Hi, Hello friends.
I was (as I often am) sitting at a coffee shop earlier this week preparing to do a bit of writing and reading. I was just about to put my headphones in when I overheard a shocking soundbite about sleep training.
If you’ve been here (here as in my Substack or my Instagram but also here as in literally just about anywhere except for the deep recesses of a cave) you likely know sleep training is a bizarrely contentious and polarizing topic, so fraught that it seems to send 6.0 magnitude shockwaves through mom groups every time the mere words are mentioned.
And rightfully so. I’ve written before about the absurdity of leaving babies alone to cry, but it bears repeating. It bears repeating until we can set aside our fragility to figure out how we’ve normalized nighttime neglect.
Oof. Neglect. No one wants to call it that. Especially in the context of systemic oppression. Especially in the absence of the many hands and many hearts we once would’ve had helping us raise our children. Especially in the presence of egregious, unspeakable acts of violence toward children happening all around the world.
I get it. It took me four years to say that out loud in “public” places. But we have to name it. We have to name it. When we justify or ignore suffering, we all suffer.
If we put babies in their cribs and didn’t respond for 12 hours during the day, it would surely be neglect. Why is nighttime any different? Babies’ biological needs — their drive for food, comfort, closeness, and safety — don’t disappear at night.
I can’t fathom that we’re still having moral, ethical, and philosophical debates about sleep training. It is so clearly an exercise of dominion and an overt act of oppression against babies. (If you want more food for thought in that realm, peruse my other posts here or on IG).
But here we are.
Let’s look at the cultural context for this conversation: most Westerners are not okay. We’re miserable, gobbling up self-help books and popping pills faster than we can drive in our cyber trucks. Rates of anxiety and depression are higher than they’ve been since we began to measure things like this. And now we’re extending the suffering to our children.
Leaving babies alone to cry is a cultural crisis. You know this in your bones. I know this in my bones. Anyone who has ever been restrained from or unable to answer their babies cries nearly immediately knows this.
There was once a time (well, 99% of human history) when this wasn’t up for debate. It was reflexive. Inherent. Of course we would respond to our babies.
To debate a baby’s right to sleep in the arms of their mother would’ve been like chastising a bird for flying. Like condemning water for running.
And to debate a mother’s drive to keep her baby close would’ve been deranged. It would’ve risked survival.
Keeping babies safe — and keeping mothers nourished and protected so they could nurture — was a collective priority.
We’re social mammals after all.
But we’ve forgotten. We’ve disassociated from our nature. And in the process we’ve pathologized the most beautiful birthright: to hold and be held.
A cultural crisis, yes, and also a neurobiological one.
In the context of the developing stress system, leaving a baby alone to cry is accepting the presence of potential harm — toxic stress that can undermine lifelong mental, emotional, and physical well-being.
And we’re doing this under false pretenses, with the aim of “giving the gift of sleep” and “teaching and training”, but babies aren’t dogs, and babies aren’t mini-adults. They don’t need to be taught or trained. They need coregulation, day and night.
Let me explain more clearly:
Babies aren’t born with the ability to regulate their emotions, meaning that no, they can’t use their prefrontal cortex and access their logical reasoning to “learn to fall asleep alone” (this becomes so profoundly silly once you understand even basic infant neurobiology).
A baby’s amygdala signals a threat (like the absence of a caregiver) and their hypothalamus begins to do its brilliant work sending a message to the pituitary gland and then the adrenals to mount a stress response. This mirrors what happens in our bodies as adults, too, until what happens next:
The stress curve in a baby brain just keeps rising.
And rising.
And rising.
A baby’s hippocampus hasn’t developed to turn off stress yet and the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala aren’t developed enough to physically shut off the stress.
Without the presence of a calm, co-regulated caregiver, the stress curve will go up expontentially. And yes, the stress can get so high — and the baby can get so flooded — that their bodies go from fight/flight to freeze and dissociate/sleep.
They’re not “learning” anything. They’re shutting down out of a survival drive to conserve energy.
Like the boy, standing naked at his door, whose fight/flight calls for his mother were so futile that he went into freeze and fell asleep standing up.
Once you see it — once you understand the neurobiology of the developing brain — you can’t unsee it.
Two of my mentors and brilliant neuroscientists Dr. Greer Kirshenbaum and Dr. Rocio Zunini remind parents often that, “a baby’s only route to regulation is through you”.
Read that again.
You are the antidote. You are the regulator.
It is your love, your connection, your presence, that quite literally turns off your baby’s stress and lowers their stress curve.
And in a perfect display of biological brilliance, your maternal brain is wired to respond accordingly.
You already know what to do.
Go to your baby. Hold your baby. Hug your baby. Respond to your baby.
What babies really need to thrive in infancy is you. Day and night. Your body, your movement, your smell, your brain-acting-as-their-external-brain.
Our cultural obsession with convenience and control interferes with this brilliant design, putting the infant brain at risk of developing a highly reactive amygdala and hypothalamus (and thus future mental health struggles) and trips the circuitry of the maternal brain’s matrescence and morphing.
The byproduct? I don’t need to lay it out here. You’re seeing it all around you. Disconnection. Depression. Disassociation. Devastation.
So if you’re alone in your mom group, family, circle of friends, community, etc., in your nighttime responsiveness, stay anchored with this perspective:
The most important input to a developing brain is the emotional experience of the baby.
The infant brain doubles in size by 1 year old and is 80% of its adult brain size by age three. This explosive connectivity and expansion is led by emotional experience.
Indigenous people knew this, which is why babies were once the centerpiece of society, but we have since forgotten.
You are the buffer. Your warmth, affection, connection, presence, and responsiveness quite literally impacts every single system in your baby’s body as it is unfolding.
It’s our job to remain in relationship with our babies day and night (like we have for all of human history barring the last ~200 years). Our early social interactions — day and night — shape brain development.
Hopefully you can feel this in your bones, but if not, here’s some science you might find “compelling”.
Maselko et al, 2011 found that babies who receive the highest levels of nurture were at the lowest risk of anxiety 30 years later.
Kok et al. in 2015 found parental sensitivity in infancy to be associated with larger total brain volume at 8 years old.
Rifkin-Graboi et al. in 2015 found that reduced maternal sensitivity measured at 6 months predicted larger hippocampal volumes in infants.
Scatliffe et al. in 2019 that looked at the affect of early stress on the developing stress and immune system illustrated that higher parental oxytocin levels in infancy are even associated with higher self-regulation and less immune reactivity in preschoolers.
And lastly (since I don’t have the energy to summarize decades of literature in a free Substack post) Abraham et al. in 2021 observed higher baseline cortisol levels in children with high negative emotionality *but only when parental oxytocin levels were low in infancy* (yes, you’re literally blunting short and long-term stress).
The same conclusion is repeated time and time again throughout entire bodies of research: early nurture matters. A lot. Day and night.
Stop striving for “self-soothing” and start snuggling.
If an entire culture can be convinced to leave their babies alone to cry, surely they can also be reminded that crying alone and unsupported is only as natural and normal as expecting trees to grow without sunlight or birds to fly without wings. Because we are nature and everything in nature is designed for interconnectedness.
And the building of independence that we’re all obsessed with? It’ll come. It’ll unfold naturally with the maturing of the stress system and with a foundation of safety and security laid in infancy.
It is deep dependence that gives way to independence, not forced separation.
Not standing alone at your bedroom door naked, crying for connection.
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