How I Got Brainwashed by Sleep Training Euphemisms

Soft language covers up hard truths.

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To start, I’m not going to debate the merits of sleep training versus co-sleeping. Our position on the matter is unwavering: we are jihadists in the co-sleeping caliphate.

But I wasn’t always this way. Not so long ago, you could find me in the comments section of a post on sleep training insisting that, “Not all sleep training is Cry-It-Out!”.

I even went so far as to hire goddamn 'sleep trainer’ off the Internet to help my second-born get to sleep.

When my son turned the ‘sleep training age’ (5-6 months) he still wouldn’t nap outside of my arms for more than 20 minutes. My second postpartum was already wobbly after I had weaned myself off Zoloft, the only solution I had found to stop my brain from devouring itself. I was spending what felt like hours upstairs in a dark room trying to rock, nurse, rock, pace, nurse, sing, rock my infant son to sleep my while my daughter sat downstairs watching an unprecedented amount of screen time. I didn’t want to just lay my son down and shut the door behind me, leaving him alone to sort out his inconsiderate circadian rhythm til morning.

Because there’s an exotic river of sleep terms that snakes through all parenting blogs and books— Wake windows! Self-soothing! Sleepy Lady Shuffle! Camping out! ! Ferberizing! Sleep regression! Controlled comforting! The 2,3,4 Schedule! Sleep Specialist! Gentle! Effective!— I thought, surely, there was some gentle process out there that could help me fix my ‘infant sleep problem.’ I just needed to find it and be consistent.

I scrolled my Insta feed and messaged a sleep training coach that claimed to do “gentle” sleep training. Perfect. Her business name even had the word “lamb” in it. Sooo gentle.  I imagined myself softly laying down an awake baby and booping him on the nose as he smiled and drifted off to dreamland.