Young Sleep Support

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

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.

One blog says your baby needs more awake time. The next article says they’re overtired. An old Reddit thread says it’s a sleep association. Then someone’s mum in the comments swears by rice cereal.

You’re exhausted and desperate and every search just adds another layer of conflicting advice.

I get it. It can feel like the Wild West of parenting advice out there.

But I promise the answer isn’t more Googling or following a routine chart you found online. It’s watching your actual baby 🫶

Because your baby is giving you information every single day. The timing of the wakes. How long it takes them to settle. Whether they go back down or fight it for an hour.

That information tells us what’s actually happening. Generic articles written for the average baby can’t do that.

I had a client who’d read everything, tried it all. Nothing worked. When we mapped her baby’s actual pattern over five days, it was clear - not enough sleep pressure at bedtime. One tweak to the last wake window, and she went from hourly wakes to her first four-hour stretch in months.

So this is your permission slip to ditch the charts! Focus on what YOUR baby actually needs.

Follow along for more gentle sleep tips 🫶

Save for the next time you need a reminder that you know your baby better than any chart!

Your baby yawned. You raced to get them down. They woke 28 minutes later and you couldn’t get them back to sleep.

So next nap you watch even closer. Catch the eye rub earlier. Same result.

This is a really common pattern that I see when we focus on just one tired cue instead of a bunch of them.

A yawn doesn’t mean the same thing for every baby. For some, that yawn means go time. For others, they’re either bored or it’s just their body clearing CO2 🤷‍♀️

Clusters of cues tell you they’re ready. Three or four signs showing up together within minutes. Getting stronger as you approach the end of their wake window, not weaker.

If your baby rubs their eyes at 90 minutes then perks back up and plays happily for another 20 minutes, they weren’t actually tired yet. They mighta just had an itchy eye.

One of my clients had a baby doing hourly wakes overnight. Split nights. 5am starts that wouldn’t budge. She was putting him down the second she saw a yawn because every chart said to.

We added 20 minutes to his wake windows. Watched for clusters instead of single cues. Within a week he went from waking every hour to 4 hour stretches.

Your baby’s biology doesn’t care what the chart says they should need.

Comment STARTERKIT and I’ll send you my free checklist of what to actually check before changing how you’re settling.

When I was a first-time parent, everyone told me it was a sleep association.

Every forum. Every sleep account. Every well-meaning friend.
“He’s learned to need you to fall back asleep. Break the association. Put him down awake.”

Except I was already doing that. He’d go down drowsy. Sometimes fully awake. Didn’t matter.

45 minutes later. Awake.

Every. Single. Time.

I felt like I was losing my mind.

What actually changed it? Figuring out he was chronically undertired.

He was going to bed without enough sleep pressure built up.

So his body would slip into light sleep, hit the 45 minute mark where the first sleep cycle ends, and have zero biological drive to link into the next one.

We stretched his wake windows by 20 minutes.

That’s it.

Within three days, the wakes stretched to two hours. Then longer.

This is what I mean when I say most sleep advice skips the biology and jumps straight to “fixing” behaviour that was never the problem.

It’s also why I get so fired up about the unregulated mess this industry has become. Confident strangers handing out one-size-fits-all advice to exhausted parents who deserve so much better.

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

Comment STARTERKIT and I’ll send you my free checklist - the things to actually check before you change how you’re settling.

6:30PM bedtime. Too early, they said.

7:30PM bedtime. Too late, they said.

Back to 7PM. Still waking.

You’ve moved bedtime around so many times you’ve lost track of what you even tried first. And your baby is still up all night.

Here’s why: bedtime isn’t the problem.

Changing when your baby goes to sleep doesn’t address WHY they’re waking. And if the underlying cause is still there, you can shift bedtime till next Tuesday and nothing will change.

Maybe it’s a sleep red flag nobody checked. Maybe their wake windows are actually fine but they’re undertired from too much day sleep. Maybe they’re ready to drop a nap and bedtime keeps getting later because they’re not tired yet.

When I work with families, we don’t start with bedtime. We start with why. And once you know that, bedtime stops feeling like a moving target.

Comment STARTERKIT for my free guide to improving sleep without sleep training.