How to stop feeling guilty about sleep training
Guilt is the most common reason parents quit sleep training halfway through — and the most common reason they regret it even when it worked. It is also a useful signal. It usually means something in your plan does not match what you actually believe about parenting.
Short answer: how do you sleep train without guilt?
- Guilt is a symptom. It points at one of three things: your goal, your reason, or your method.
- The goal (what): choose a developmentally appropriate goal for your child, not the internet's version of "good sleep".
- The reason (why): exhaustion is a good enough reason. Pressure from relatives or friends is not.
- The method (how): pick one that fits your parenting values, not the one with the best success stories.
- If you still feel guilty once you have started, stop or change method. Guilt-driven sleep training rarely stays consistent.
Would you like to listen to a podcast episode about this? Feeling guilty about sleep training?
The rest of this article works through those three questions one by one, starting with the question that prompted it.
A parent asked: how do I stay consistent with sleep training?
“My daughter is almost nine months old. She used to fall asleep next to me in bed and then I would transfer her into her crib. I decided to start sleep training with graduated extinction, so I put her down and waited five minutes before going in to check on her. When I went in, she was already asleep — she had cried for those five minutes. I never expected it to work that quickly, and I still feel bad about letting her cry. Do you have any tips to help me stay consistent?”
The question was about consistency, but the answer starts somewhere else: it is much easier to stay consistent if you do not feel guilty about what you are doing. Many parents stop sleep training because of guilt. Others push through, and then feel bad about it for years afterwards, even though they can see that nothing bad happened to their child.
So if you feel guilty, my advice is to stop, or to find a method that suits your parenting values better. Even if sleep training works and your baby falls asleep independently and sleeps through the night, it is not worth it if you carry guilt about it afterwards.
Why does sleep training feel different from other times your baby cries?
Sleep training almost always involves some crying, and watching our children cry is never nice. But crying on its own does not explain the guilt.
You do not feel guilty when your child is learning to walk, falls over and cries. You feel sorry for her, which is a different feeling. You do not feel guilty when you strap a protesting toddler into a car seat, he cries and you do it anyway. When my son wanted to climb on the table and throw glasses on the floor, I stopped him, he cried, and I did not feel guilty for a second.
So what is different about sleep training? In those other situations, the goal, the reason and the method are all obviously in line with what you believe. With sleep training they often are not, and that is where the guilt comes from. It is worth looking at all three separately: the what, the why and the how.
What should your sleep training goal be?
Most people associate sleep training with one package deal: you put your child down, she falls asleep independently, sleeps through the night, and she wakes up late in the morning. Falling asleep easily, no night feeds, no night wakings, all at once.
In my experience, deep inside, plenty of parents do not want all of that. One mother I worked with was perfectly happy co-sleeping, except that her baby had taken to picking at her ears to soothe himself. She could not fall asleep like that and he woke her up with it several times a night. Her goal was not independent sleep or a full night — it was only to get rid of that one habit.
Other parents used to rock their baby to sleep and loved it, but as the baby grew heavier their backs gave up. They are fine holding the baby until she falls asleep; they are not fine rocking her anymore. In their case, sleep training means removing one sleep association and nothing else.
Your goal can be that narrow. If you pick a goal that is not really yours, you will keep asking yourself whether this is bad for your baby — and that question is what guilt sounds like.
Is your goal developmentally appropriate?
There are two things to weigh up. The first is what is typical for your baby's age, because what is developmentally appropriate is, in most cases, appropriate for your child too. Look up sleep recommendations, or read a book that explains how much babies sleep in 24 hours, how often they wake, how often they feed at night.
The recommendations differ, and that is confusing, but if you compare two or three of them you will find the numbers are not that far apart. Do not get hung up on the details: whether two or three night feeds are fine at your baby's age, or only one, is not the important part. What is important is that waking up twelve times a night is not fine at any age.
If you are not sure where your baby actually stands, start there: does your baby get enough sleep? And if you want to see how much the published recommendations disagree with each other, I compared them here: was Ferber wrong?
What if your baby is not average?
The second consideration pulls in the opposite direction. You may have a good reason to think your child should not be measured against the average: an underlying medical issue, or simply your own knowledge that in this particular area she is developing more slowly than other babies.
I once saw a post from the mother of a six-year-old boy, announcing proudly that he had slept through the night for the first time in his life. Six years. We can argue about whether it is fine for a one-year-old to wake once or twice, but a six-year-old who still wakes every night is an outlier — and outliers usually have a reason. Always leave room for the possibility that your child is one.
Is it selfish to sleep train?
This is the why, and there are two answers parents usually give.
The first is exhaustion, and that is a good enough reason on its own. Sleep deprivation is a very real problem. It is one of the most common fears of people expecting a baby, and plenty of parents stop at one child after a hard first experience with sleep.
Keep in mind that people cope with sleep deprivation very differently. For one parent, waking three times a night is unbearable; for another, five or six is manageable. So do not feel guilty for wanting to change something just because your friend's baby wakes twice as often and she seems fine with it. The only question you have to answer is whether it matters to you.
The second reason people give is pressure — from relatives, from friends, or just a vague sense that this is what one does. In my opinion that is not a good enough reason. Whoever gets up with the baby most nights is the one who gets to decide how to handle it. If you are sleep training because you feel pushed into it, you will end up asking yourself whether you are being selfish, and you will feel guilty either way.
How do I choose a sleep training method that fits my parenting values?
The how has two sides. One is practical: does the method suit your child's age, your living arrangements, the way your evenings actually run? The other is about your parenting style, and this is the one that gets skipped.
Go back to the mother who wrote to me. Her goal was reasonable — falling asleep independently is a sensible goal for a nine-month-old. Her problem was the method. It mattered to her not to leave her baby crying alone, and the method she had picked did exactly that.
It got worse by accident. She chose graduated extinction with a five-minute first interval, which is completely fine, but her baby fell asleep before those five minutes were up. No check-in ever happened. In practice, the night ran as full extinction — the harshest version, and the one she had deliberately not chosen. (Something very similar happened in my own home: how I accidentally CIO-ed my son.) So even though you can say, that sleep training went very smoothly, because the child fell asleep in a few minutes, for this mum, it felt catastrophic.
So when you compare methods, do not only ask which one works fastest. Ask what happens on the night it does not go to plan, and whether you would still be comfortable with what you are doing then. If the answer is no, choose a gentler method — one where you stay in the room, or pick your baby up. A method you can carry out calmly beats a faster one you resent.
How do I stay consistent with sleep training?
Consistency is not really a matter of willpower. Parents who are clear about their goal, sure of their reason and comfortable with their method tend to be consistent without trying very hard. Parents who are not clear about one of the three start negotiating with themselves at two in the morning.
So before you start, write down the three answers: what exactly you want to change, why you want to change it, and how you plan to do it. If any of them makes you uneasy, fix that one first. And if you have already started and the guilt will not go away, stop and change something rather than pushing through. Sleep training is worth doing well or not at all — and it is rarely too late to start again later.
Frequently asked questions
Is sleep training the same as cry it out?
No. Cry it out, or extinction, means you put your baby down and do not go back in until morning. Most other methods involve some form of checking in, staying in the room, or picking your baby up and soothing them.
Is it okay to sleep train because I am exhausted?
Being exhausted is a good enough reason. Sleep deprivation is a real problem, and people differ enormously in how they cope with it: for one parent three wakings a night are unbearable, for another five are fine. The only question that matters is whether it is important to you, not how your friend copes with her baby.
Should I stop sleep training if I feel guilty?
Yes, either stop or switch to a method that fits your parenting values better. Parents who push through while feeling guilty often quit halfway, which teaches the baby nothing, or finish successfully and still regret it years later. Sleep training that costs you that much is not worth it.
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