Does holistic sleep coaching mean no crying?

No. And I'd be suspicious of anyone who promises it does.

Holistic sleep coaching means responding to crying — not eliminating it. Those are different things, and the difference matters more than almost anything else in this field. A programme guaranteeing your child will never cry is guaranteeing your child will never feel frustration, disappointment, confusion or the stress of transition. Nobody can promise that. Nobody should.

What we can promise is that no child is ever left alone to cry, and that every tear is treated as communication worth answering.

First — what I mean by “sleep training”

This term causes endless confusion, so let me be precise before we go further.

Hands up — who likes the sound of a baby crying?

Anyone? Nope. Thought not. Me neither.

That reaction isn't squeamishness. It's biology. Infant crying activates adults for a reason — we are wired to respond to it. And that wiring is precisely what non-responsive sleep training asks parents to override.

Crying is communication

As a human of any age, it is normal to experience a range of emotions. There's a spectrum of feeling from joy, euphoria and bliss, all the way through ambivalence, boredom and inertia, to despair, grief and hopelessness. Most of the time we don't experience the extremes — we dip into frustration, anger, confusion, sadness, contentment, excitement. It's all normal. It's part of who we are as complex mammals capable of experiencing life and relationships in all their fullness.

A life experience devoid of any negative emotion is unrealistic. And while we certainly need to shield children whose ability to handle profoundly difficult emotions is still immature, it is not our job as parents to curate a life that excludes negativity altogether.

The biology backs this up. We produce three types of tears: basal tears that lubricate the eye, reflex tears from irritants like dust or onions, and emotional tears. Emotional tears are chemically distinct — research shows tears produced in response to different emotional states have different compositions. If emotional tears are biologically unique, they are not trivial.

Which brings us to the principle everything else rests on: crying is communication before spoken language. If we believe in responsive caregiving, we cannot logically dismiss communication.

And really — if we wouldn't leave an elderly grandparent alone crying, or our teenager, or our partner, why would we leave a baby?

Where “leave them to cry” actually came from

Parents have responded promptly to the needs of infants for millennia. Then non-responsive sleep training arrived in the 1800s, and behaviourism from around the 1920s, and people widely began to believe that parental intuition and responsiveness were not in children's best interests.

The behaviourist logic was simple: if a child wakes and needs something from their parent, you eliminate the waking by removing the trigger — the parental response.

That very basic way of thinking has been widely refuted by highly credible research. But its legacy has lingered as the backbone of sleep management, and you can see its roots in almost every mainstream non-responsive intervention there is.

Leaving children to cry isn't the stated aim of non-responsive sleep training. But it's almost inevitable. Cry it out, controlled crying, the disappearing chair — they all involve withholding parental response, which is very likely to cause crying.

Here's what I find revealing. A study published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine randomised 91 infants aged 9 to 18 months with sleep problems to one of two behavioural interventions, and found that parents with higher tolerance for crying saw greater improvement in their child's sleep. The researchers themselves noted that because these interventions require parents to delay their involvement and tolerate some crying at night, parents who are highly sensitive to infant distress may be less likely to implement them successfully — resulting in poorer outcomes.

The opposite extreme isn't helpful either

While the mainstream sleep training industry has done a good job of confusing people in one direction, some quarters have pushed just as unhelpfully the other way. The idea that a gentle approach means no crying is also a problem.

Think about crying in the context of a real sleep challenge.

A parent finds their situation unsustainable. They need to change how they support their child at night. Perhaps they can no longer feed their child to sleep every hour. Maybe they need to stop rocking. There are so many sound reasons a parent may not be able to continue doing what they've been doing.

If we take the view that any crying at all means the approach isn't gentle, then parents end up trapped — continuing something that is breaking them, because the alternative is that their child might cry.

Whatever the parent is currently doing, they're doing it because so far it has been the easiest, quickest, most reliable way to get their child back to sleep with as little fuss as possible. So it follows that anything else — no matter how responsive, no matter how kind, even with the parent right there — is not going to be the child's preferred option.

And how does that manifest? The child expresses their feelings about it. Of course they do.

Say a child would prefer to be rocked, and instead they're being held gently and having their back rubbed. Still responsive. Still loving. But not what they wanted. So out comes the confusion, the disappointment, the frustration, the anger, the sadness — all the feels. If they have the vocabulary they might use it. But even adults cry when feelings are complex and messy and raw. Children don't always reach for words, even when they have them.

Crying is likely. We would never advocate ignoring a child's distress, or ploughing on regardless of how hard they're finding it. But it is unrealistic to think a child will never cry when something changes.

Boundaries are not abandonment

Boundaries are part of responsive parenting. They make children feel safe, and they're often part of a bigger picture of parental bodily autonomy. As long as they're reasonable, age-appropriate, and we're realistic about how much support a child needs to learn them, boundaries are a good thing.

And yes — that includes when they lead to tears.

Just as a child might cry when you take away something unsafe, or remove a toy they were hitting someone with, holding a kind but firm boundary at night is okay.

If a parent doesn't want to feed their one-year-old every 45 minutes, it's okay to set some limits around that. If a parent doesn't want their child pinching their skin while falling asleep, it's okay to stop that. If a parent doesn't want their hair pulled — guess what, that's okay too. Even if they cry.

What is not okay is punishing the child for it: getting cross, withholding presence or comfort, or ignoring their feelings when the boundary is held. Children are allowed big feelings, day or night. They simply don't have the emotional maturity to handle those feelings alone.

Is crying in arms really different from crying alone?

This is where the nuance matters most, and I want to be honest about the evidence: there is no direct research comparing crying in arms with crying alone in a cot. But attachment theory and affect regulation research give us the framework.

Picture two scenarios.

In the first, a child is being held. Their parent is stroking their back, saying I'm here, I know this is hard, adjusting moment by moment. That's attunement.

In the second, the child is alone and receives no response.

Both children are expressing emotion. Only one is having that emotion held.

Holding a loving limit while remaining present is fundamentally different from withdrawing responsiveness. Children should not be expected to manage overwhelming emotion alone.

Can sleep improve without any distress?

Very often, yes — and this is the part people miss.

One advantage of a whole-child approach is that we look at sleep needs and timing, regulation, sensory input, connection, emotional scaffolding, feeding, nutrition, development, play, activity and family capacity. Sometimes sleep challenges aren't behavioural at all. They're expectation mismatches.

I think of Chloe, one of our graduates. Before training, she'd absorbed the mainstream narrative — every child needs twelve-hour nights, fixed nap totals, rigid parameters. When her own child didn't meet those expectations, she felt anxious, like she was getting it wrong.

Through training she realised something incredibly simple but powerful: human beings are different. Sleep needs vary. Regulation, temperament, development — they all matter. That understanding didn't just change her practice. It changed her confidence.

When a child is wired differently and we try to fit them into a generic template, anxiety escalates. When understanding increases, pressure decreases — and sleep very often follows, with no emotional upheaval at all.

How much crying is too much?

Parents ask this, and it's a completely reasonable question. They're there with their child — soothing, singing, rubbing their back, swaying, not feeding — and the child is crying.

There isn't a single right answer, and I won't pretend there is.

First, children vary enormously in emotional expression. Some cope really well. Others are deeply distressed. So it's not necessarily about whether the technique is gentle — it's about that child's ability to handle change, which may relate to temperament, personality, attachment, neurotype, internal resilience or inherent vulnerabilities.

Second, parents have different reasons for changing. Some are facing an emergency physical or mental health challenge and don't have the luxury of waiting for a more settled month. Others can be flexible and take their time. Context, urgency, the child's age, the buffers and support available — all of it matters when working out whether this is the right moment, and whether to persevere when a child finds it harder than expected.

What I can tell you is what we are not doing: we are not nudging a gentle approach into a non-responsive position. The two are diametrically opposed in philosophy, understanding and aim.

So what actually makes the holistic approach different?

I'm not a fan of sweeping statements about something this nuanced. But here are some truths:

We don't sort crying into valid and invalid. We don't rank pain above frustration in terms of worthiness of response. We don't recommend leaving children of any age to cry alone. And we don't promise parents that emotion will never arise.

Our difference lies in interpretation, and in consistency of response. Crying is communication, attachment behaviour, emotional processing, a nervous system signal. Parents are the experts on their children. Our role is to empower them with knowledge — not to override their instincts.