Young Sleep Support

Young Sleep Support Shannon Young | Gentle Sleep Consultant for Babies & Toddlers

Tell me you haven’t done it... 3am, about to attempt the ninja transfer, one thumb free, typing “why does my baby wake e...
23/07/2026

Tell me you haven’t done it... 3am, about to attempt the ninja transfer, one thumb free, typing “why does my baby wake every 40 minutes” into ChatGPT 🫠

I get why. It answers instantly and it sounds SO confident.

But here’s the problem. It learned about baby sleep from the internet. The charts with zero evidence base. The rigid schedules. The cry-it-out forums. And the loudest voices in infant sleep online are the sleep training ones - so that’s the well it’s drawing from.

Add in the way AI actually works (it literally predicts the most likely next word) and what you get back is the internet’s most common answer. Not your baby’s.

It also can’t tell you when something’s worth a GP visit, and it definitely can’t see the tired cues happening on the play mat right in front of you.

So if you’ve followed its advice and nothing changed - that’s not on you. It’s the advice that wasn’t made for your little one.

If you are looking for evidence based, holistic advice, my Gentle Sleep Starter Kit is a great place to start and it’s free. Comment STARTERKIT and I’ll send it over 💛

19/07/2026

Feeding to sleep isn’t ruining anything 💛

Say it louder for the people in back…. and for every 2am Google search that made you feel like you’d broken your baby.

Feeding to sleep is biologically normal. It’s one of the oldest, most beautiful settling tools you have. The milk, the closeness, the hormones that make them sleepy and calm - that’s not a bad habit. That’s design.

Somewhere along the way, someone told you that comfort was a problem to be fixed. That if your baby needed YOU to fall asleep, you’d done it wrong.

You didn’t do it wrong. You were never doing it wrong. The information you had just wasn’t right for your baby.

Now - if the feeding-to-sleep is leaving YOU depleted, or the night waking has become too much, that’s a completely different conversation.

And it’s NOT because the feeding to sleep is bad. It’s because you deserve rest too, and there’s a gentle way through that doesn’t ask you to leave anyone to cry. 💛

Comment STARTERKIT for my free gentle sleep starter kit. And follow along for sleep advice that doesn’t make you feel like you’re doing something wrong.

16/07/2026

Fair warning: I’m not like most sleep consultants.

I will never tell you to leave your baby to cry.
I will never call feeding to sleep a bad habit.
And I will never hand you a generic chart and call it a plan.

Because here’s what the research actually says:

Wake windows are averages, not rules.
Babies learn self regulation through 10000s of instances of co-regulation (support) not by being left to “self settle”
There are no such thing as “biological nap windows” 🫠
And most sleep problems are not settling problems.

Which means you can get more sleep without sleep training.
Not by waiting it out. By fixing the actual cause.

That’s the third option nobody talks about. And it’s the only thing I post about here.

Hit follow for sleep advice that respects your instincts. 💛

The men behind the original sleep training advice had, by all accounts, never changed a nappy or done a night feed in th...
11/06/2026

The men behind the original sleep training advice had, by all accounts, never changed a nappy or done a night feed in their lives.

Luther Emmett Holt published his infant care guide in 1894. It became the parenting bible for a generation of mothers.

His core position was that picking up a crying baby, feeding on demand, or offering physical comfort would ruin the child. He also recommended leaving babies to cry-it-out to improve their “lung development”.

His work directly influenced the behaviourists of the 1920s, who took it even further.

John B. Watson, whose work shaped clinical thinking for decades, told mothers publicly that affection was psychologically dangerous. He had children of his own.

He reportedly shook their hands.

This is the lineage of the advice that you’re getting from well meaning relatives and friends.

Nobody was studying baby brains in 1894.

Nobody was tracking cortisol responses in infants or measuring the long-term impact of unmet needs on nervous system development.

The goal was a manageable baby in a world where mothers were expected to get back to domestic function as fast as possible.

Developmental science has had decades to catch up.

And it has.

Responsiveness builds the brain.

Feeding and contact at night are biologically expected for babies in the 3 to 18 month window.

There is no research showing that responding to your baby harms them in any way - the ‘bad habit’ story doesn’t have the science behind it.

Your instinct to respond? Backed. By science. Repeatedly.

If you’re a mum who keeps getting told the gentle path won’t work, the Gentle Sleep Mini-Course walks you through my Get Some Actual Sleep Method, my framework built on what the research actually says, not what a Victorian doctor with no night duties decided in 1894.

DM me GSMC and I’ll send you the link. Or send this to your mama bestie who might need it 💛

06/06/2026

COMMUNITY SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT for those entering winter…. It’s getting COLD at night.

And if your baby has suddenly started waking at 2 or 3am when they weren’t before, I want you to check ONE thing before you change anything else.

The TOG rating on their sleepwear.

Not the wake windows. Not the whole settling approach. The TOG rating first.

TOG is a measure of warmth. The higher the number, the warmer the layer.

Why does this matter?

Because the room temperature at 7pm when you put them down is likely NOT the room temperature at 2am.

Houses cool down overnight. And your baby can’t just go and get a blanket for themselves.

So when they surface between sleep cycles, they go “OH, I’m really cold” and fully wake instead of drifting into the next one.

That is not the wheels falling off your sleep. That is biology doing exactly what biology does.

So before you restructure everything or change your wake windows, grab a room thermometer and check what it actually drops to overnight.

BUT here’s the nuance, because it REALLY matters:

The goal is the RIGHT temperature, not just warmer. You can absolutely overdo this. A baby who’s too hot will wake too, and overheating is a risk for SIDS.

So this isn’t “pile on the layers.” It’s “match the layer to the baby.” Sometimes that’s a layer up. Sometimes it’s a layer down.

How do you tell which way to go? Your baby!

Next time they wake, pop a couple of fingers on their back.

You want their skin to feel warm. NOT hot, clammy or sweaty - they are too hot. Not cool (likely waking from cold).

(Cooler hands and feet are completely normal, so don’t go by those!!)

And when you’re genuinely unsure?

A touch under beats over. A cool baby usually just wakes. A too-hot one is the one to be careful with because of the SIDS risk.

And if you’re in the northern hemisphere? Your task is opposite!! Make sure your little one isn’t getting too hot overnight. Two reasons for that - overheating is a SIDS risk and OMG have you ever tried to sweat through a hot summers night when you have too many layers on?? The worst and you’d definitely wake!

Send this to your mama bestie who’s in t

The question I get more than any other about how I help families with sleep.‘Is this sleep training in disguise?’And hon...
04/06/2026

The question I get more than any other about how I help families with sleep.

‘Is this sleep training in disguise?’

And honestly, I get it. Because ‘gentle sleep support’ has become a phrase that means almost nothing now. Every account uses it. Some of them are describing a pretty standard extinction method with prettier adjectives.

So here’s what I actually do.

It works entirely on biology. Ruling out red flags. Nap timings. Sleep pressure. Cue clusters. The scheduling piece that almost nobody addresses before jumping to settling techniques.

A 4 month old I worked with went from waking hourly to 6-hour stretches. His settling didn’t change. His wake windows shifted by about 20 minutes. His body had enough sleep pressure to actually link sleep cycles, and the wakes stopped.

I will never tell you to change you how to settle your baby unless you actually want to. There’s no step where you leave the room, wait a few minutes, and return. That’s not part of the plan, ever.

What is in there is the framework that explains why your baby is waking in the first place, and for most babies, once that’s sorted, the settling gets easier without anyone having to change anything about how responsive they are at night.

You were never doing it wrong. The info you had just wasn’t right for your baby.

If you’re looking for a place to start, I’ve got a free resource for you with some of my favourite ways to improve sleep without changing how you settle your baby. Comment STARTERKIT and I’ll send it over.

02/06/2026

I remember the first time a mum showed me a post warning her that every night she answered her baby’s cries was costing her baby’s future sleep. She was holding her phone like it was evidence against her.

This mum was often on the yoga ball at midnight, trying to get her baby back to sleep, responsive, present, exhausted. And genuinely terrified that the thing she’d chosen to do was quietly breaking something.

I’ve sat across from hundreds of parents in that exact place. And what I’ve watched again and again is this: babies who are never sleep trained still stop waking every 45 minutes. Biology doesn’t stall because a parent stayed responsive.

A 12 month old I worked with was waking hourly, cosleeping, mum was exhausted. Within weeks they were sleeping alone in their own cot. Biology-based work. No training involved.

What tends to keep sleep stuck isn’t the gentleness. It’s usually the timing that’s wrong for that specific baby, something that’s happening during the day, or a physiological red flag we might need to get help with.

Comment STARTERKIT and I’ll send you the free checklist of what to actually check first.

Feeding your baby to sleep doesn’t create a bad habit. It creates a fed, sleeping baby.The ‘bad habit’ narrative comes f...
23/05/2026

Feeding your baby to sleep doesn’t create a bad habit. It creates a fed, sleeping baby.

The ‘bad habit’ narrative comes from sleep training culture, where independent sleep is usually the goal and anything involving you is framed as a problem you need to fix.

But sleep associations are just the conditions present when your baby falls asleep. Feeding. Rocking. Contact. Darkness. White noise. They’re all associations (we all have them!) - and they’re neutral until they stop working for your family.

That’s the only test that matters. Not whether somebody else says it’s wrong. Whether it’s sustainable for YOU.

Babies who feed to sleep don’t stay that way forever. They will usually naturally transition as they develop, as overnight feeding needs drop, as they mature. You’re not locking them into a pattern for life.

If feeding to sleep is working and you’re both getting rest, keep going. If it’s stopped working or you’re exhausted, or you just can’t do it anymore, we can change it gently without cutting off comfort or connection.

You can feed your baby to sleep AND work toward easier nights. Those two things can co-exist while you figure out what actually works for your baby.

And if you want support with this? I’m here 🫶

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