we take the brain chemistry analysis tests so we can see if some of them are off. Some people that have allergies have high histamine levels. That’s an upper, so when we have allergies, those people actually tend to have anxiety, as well. And so we can actually nip the anxiety in the bud by treating the allergies and reducing histamine levels. So it’s really a cool science.
Alyssa: And the cortisol and serotonin and melatonin, all those things you can actually check with blood and urine?
Janna: Exactly, yeah.
Kristin: And a lot of women have issues with their thyroid; is that part of the testing, that you can check thyroid levels?
Janna: Absolutely. I like to refer to it as our hormone triangle where we have our thyroid as the king, our sex hormones like estrogen, progesterone, and then we have our cortisol. All three of those categories play a huge role in our hormone development and picture that we have, so we do a lot of intensive testing to find out where those levels are at.
Alyssa: And what would you do if I came in and my cortisol levels were sky-high and you noticed something with my thyroid? What would you tell me to do?
Janna: So depending on your lab results, the thyroid could be treated in two ways. One, sometimes we do give conventional medications, and then another way to treat, depending on your levels, is with herbs. We can give a series of botanical herbs to actually bring your levels back to normal, as well as certain nutrients. There’s a number of co-factors that actually feed our thyroid hormone to turn from its inactive to active form, and without them, we will not function. So that’s things like vitamin D and iron and vitamin C; very common nutrients that we take for granted, but they play a vital role in our thyroid health.
Alyssa: So how long do you test that out before you put them on a drug?
Janna: Typically, I like to give a patient three to six months to see if we can fix it with nutrients and herbs. Again, it comes back to what the patient wants. If a patient wants results this month, then we might take a more aggressive treatment plan. But if they’re willing to do it completely naturally, then three to six months.
Alyssa: So let’s say I get it under control; I’m pregnant, and I still notice now that I still have some anxiety or depression. What do you do during pregnancy?
Janna: I really like to encourage diet and exercise and sleep. Those are our biggest best friends to really help out. Different lifestyle factors can have a huge effect on our mood and behavior. So let’s start with maybe some foods. We could eat a diet rich in dopamine, so we could do things like chocolate. I mean, who doesn’t love chocolate? We all love it, but do we know it’s high in magnesium and it’s high in zinc? Those are vital co-factors to run our brain chemistry. We can also have blueberries or nuts and seeds, which are high in vitamin B6 and 9 and all these B vitamins to help also with our mood. We could do some grass-fed or fermented foods, which help with our gastrointestinal health, which again, I’m sure you guys have all heard of the gut being the second brain. And then sulfur; sulfur-rich foods like onions and garlic that actually help with detox, so if we are having some things get backed up, we can help get them out. So we really try to approach it from a multifactorial view hitting all points. How’s our diet? How’s our exercise? How’s our sleep? How’s our stress? And a lot of what I get into with patients, too, is how is your relationship at home? Do you feel supported? Do you feel loved? Do you feel heard by your partner? By your business partners, your coworkers? These are all part of our needs that play a role in our mental health when we’re pregnant and when we’re not pregnant.
Alyssa: I was going to say those are things that should be carried over throughout, right?
Janna: Yeah, yeah!
Alyssa: Meanwhile, exercising and getting enough sleep.
Janna: Totally, and pregnancy just kind of is that opportunity where we find our weaknesses in our body, and it’s actually a great opportunity to increase our health for the rest of our life and find out things we wouldn’t know about it unless we were pregnant.
Alyssa: Oftentimes, I feel like that is the point in a woman’s brain and body where we finally start to understand and care about what’s happening to our body, and because we’re growing another human, then we’re like, oh, I better start taking care of myself so that I can take care of this baby.
Janna: Yeah, and I think that has a lot to do with what happens after we give birth and why a lot of moms struggle. I mean, I want to say that loud on this podcast right now that mom life is hard. It is a struggle, and I know we all try to put on a face that we’re doing well and everything’s perfect at home, but mom life is hard, and that’s maybe another podcast sometime, but that’s a conversation I’d love to get started because it is hard, and to that extent, why we have a hard time after birth is a lot of the time – and I’m sure you guys see this all the time, being in the house with moms – that the moms forget about themselves. They put all of their energy, all of their love, into their baby, and I was guilty of it, too. I mean, I have a two-year-old, and I definitely did it. I’m still guilty of it some days because we love that human so, so much. But I think it’s really important for our mental health and as mothers to put the energy back into ourselves and remember that we really can’t pour from an empty cup, and we have to be healthy and strong ourselves in order to make strong and healthy babies.
Alyssa: So what do you recommend to a mom who’s suffering from depression? You know, maybe they had a beautiful pregnancy, easy labor and delivery, and then they’re like, oh, my God; this is way harder than I thought, and then sink into a depression that they’ve never experienced before. How do you get them out that?
Janna: And so many moms do! There are so, so many out there that come in, and they’re like, not even my husband knows how sad I am; not even my best friend knows how sad I am, and that’s where I really encourage everyone to just start reaching out. I don’t want you to be ashamed; I don’t want you to feel guilty, because it doesn’t mean you’re a bad mom. You’re an excellent mom because you care so, so much, and asking for that help and taking that first step, making people aware that this is something I do need help with, and receiving that love. From a medical standpoint, too, we’ll go in and I’ll help adjust hormones and your brain chemistry with either herbs or conventional treatments or nutrient levels to help your body, but I think so much of it also comes from a mental and emotional spot of feeling supported and loved by your people around you.
Alyssa: So is naturopathic medicine, in general, more of a functional approach versus the medical approach or kind of a combination?
Janna: Exactly, yeah, and functional medicine is so great. That is the bridge between conventional medicine and natural medicine because we all agree on it, you know. We see a lab level, and it’s important to attend to it when it’s on its lower level. Traditionally-minded thinking, we only would treat something like vitamin D if it was set low because that’s the level that can cause rickets and true mobility issues, but what about everybody that has low-normal, that they’re in that functional, funky range? That’s at a stage that can cause depression, that you can get autoimmune diseases. So as a naturopathic doctor, I really work on treating it then and now so we can prevent getting those diseases because they may not pop up in five or even ten years, but they will happen if they’re not treated.
Kristin: Even in pregnancy, there’s evidence that preeclampsia with the lack of vitamin D, that can be a factor in developing preeclampsia.
Janna: Exactly, and that’s how it can be that simple sometimes where moms come in and, hey, they just want to run a nutrient panel just to find out what are their baseline nutrients, and then that way when breastfeeding comes into play, especially for extended breastfeeding – I’ve been breastfeeding for two and a half years, so that’s something I’ve been keeping a constant eye on, what are my nutrient levels, because we don’t want to cause other problems from just being depleted. So yeah, that’s a great point.
Alyssa: Depleted is a good word to describe mothers postpartum, I think. Most of us at some point just feel depleted, whether it’s mentally, physically, whether it’s just breastfeeding. That alone can make you feel depleted; this baby is literally sucking the life out of me!
Janna: Because you’re giving everything!
Kristin: I tandem nursed, so I really felt depleted when I was nursing two!
Alyssa: It’s like this weird tug of war between “I love doing this” and “I hate doing this so much.” I remember getting so over it when I was done, and then a month later I missed it. I was like, oh, my God; I’m not breastfeeding anymore! But I was so ready to throw those pump accessories in the trash and celebrate, but it’s just a weird…
Janna: It is! And every mom is different, so we like to celebrate moms at each level, whether they want to breastfeed for three months or six months or a year. We all have our breaking point, and we want to prevent us from getting to that point. Mama matters, too!
Kristin: For sure!
Alyssa: Well, thank you so much for joining us, and if people want to find you to come visit you or just ask you questions or follow you on Instagram, where do they find you?
Janna: Absolutely! So I’m currently accepting patients at Grand Rapids Natural Health, and I’m also on social media as holisticmommyandmedoc, and you can reach out there anytime. My name is Janna Hibler on Facebook, and feel free to message me anytime. I like to get to know my mamas. Since I just moved from Vermont, I’m looking to build up my network of mamas because we are a tribe and we all need to stick with each other, so whether it’s personally or professionally, I do want to link up with you!
Most parents probably don’t think about hiring a doula if they aren’t pregnant. They think of a birth doula only supporting a laboring mother, but that couldn’t be farther from reality. Birth doulas can support any parent. Postpartum doulas can support adoptive families by helping them to prepare for baby’s arrival and in-home after baby arrives. There are so many ways doulas can support families that are adopting!
At Gold Coast we are focused on educating parents. We offer several prenatal and postnatal classes to help new parents navigate this new territory. We offer a Newborn Survival class that goes over essentials of surviving those first few weeks and months home with your baby. Real life scenarios and raw topics are discussed to help parents feel confident in their roles.
We also offer a Prenatal Stress class. This is designed for any parent, pregnant or adopting, to understand the affects that stress has on a developing child’s brain, not just throughout pregnancy but through their growing years as well.
Infant Massage is a great way for adoptive parents to bond with a new baby. Our instructor offers classes as well as private in-home instruction. Another great way to bond is babywearing. We have a certified babywearing expert that does in-home instruction and can show you how to safely use your carrier(s).
For parents that might be bringing multiples home (twins or even triplets) we offer a Preparing for Multiples class, and we have a postpartum doula that is a mother of twins herself. Her in-home support, expertise, tips, and tricks are invaluable!
If grandparents will be primary care givers, we offer a class called The Modern Grandparent that updates them on the latest safety information as well as informs them about today’s parent and how parenting styles differ from generations past.
Our lactation consultant can help adoptive mothers induce lactation and can also offer advice about chest feeding.
At Gold Coast, our postpartum doulas are available day and night. Daytime support includes help with baby bonding, newborn care, help with older siblings, meal prep, and evidence based resources. Your postpartum doula is your trusted guide for anything baby related. Overnight support allows parents to get a full nights rest while the doula takes care of the baby through the night. The doula will feed the baby, burp, change diapers, etc allowing the parent(s) to get as much rest as possible knowing there is an experienced professional caring for their child.
A postpartum doula is an amazing gift idea for baby showers! We can create a custom insert for your shower invitations and you can also register online for any of our services at EcoBuns Baby + Co online.
We also offer Gentle Sleep Consultations. Sleep is critical for adults and babies. Babies needs proper sleep for brain development and physiological growth. Parents need sleep to help manage the day to day obstacles of parenthood as well as for basic health and wellness.
We also have doulas specially trained in grief that can help you through loss.
Some of the trusted resources we suggest to families are:
Kelly Mom https://kellymom.com/category/parenting/ Athough there is alot of information about breastfeeding on this site, there are some relevant parenting and adoptive parenting tips as well.
At Gold Coast Doulas, we pride ourselves on being the premier doula agency in West Michigan. We offer judgment-free support to all families regardless of their parenting styles. We are here for your family, wherever you are in your journey.
Right when you get your child on a good schedule something inevitably comes up that makes it difficult to stay on track. We just went through the dreaded daylight savings (the worst for adults too!). Right now we are in the midst of the holidays. Here are some sleep tips for keeping your children’s sleep schedules on track.
If you’re traveling and driving, try to time the car rides over nap times. For instance, if you have a three hour drive and you know little Johnny takes his afternoon nap from 12:30 – 2:30, hit the road at noon and do some singing or stimulate him for a while until he gets drowsy and falls asleep. Then when you are almost there, he should wake up!
If you are flying, naps can be tricky. If you have a baby, holding the baby to sleep usually works. But if you have an 18 month old, you might have to prepare yourself for a no nap situation that day. In this instance, be sure to get them down to bed a bit early that night.
What if you’re traveling somewhere with a time change? Ugh..every parent dreads this no matter the age of your child. If you’re only going for a couple days, keep the child on their normal schedule. That means if they go to bed at 7pm and there’s a 2 hour difference, you put them to bed at 5pm. I know this messes up party plans but you’ll have to think ahead. Bring a pack and play for your baby or a blow up mattress for your older child and put them to bed in a dark room with a sound machine at their normal bed time.
If you’re traveling and staying for an extended period of time, slowly move their bedtime back in 30 minute increments until they’re at a more reasonable bedtime. Then before you leave to go back home, move that bedtime back to the normal time slowly. If you wait to move the bedtime back until you’re home, just know that you’ll have 2-3 days of adjusting to deal with.
If you’re hosting a party in the afternoon during a normal nap time, let everyone know that your child will be sleeping. Don’t let them stay up just because Grandma wants to cuddle. They will have to wait until your child wakes up. During a party, that sound machine may need to be turned up a bit louder than normal.
Remember that sleep is a priority and stand firm when a friend or relative says, “Oh, just let him stay up.” Easy for them to say!
As a sleep consultant, I get asked often how early you can sleep train a baby. My answer is this – Most babies are ready around 12 weeks, but it’s never too early to start introducing heathy habits to make the sleep training go smoothy when baby is ready.
Why 12 weeks? Most babies are developmentally ready around this time. They’ve also established a healthy eating routine (whether breastfeeding or bottle feeding), and they’ve gained substantial weight.
At 12 weeks most babies are ready to sleep through the night. Many breastfeeding mothers will actually wake their babies to nurse them, even though the baby would sleep through on their own. Some mothers pump once in the night and let baby sleep. Other mothers can make it through the night just fine sleeping 8 hours straight, but they will more than likely need to nurse or pump right when they wake up!
Please note that at 12 weeks sleeping through the night does not mean a 12 hour stretch. Very few babies at this age are ready for that. But some babies may be ready for a 6 or 8 hour stretch. If you’ve only been getting sleep in 2 hour chunks, this sounds fantastic!
When I put a plan together with a family, I first talk with them to find out what their values and goals are. If nursing in the night is a priority, we create a plan around that. If their main objective is for baby to get a full nights rest, uninterrupted, then we create a plan around that. There’s no one right answer to sleep training; it has to fit each individual family.
So what kinds of things can you do with your newborn before that 12 week mark? You need to realize that babies thrive on routine. A chaotic schedule is not the ideal environment for a newborn. From day one, you can start to create a sense of consistency.
Wake up around the same time in the morning and go to bed around the same time at night. Do this for you and your baby.
Talk to your baby. Narrate life to them. Tell them what you’re doing (changing their diaper, feeding, nap time, wake time, play time, etc). They are listening!
Have all sleep happen in a dark room with white noise. A good, arms-down swaddle is great for newborns! There are several types of swaddles (muslin wraps, Miracle Blanket, Love to Dream), find what works best for you and your baby.
As your baby establishes feeding patterns, try to stick to a schedule for feedings. Remember you must always be flexible. Babies are not always hungry every three hours on the dot. If your baby typically eats every three hours, be aware that sometimes it will be 2 hours, sometimes 2 1/2, but usually 3. Don’t ever let your baby cry for food just to wait until the right time on the clock. Always watch for their cues and respond accordingly before letting them get too upset.
Speaking of cues, watch for them! Your baby is constantly communicating with you. From day one, they are communicating. As they grow, if you’re paying attention, you will begin to distinguish what different cries mean. This is important to create a relationship of trust between you and your baby. You cannot assume every cry means food. Just as if you stubbed your toe, it would not help if someone offered you a hamburger. You would want to sit down and maybe have someone give you some ice or even a band aid.
By assuming all of your babies cries mean hunger, you are telling them you’re not listening to what they are saying. Pay attention to what was happening to and around the baby when they started crying. Some babies are more introverted and like staring peacefully at a wall. They may begin to cry if there is a loud noise, a bright flash of light, or someone gets in their personal space too quickly. Others want to be in the room with all the action. Those babies may cry when you leave the room, or if they can’t see out the window. They do not want to stare at a blank wall, they want colors, noise, and lights.
Your baby might cry because they are too hot, too cold, sitting in an uncomfortable position, have a dirty diaper, are tired, are hungry, have an upset stomach. By paying attention to how they react to what you offer, you start to establish that trust relationship that says,”I’m paying attention to you. I’m listening to what you’re telling me, and I will react accordingly.” Your baby will know that when something is too stimulating, you will pick them up and put them somewhere they feel more comfortable. Your baby will know that when they are tired, you will put them to bed.
A good example of this the well meaning visitor – or the “Space Invader” as I like to call them. They rush over to the baby and get right in their face. When the baby starts to cry, the visitor thinks the baby does not like them, when in fact they just invaded their personal space too abruptly. If a baby is content and then suddenly starts crying, it usually isn’t too hard to figure out why if you’re paying attention.
What does this have to do with sleep training? Everything! By establishing routines and a trust relationship from the beginning, you are eliminating unknowns for your baby. They trust you to do what’s best for them. When you talk them through what’s happening, they know what to expect. They know when it’s time to change a diaper, put on clothes, or take a nap because you’ve been narrating their story to them and you’ve created consistency. This level of routine, consistency, and trust is your foundation to healthy sleep habits.
Then, when you call me around 12 weeks to start gently guiding your child through a full night’s sleep, the ground work is already laid. A child that gets enough sleep is a healthier and happier child, and so are their parents.
For more information on sleep training, contact us by phone (616) 294-0207, email, or fill out our contact form. You can also learn more about Alyssa’s methods on our blog.
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