For a lot of sleep deprived parents, this is the $64M question! For every mum who has been blessed with a baby sleeping through without milk at 4 weeks there seems to be another who is feeding their 18 month old overnight and says that she still needs to. So when CAN a baby sleep through without being fed? When is it safe?

Many parents put off reaching out to a baby sleep consultant because they worry that they will be bullied into cutting their baby’s feeds entirely overnight or simply think that it’s impossible to improve their baby’s sleep without doing so. This is flat out NOT the case. 

From the moment a baby is born we are told about safe sleeping practices and rightly so. SIDS is possibly one of the scariest things a parent of a young baby faces, probably because it is silent, has no warning and happens when we are relaxing with our baby asleep. Sleeping a baby on her back is the first recommendation on the SIDS and Kids website and is the policy at most Australian maternity hospitals. 

This week I received an email that made me cry. As you can probably imagine I receive a LOT of emails about child sleep issues and there are certainly a fair few who talk about previous experiences with other sleep consultants that hadn’t gone as they’d hoped. This was different though. This mama was broken. 

A new baby can’t do anything for herself and relies totally on you to provide her with food, comfort, and warmth. Crying is the way she communicates that she needs those things, and how she ensures a response from you. You are hardwired for the sound of her crying to upset you – our species would have died out already if it didn’t bother us!