High needs baby sleep is not “waking twice a night.” It is not “going through a regression.” It is not something a better bedtime routine will fix. I know because I lived it for ten months with my first son — and I want to be specific about what that actually looked like, because most descriptions of high needs baby sleep are still too gentle to capture what parents in the thick of it are actually experiencing. My son woke every twenty minutes. Not every two hours. Every twenty minutes, through the entire night, for the better part of ten…

If you’ve been searching gentle sleep training for the last hour, I want to save you some time. There are a lot of approaches out there. Some involve leaving your baby to cry. Some promise results in three days. Most require you to be a perfectly consistent robot at 3am when you’ve had four hours of broken sleep and your nervous system is running on empty. The gentle sleep training method I’m going to walk you through is different. It’s called fading — sometimes called the chair method or gradual retreat — and it doesn’t require you to leave your…

If your baby won’t sleep, I want to say something before anything else: you are not failing. I know that’s easy to say and hard to believe at 3am when you’ve been up since midnight and nothing is working. But I’ve been there — twice, with two very different babies — and the one thing both experiences taught me is that when a baby won’t sleep, it’s almost never about what the parent is or isn’t doing. It’s about finding the right system for your specific baby, in your specific life. My second son slept beautifully for the first four…