Which sleep approach is best for your children? The battle rages on

If you are ever bored and want to make life a little spicy, try introducing the topic of sleep into a room of parents with children under the age of three and then fleeing. Like farting and then departing, you leave everyone to stew in general discomfort as they attempt to tiptoe around the elephant in the room while side-eyeing each other with latent distrust.

The subject of nighttime hibernation in early parenthood is a minefield at best, and a blitz at worst. Forget politics - Left versus Right, Tory versus Labour, Democrat versus Republican. Forget people’s views on abortion, sexuality, or Meghan Markle’s jam. Forget it all because the real divider, the Great Divider in modern society for those of us mad enough to have kids, is: which sleep approach do you use for your children?

In a world where we have too many options for everything, there’s about fifty thousand different techniques that can be implemented for infant sleep. There’s bed sharing where you co-sleep with your child until they get married. There’s responsive settling where you rock the baby either until they drift into a slumber or you die, whichever happens first. Usually the latter. And, of course there’s cry-it-out, or “Satan’s approach” in some circles of Mumsnet.

I ended up sleep training because my ex-colleague, Brittany Sheehan, is now a baby sleep consultant and since I like her and do not believe her to be a psycopath, thought I’d buy her course and just do as she said. Parenting is overwhelming at the best of times, and I welcome any situation where I can just trust someone who knows more than I do, and follow them blindly off a cliff. As hoped, her course worked for my daughter, who started consistently sleeping through the night at four months old.

As with many sleep training approaches, Brittany’s method doesn’t shy away from the fact that, sometimes babies cry. I didn’t mind this aspect as my daughter’s wails drastically reduced after a few days, and I was assured that the process wouldn’t cause any trauma or later-life gambling addictions.

Once we got to the end of the programme, I was so overcome with the ecstasy of having my evenings back that I made the hideous mistake of trying to improve other people’s lives by recommending Brittany’s methods. I thought that other mothers would be excited to hear the gospel - but, the second that the words “sleep training” fell out of my mouth; the room became instantly divided. While some were eager to hear about it, others mentally deleted my number. From then on, I found that every time I was idiotic enough to bring up the topic of baby sleep, I was met with the same awkward situation that I willed myself to be kidnapped from.

When I asked Brittany why people can be so touchy about the subject of sleep, she said that there’s a trend for parents to almost boast about how challenging their child’s situation is. Instead of trying something that doesn’t necessarily fit with the concept of a “gentle” approach, it can be easier to just say that your child is incapable of sleeping through the night and dismiss sleep training as “mean and cruel”.

Read also: Gentle parenting is creating little monsters... and I should know

Sometimes parents will try practically anything other than her methods, and she’s heard of people feeding their children butter at night, putting onions under their cots, and watching crime programmes in order to try and achieve a good night’s sleep.

Like some kind of sadistic octopus, the subject of baby sleep has tentacles in all of the raw areas of early parenthood: the sleep deprivation, the insecurities, the overwhelming anxiety to not accidentally create a serial killer. It also touches upon the soft spot of what’s considered selfish versus necessary for mental health, which is an evolving concept throughout parenthood that mothers, especially, grapple with.

Personally, I like to sleep, and for me, a small period of discontent was the tax to pay for long-term restfulness and mental stability. But, if you want to listen to Enya for six hours while rocking your child to sleep and doing an interpretive dance, then by all means go ahead. All I know is that I’d rather bathe my eyeballs in chilli flakes than ever broach the subject of sleep with new parents again.