It is a familiar scene for most parents.
You’re laying in bed, eyes closed, a wave of drowsiness washes over you. You’re just about to drift into sleep when you hear a loud cry.
You jolt awake, look over at your partner, and eventually trudge down the hall to where your child has just awoken from their crib. You slowly rock them back to sleep, hoping you won’t be too tired the next morning to go to work.
The good news: It doesn’t have to be this way, because there is something called sleep training.
The bad news: It might not work for your child, or for you.
What is sleep training
Sleep training is an umbrella term for different methods that parents employ to get their child to fall and stay asleep. Some parents swear by it, and others find it difficult to maintain.
“Sleep training means different things to different people,” said Melisa Moore, a licensed psychologist who is board-certified in behavioral sleep medicine. She runs a pediatric sleep practice in Pasadena. Moore recently spoke to Austin Cross on LAist’s daily talk show AirTalk to break down different methods of sleep training.
“To me, sleep training is really helping your child learn to fall asleep on their own and get back to sleep on their own during the night so they’re not waking everybody up.”
Cry it out
Sleep training has garnered a negative connotation over the years, largely because one method known as “cry it out” has come to overshadow other aspects of the discipline.
With this practice, the child is put in their crib awake. If the child awakens in the night, the parents do not go into the room to help the child fall back to sleep. The child…
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