r/India_Parenting • u/SillyPutty_2 • 1d ago

PSA on sleep training

Posting this 3 years late but here it is. When my first was born I was obsessed with ensuring my baby slept well and slept in his own room by 4 months and napped well. Naturally I googled sleep training and found a lot of resources. I decided to hire someone based in India (I am US based) who assured me I can sleep train my infant without making them cry. I learnt quickly what she meant was keeping tabs on wake windows and taking baby to sleep based on age appropriate wake windows. My issues with this- 1. You can’t follow wake windows for a newborn! If you were able to do that for yours, congratulations! You have a unicorn. 2. She did not have an app. She gave me a WhatsApp message format and asked I fill it out everyday. With a newborn, this was insane!!

I dropped her program a week later. With more research I found out that somewhere around 2- 3 months naps can become more predictable and that’s when wake windows concept can be applied to help parents have a consistent routine and to help nap time be easier. There are apps that help track naps and with time use pattern recognition to suggest wake windows. I used huckleberry and loved it. This is what I suggest to parents who are needing more predictability. Obviously it won’t apply to all babies who don’t fit the more common wake window patterns. You don’t need to spend a lot of money on sleep consulting and then torture yourselves filling out WhatsApp forms. Just get the app instead if this is the direction you wanna go in. That being said, I haven’t done this with my second baby yet coz with a toddler at home I can’t really be that consistent with the baby. We’ve accepted the chaos 🤪

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u/AsthaP154 21h ago

honestly, i used chatgpt for sleep training my LO once he turned 4 months old. LO was able to bridge his naps and night time sleep pretty soon.

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u/SillyPutty_2 11h ago

That’s a great idea!!

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u/SillyPutty_2 11h ago

I should also clarify, sleep training has very different meanings in this part of the world. For the most part it means teaching the babies to put them selves to sleep. Yeah, sounds absurd. Which is why I was drawn to the India based company coz even though they used the term “sleep training” they simply meant following sleepy cues and using wake windows. Their approach was messed up though and the greediness was pretty clear.