What modern infant care keeps getting wrong about children's sleep

Children have wildly different sleep needs. Most guidance pretends they don't

If I could change one thing about the way we talk about children's sleep, it would be this. Some children genuinely need a lot of sleep. Some run beautifully on much less. Low sleep need, average sleep need, high sleep need: all of it completely normal, in exactly the way it's normal for adults (Hirshkowitz et al., 2015). Some of us are wrecked on anything under nine hours; some of us are genuinely fine on six.

Here's the problem: most of the guidance we've all been handed (the charts, the wake windows, the "by this age they should be doing this") is quietly written for high sleep need children. Nobody says so. It's just baked in.

So when a family follows that guidance with a low sleep need child, you get a little one lying awake night after night, wired and frustrated, and parents increasingly convinced something is wrong with their baby, or with them. Nothing is wrong. The expectations are wrong. Take an adult who needs six hours of sleep and send them to bed at ten o'clock every night, and you'll manufacture insomnia in a perfectly healthy person. We do a version of this to children constantly.

Which means some of the "sleep problems" that land in front of professionals like you aren't sleep problems at all. They're chart problems. And the first genuinely useful question isn't which strategy. It's how much sleep does this particular child actually need?

The strategy is the smallest part of the work

People ask me constantly at conferences, in supervision, on calls: what's the best settling strategy? For this age, for this situation. And after twenty years, my honest answer is: it depends. I've joked that I should have it tattooed somewhere, but I mean it seriously, because "it depends" is where the real expertise starts.

The right approach depends on this child: their temperament, their development, how much sleep they actually need. It depends on these parents, on what they want and what they can honestly carry right now. A plan that assumes two rested adults falls apart in the hands of a solo parent, or a parent looking after their own mental health, or one with two other children under five. And it depends on the moment. A new sibling on the way, a house move, childcare starting, a new tooth, a baby about to learn to stand. Timing sinks more good plans than strategy choice ever does.

What we're talking about here is a skilled individualised assessment that accounts for all of the individual, familial and contextual variables that impact sleep. Urie Bronfenbrenner's seminal work on family ecosystems (1979) stressed that growth is dependent on the relationship between the child and their changing environment and context. We view sleep as part of that ecosystem, and a symptom of many other factors, rather than the sole puzzle to solve.

Sometimes the most skilled thing a practitioner can say is "not yet." That's a clinical judgement, and it takes training and a deep understanding of family centred care (Zgambo et al., 2025) to make with confidence.

This is why, in my framework, the sleep strategy is almost the last thing we choose, after feeding, health, development, temperament, and the family's real capacity have been properly assessed. Almost every "failed" sleep plan I've ever reviewed was a reasonable strategy applied before anyone understood the actual problem.

The assessment isn't the boring bit before the real work. The assessment is the work.

Families keep plans they help write

Ask around and you'll hear the same complaint about sleep consultants, again and again. It's rarely about the method. It's the plan that arrives by email a day or two after the consultation, reading like it was copy-pasted from someone else's file, as if the conversation the family just had never happened. Families drop those plans within days, and honestly, I don't blame them.

The alternative is a coaching approach, and it's more rigorous than it sounds. Before anything is decided, you get forensic with a family: What's fabulous about your child, and what's genuinely hard right now? Where do you want to be in three months, and what do you not want to change? What have you tried before, and what actually happened? Who's in this with you?

Solution focused coaching models have been studied extensively and are known to be associated with greater self efficacy, more positive mental health, and tend to help people achieve their goals more fully. The approach we promote is more empowering, more personal, and highly robust (Kim et al., 2024). It also informs exactly how we support families while they make those changes. The evidence is clear that you cannot make big changes in a "one and done" session. It takes time, and of course this goes hand in hand with the trusting rapport and therapeutic relationship we build with our clients while they work towards their goals.

And then the question almost nobody asks: when this plan meets three o'clock in the morning, after you've been up every hour, what will you do and how will you feel?

If a parent hasn't thought that through in daylight, the plan doesn't survive the night. When parents have genuinely co-authored a plan (their goals, their limits, their 3am reality), they stay with it, because it was theirs from the start. Coaching is one of the best-researched communication approaches we have, across many fields. In sleep work, it's most of the job. And it's a skill that can be taught.

Sleep doesn't end at age five. Most sleep education does

Here's something a bit odd about our field: most sleep training for professionals covers babies, perhaps toddlers, and then simply stops. As if sleep tidies itself up around the fifth birthday.

But the approaches that help a four-month-old, a three-year-old and an eleven-year-old have almost nothing in common (Hookway, 2021). Different biology, different pressures, different conversations with parents. An eleven-year-old who can't wind down at night is not a large toddler, and treating them like one helps nobody.

Meanwhile, the families don't stop asking. The ones who trust you keep bringing sleep back to you right through childhood and into the teenage years, because for them it was never a "baby topic."

So the honest question for anyone doing this work is simple: when the asking doesn't stop at five, does your training keep going?

Twenty years in, families still surprise me. Weekly

Nearly every week, in our live supervision sessions, a practising sleep coach brings me a case that genuinely blows my mind. After twenty years, a PhD, and more families than I could count.

I've stopped thinking of that as a gap in my knowledge. I think it's the honest nature of this work. We have never met every child. The parent is the expert on their own child, and children keep us guessing, which is rather what makes them wonderful. Anyone in this field who's stopped being surprised has, I'd gently suggest, stopped paying attention.

It's also why I don't believe in finishing a course and being "done." The real learning starts with real families: your twentieth client, not your last module. Which is why nobody trained by us does that part alone.