Sleep!?
In my experience at MOMS group and as a postpartum doula, there may not be a more widely discussed topic among new parents than sleep. How to get more sleep, how many hours a baby needs sleep, whether to wake the baby or not, and please oh please, how to we parents deal with sleep deprivation? Part of the complicated answer to all these excellent questions is that there are about 26 different answers if you search google or social media. I talk with moms each week about how overwhelming it can feel to receive contradictory information about so many topics related to raising a baby, like sleep. Sleep training versus letting the baby lead have both been successful tactics for families, yet the approaches are very different.
My goals when helping a family negotiate all these conflicting pieces of advice are: 1) a family needs to decide what feels right to them, and follow their instincts. Empowering a parent to trust that they know their baby and their situation best is important to me. 2) Seek out evidence-based information. I trust reliable, proven science. The trick can be finding reliable, up-to-date science. Here are a few websites I use for current research and information:
https://www.cdc.gov/parents/infants/
https://healthychildren.org/english/ages-stages/baby/Pages/default.aspx
Please send me an email if you have discovered other research based websites that provide helpful baby development information!
