Let me take a guess at why you are currently anxiously asking yourself what will happen if you don’t sleep-train your baby. Perhaps you just had a conversation with another mom, a pediatrician or a family member who tried to convince you it is essential to sleep-train your child.
Maybe you have read online that “good” sleep habits in children can only be attained by teaching your little one how to sleep independently at a young age. Or it may simply be that your own mind is full of doubts about your parenting (welcome to motherhood!). Or maybe you are just plain frustrated with your child’s current sleep situation (allow me to give you another resounding welcome to motherhood!).
This is a sticky topic and I want to start off by saying that this post is not about taking a “side” or condemning any parent’s way of handling their child’s sleep. I firmly believe that every child and every family is different and parents need to make decisions according to the unique needs of the household.
In fact, the way I have chosen to handle my daughter’s sleep may not be how I will handle sleep with our future children. On the other hand, I may do things the same way next time. I can’t know for sure because it will depend on the needs and nature of that particular child and our family’s situation at that time.
So whatever way you tend to lean on the sleep-training issue, as long as you know that you are doing what is best for your family, you are doing the right thing, even though you may feel like you are still struggling to figure it out.
As you read this post, remember to trust your gut as a mom. Listen to other people’s advice critically and don’t allow that advice to burden you. Other people can voice their opinions, but you have the control over your decisions for your family.
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I am not a medical professional. Nothing in this post is to be construed as or meant to replace medical advice. Please talk to your pediatrician about your child’s sleep.
What Will Happen if You Don’t Sleep-Train Your Baby
So what will happen if you don’t sleep-train your baby?
Well, to be honest, I can’t answer that for your child’s particular situation. But I can share with you what happened to my daughter whom I did not sleep-train:
She learned how to sleep.
That’s the short version of the story. But the real story is how we got to that point. And that’s what I’m going to share with you today. I hope you find some commonality and understanding to encourage you as you read this post, Mama.
My Daughter’s Sleep Journey …
As a Baby
Let me start off by describing what my daughter’s sleep looked like as a baby. Unless she was attached to my boob, she could not fall asleep. And unless she was in my arms (and usually also nursing), she could not stay asleep. That is the entire description of when and where my baby was capable of sleeping.
I was not miserable nursing my daughter to sleep and back to sleep over and over every night. We found ways to sleep that made us both comfortable enough to get better rest than a lot of parents and babies.
During my daughter’s first year of life, I nursed and held my daughter to sleep and through the night in my Lay-Z-Boy recliner (that was an invaluable purchase, by the way). I wore the My Brest Friend nursing pillow around my waist and laid my daughter on it, tilting it up just enough that she could not roll off even if my arms somehow lost hold of her in my slumber.
This sleep situation worked well for us until my daughter began to get too active during her sleep for me to be able to hold her anymore. Then my husband convinced me to move our sleep surface to a bed – a mattress on the floor to be exact. My 1-year-old daughter liked to travel internationally while she was sleeping, you see, and the chance of her falling off the bed was about 100%. So we stayed close to the ground.
It was actually a challenge for me for several nights to learn how to sleep comfortably in a bed again. Lying flat felt so uncomfortable at first after becoming used to sleeping halfway upright in my recliner for the past year.
It was also briefly a challenge for my daughter to sleep on a bed while nursing. She didn’t seem to know what to do with herself and kept crawling back and forth to switch nursing sides, usually ultimately deciding she was most content sleeping right on top of me (a habit I eventually broke when the heavy compression on my chest brought to mind images of those COPD commercials depicting an elephant sitting on top of a person while they slept).
But we both quickly adjusted to the change of sleeping surface and were better off for it. I no longer had to worry about my active sleeper falling out of my arms, and I could actually change positions and get up to relieve myself in between nursing my daughter back to sleep.
This new sleep situation also allowed me more freedom to get up and have time with my husband or get something done in the evenings until my milk dispensers were needed again.
But during that first year of sleeping in the recliner, my husband and I had known without a shadow of a doubt that we were doing the right thing for our daughter’s sleep.
As a baby and even beyond, I adamently believe that she was not physiologically capable of sleeping without nursing. Because of this, I was, overall, okay with our unique sleeping situation.
But I still had my moments. There were those nights when I just wanted a glimmer of hope that she would someday outgrow this need.
Not to mention those times when I feared what people would think if they found out my baby could not nap without me. Those embarrassing moments when I had to shedule everything around her naps, including having service people come to the house or inviting a friend over for a visit.
And so, at one point, when my daughter was about seven months old, I decided to try a gentle sleep training method of bouncing her to sleep. Aside from nursing, bouncing was frequently an effective way of calming my reflux baby.
Read about my full infant reflux journey here.
But after a few days of crumb-size success, I gave it up, knowing it was not going to work and knowing she was not nearly ready for it. It took too many tears (which also aggravated her reflux) to get her to sleep even while bouncing. And the times that I did manage to get her to sleep, she would wake up after about 20 minutes, more upset than when she fell asleep and desperately needing to nurse.
She always had a need to nurse frequently and I could sense it in her whenever that need was especially intense. It was almost as though something in my milk was healing to her tummy troubles and relaxing to her brain that otherwise refused to sleep. There were a few times when I tried to push her past it, but it never worked during those moments when I most felt that intense need from her.
As a Young Toddler
From the ages of one to two, nothing much really changed about our sleep situation overall. We continued with our nursing-to-sleep and back-to-sleep routine on the mattress on the floor and I was given little reason to believe it would ever end.
I will admit that the longer we had this sleep situation, the tougher it got for me. Generally, it still was not a major bother to me personally because it was simply the only life I had known as a mom. But at the same time, the longer it dragged on, the more I worried it would continue to drag on.
As we were hoping to have another child as soon as possible, I was also worried about having to manage nursing my toddler to sleep during a potential pregnancy and then with a potential newborn.
Read my post on trying to conceive while breastfeeding here.
At about 21 months of age, my daughter shockingly lost interest in nursing during the day, and I took the opportunity to completely day-wean her – except for naptime of course (read about my emotionally and physically challenging weaning experience here). This monumental moment gave me hope that she would, indeed, eventually outgrow her need to nurse to sleep as well.
It was only a few months later that I discovered decay on my 2-year-old daughter’s teeth and was advised by her dentist that it might be beneficial to try to wean her off of night nursing (although, thankfully, I was never pressured or made to feel as though it was wrong to nurse her to sleep).
I was in such a state of fear over what would happen to my daughter’s teeth and oral health that we decided to immediately sleep-train her, beginning with naptime on the 3-hour drive home. It was a bad decision, albeit enlightening.
I won’t go into every traumatic detail of what those couple of days and nights looked like … but I hated myself in that moment for what I was doing to her. I was trying to do what was best ultimately for her oral health. But it was damaging her in other ways.
Even though I stayed with her and tried to comfort her through it all, the level of distress she was in was incurable. She wouldn’t even let me touch her. She would cry and scream and just be absolutely miserable until her body was simply too exhausted to stay awake anymore.
She was not throwing a tantrum. In fact, at this age, my daughter really did not throw tantrums. Her hysterical state was the behavior of a child being denied something she needs.
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I hate to even admit that I did this to my child for those couple of days. Normally, I would not have. But I felt desperate to keep her teeth from rotting out of her mouth and feared the consequences of continuously coating her teeth in sugary breast milk all night long.
However, attempting this form of sleep-training when my daughter was not ready for it required me to do something that I knew without a doubt was hurting her, physically and emotionally. It made me numb. It made me angry.
And I carried a heavy burden of guilt, grief and regret the day after we discontinued our efforts. Every time my little girl spoke with her hoarse voice was a reminder to me of how hard she had begged me for what she needed those couple of nights.
I can hardly bare to remember and retell the events of those nights. Let me just sum up that experience with this piece of advice: Do not sleep-train your child when you know he is not ready for it if at all possible.
Also, as a word of comfort, my daughter’s teeth are stable a year and a half later, even with continued nursing throughout the night for most of that time. For more details on what we did to accomplish that, check out this post.
As an Older Toddler
I believe it was sometime after my daughter turned two that she began sleeping for somewhat longer streches at night – about 2-3 hours instead of 40 minutes to 1 1/2 hours. This was just another one of those small, gradual steps of progress toward her sleeping independantly.
It was also around this time that nursing began to be less and less enjoyable for me. By the time I became pregnant – and especially during my pregnancy – when my daughter was 2 1/2, I was pretty miserable a lot of nights. Nursing had become so uncomfortable physically, it made me angry and extremely irritable every night I had to nurse her longer than 5 minutes before she fell asleep.
At this point, I just wanted to be done. But my daughter did not, nor was she ready. So we continued on in this challenging state throughout my 16-week pregnancy (read the story of my complete molar pregnancy here).
After the pregnancy ended, we continued in this fashion for a few more months before I decided I couldn’t do it anymore. I was willing to try sleep-training again.
But 2 1/2 hours into my exhausted daughter crying in distress as I read her stories and sang to her while we lay in bed, I gave up. I could see that it was going the same direction as it had gone a year prior when we had tried to sleep train her. She clearly still was just not ready.
However, a few months before she turned 3, my daughter began to, on rare occasion, fall asleep in the car or while watching TV when she was extremely tired. That had never happened before this point. It gave me hope that her body was very gradually becoming capable of sleeping without nursing.
We were still nursing to sleep and back to sleep every night, but we started having a night here and there when she would nurse and nurse and not fall asleep. After 20, 30 or 40 minutes of extreme discomfort, I would finally sit up in frustration and announce that we were done with “Milkies” for the evening. We would then relocate to the living room where I would turn on the TV for her to watch until she eventually would fall asleep.
Read about the effects of screen-time on children here.
One of these particular nights, I was rocking her as she watched TV, and she fell asleep much quicker than I expected. I think it was from this point on that I started rocking her to sleep without TV whenever nursing went on way too long and I couldn’t take it anymore (which was still only an occasional occurance). And then I would nurse her back to sleep throughout the night.
And then something truly miraculous happened. My husband and I promised our daughter we would take her to the ice cream shop to get ice cream (an area in which she is completely and utterly deprived due to her tooth decay) if she slept all night like a “big girl” – meaning I would rock her to sleep and back to sleep every time she woke up but no nursing whatsover once bedtime started.
We had tried such bribery before. In fact, it was a regular thing for us to come up with tempting treats or toys and offer them to our daughter in exchange for sleeping all night without Milkies. But it had never been quite tempting enough once bedtime came around.
But on this historical night, it actually worked! I allowed my daughter to nurse while we read her bedtime story and did our prayer time. And then we said goodnight to the Milkies and I rocked her to sleep. She was asleep within 10 minutes! She slept a record-breaking 7 hours straight and I rocked her back to sleep the one time she woke up.
I can’t even describe how proud I was of her (and yes, she did get her ice cream reward). Although, to be honest, I do not believe it was sheer willpower that accomplished this. I firmly believe it was simply when her body was ready to sleep without nursing.
Why? Because she had legitimately tried to sleep without nursing in the past and was unable to. It was not a matter of being stubborn or making a decision.
Even when we tried to sleep train her at the age of 2 due to her tooth decay, she had made an impressive effort to fall asleep without nursing. She would lay down and close her eyes off and on and be very quiet for as long as 20 minutes. But when she could not sleep, she would inevitably get frustrated and her emotions would escelate the more tired she became.
It had been my husband’s and my belief all along that our daughter simply could not sleep without nursing. She was not capable of it until her body and brain matured enough that the need to nurse faded away. And once it faded away on its own, I had no trouble rocking her to sleep without nursing every single night.
Where We Are Now
What a long journey it has been, but so worth it! My husband and I have had to wait longer than a lot of parents for our child to sleep through the night. We have chosen to wait longer than many parents to let our daughter learn to put herself to sleep. We did it the way we did because it was in her best interest.
I just want to clarify again that I do not believe that we have guided our daughter’s sleep in a superior or inferior way to other parents who choose to sleep-train their babies. We have simply done what seemed best for her.
I am so amazed, relieved and satisfied to be able to say that now, at the age of 3 1/2, she often puts herself to sleep without me even having to be in the room with her. Sometimes she sleeps through the night; sometimes she wakes up once and I sit rocking her or just rubbing her back for a few minutes until she’s back to sleep.
It is truly incredible to me that she has learned how to sleep despite the fact that we did not sleep-train her as a baby. It’s incredible to me because it is contrary to what most people believe and preach about children’s sleep habits.
In a sense, we did sleep-train her in gradual stages. Sort of. But I would not really call our ultra-gentle methods “sleep-training”. I set boundaries as they became appropriate and only when I felt she was really ready for them. And sometimes she was not ready until long after I was ready to set a boundary.
But we made it through and I am so happy we did not ultimately force our child or ourselves to do something that felt wrong for us.
So the next time someone begins to lecture you about what will happen if you don’t sleep-train your baby, refer them to this blog post. And then you do whatever wisdom and motherly intuition instruct you to do with your child.
UPDATE May 4, 2022: My daughter recently turned 4-years-old, and, for many months now, she has been sleeping completely independently in her own room. She falls asleep usually within 5 minutes of me leaving her room and she never wakes up during the night unless she is sick. She sleeps exceptionally well and I could not be happier with how we handled her sleep as a baby and toddler!
Want more on the topic of sleep-training? Check out this post on why sleep-training is not right for every child.
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