Baby Sleep Training Services

Sleep training is all about teaching your baby to fall asleep without your assistance – without feeding, rocking, or helping your baby fall asleep. It’s the process of allowing your baby to learn to self-soothe so that they can put themselves to sleep independently at bedtime and help themselves back to sleep when they wake up throughout the night. At Mommywise, we integrate nap training into the sleep training process.

If you ask ten pediatricians, you’ll likely get ten different answers. After 20+ years of sleep training babies, I can tell you with confidence that your baby is ready for sleep training if your baby is 12+ pounds and 12+ weeks old, ready to reduce to one feed per night, and is able to suck or chew their hands/fingers. You might not be ready for sleep training at 12 weeks, but your baby is!

This is a personal decision and there’s no right or wrong answer, but I believe after over two decades of helping babies sleep the ideal window to begin sleep training is between 12 weeks and 5 months old. You can sleep train your baby after 5 months old, but honestly the earlier the better. By the time babies are 6 months old, they’ll be teething and going through so many developmental changes – sleep training becomes increasingly more challenging as your baby ages.

If you’re following a book, or video course, or working with a remote sleep consultant, sleep training can take a month or more. When you work with us, we get babies sleeping independently in 3-5 days. It’s not perfect in 3-5 days, but our approach will get you on the right path in 3-5 days, then a month of unlimited follow-up support is included to ensure that your baby is a good sleeper for life.

Yes, sleep training can help with naps if you work on naps as part of your sleep training plan! Some sleep consultants will recommend working on nights first, then moving to naps, but we know from decades of helping babies sleep that sleep training for nights and naps simultaneously will help your baby learn to sleep independently faster and easier. Sleep training for naps can take up to three weeks before your baby consistently consolidates sleep cycles and settles into a new predictable schedule.

If your baby gets sick or starts teething during sleep training, you should pause and resume sleep training when your baby is 100% healthy and not in pain. In rare cases when we’re working with a family whose baby gets sick or starts teething during sleep training, we may continue if the baby’s not in acute pain. If your baby has a fever, and you’re already a couple of days into sleep training, you can treat the fever with Tylenol or Motrin (age-dependent) 40 minutes before you put your baby down for bed. If your baby wakes up crying after the medication wears off, you will know that your baby is sick or in pain, and pause sleep training until you’re confident that your baby is feeling better.

The cost of professional sleep training support varies greatly depending on the kind of support you want. Books and video courses are less than $50, and a remote sleep consultant may charge up to $1,000 for a sleep training plan that you will implement yourself, with limited text and phone support. For in-home sleep training support with a pediatric sleep specialist in your home who will tailor their sleep training approach for your baby, fees will be in the $7,000 – $10,000 range. Keep in mind that sleep training may be covered by an FSA or HSA.

We at Mommywise follow AAP guidelines for safe sleep, which recommends that babies sleep alone in a crib with a tight-fitting sheet and nothing else – no blankets, comfort items or crib bumpers. Swaddles are not recommended for sleep training, especially if your baby is showing signs of rolling. It’s unsafe to swaddle your baby once they start rolling, but we also want your baby to have access to their hands for self-soothing so they can learn to comfort themselves with something easily accessible. Hands are great for self-soothing! Check out these other tips regarding sleepwear for sleep training.

Yes it’s possible to sleep train multiples, twiblings and siblings of different ages! Sleep training multiples is far more challenging than a singleton, but we do it all the time! If there’s an extra room available, we would recommend separating multiples for at least naps at first, then once they’re doing better at sleeping independently, we’ll put them back together in the same room.

Many breastfeeding parents think that you can’t sleep train and exclusively breastfeed at the same time, but that’s not true. You can nurse your baby day and night during sleep training, we would simply recommend not nursing your baby to sleep. As long as you’re nursing your baby when they’re fully awake (and not dozing off!), there’s no problem at all. At night, we will recommend reducing to one nursing session between 7pm – 7am, and then settling into a 3-4 hour nursing schedule during the day, to ensure that your baby is getting enough full feeds during the day. Many families we work with are nursing round the clock and struggle with “snacking”. We can turn that around and get you into a good nap/feed schedule in a few days!