The Nurture Revolution: Grow Your Baby's Brain and Transform Their Mental Health through the Art of Nurtured Parenting

by Greer Kirshenbaum

In reality, sleep training is not neuroscience-supported or evidence-based. It’s not trauma informed, it’s not nervous system informed, and it’s not mental health informed. It is based on absolutely no evidence of efficacy or safety for the infant brain. It is simply practice-based, meaning it is done because others have done it before. It’s not even particularly effective: One study of over two hundred infants found that sleep training only stopped nighttime signaling completely in 14 percent of babies who were sleep trained at home.8 Many parents find (and sleep training admits this) that they have to “retrain” their infants multiple times, after illness, teething, travel, or any other event in which an infant gets support to feel safe and relaxed throughout the night. Babies are not learning to sleep; they are learning to stop signaling, and their need for co-regulation is so strong that they signal again if their parents respond again. It’s also a totally unregulated and quite lucrative field.