We've lost the plot.

Science, sentience, and sleep trainers.

This morning I sat in my boucle green rocking chair nursing my son to sleep. The day had barely begun. He was tired — as was I — from a night of restless sleep.

He’s nine months old. He has been Earthside barely as long as he was in the warm waters of my womb. I’m nine months old, too. Nine months into the second round of mothering. Nine months into being River’s mother.

I sipped a lukewarm cup of matcha out of my favorite pink checkered ceramic mug as he sipped milk out of his favorite vessel: me.

Both of us with our drinks. Both of us with our cozy comforts.

I laid a blanket over the two of us, enveloping our legs in warmth to counteract the chilly autumn breeze slipping through the window.

Drinking. Rocking. Snuggling.

He fell asleep splayed across my body, his toes resting upon my legs — his fingers splayed out across my chest.

Exterogestation in action. Human infants are born premature to accommodate our bipedal nature, meaning that our babies — all human babies — are born with 25% of their eventual brain volume.

Babies are meant to rest upon their mother’s bodies. Like my son, lying across my chest, with the breeze caressing his hair.

Human infants — all of them — are designed to finish their gestation out of the womb, in the arms of their mother. On the chest of their mother.  This is a physiological truth. Not a preference. Not a philosophy.

A mother’s body regulates her infant’s heart rate, respiratory rate, and matches brain waves through a brilliant, ancient process called biobehavioral synchrony.

An invisible protective tango, happening automatically without teaching or training or willing. Nature’s symphony.

So there I sat. There we sat. Swimming and swirling in a sea of oxytocin and heart coherence, reveling in the remarkable miracle of the dyadic relationship between mother and baby.

Between him and I.

Cosmic bliss.

I picked up a book — still high on oxytocin — and began to read. Minutes passed. I fell deeper into the text but realized I wasn’t reading at all. I was dreaming. Day dreaming of a time and place when mothers and babies were unencumbered by the constriction we all feel suffocated by daily.

And then I made the terrible decision to reach for my phone. I opened Instagram to see a direct message about yet another sleep trainer ranting on about how sleep training doesn’t harm attachment.

The juxtaposition of her clinical, cold words against my and my son’s warm body felt stark. Jarring, even.

Thousands of likes. Hundreds of comments. Because no one wants to believe that a normalized childrearing practice could cause harm.

And everyone wants permission. Permission to do something — anything — to lessen the pain from the sting of parenting in late-stage capitalism.

I kept reading her post. My oxytocin high was now hijacked. Hijacked by some woman, somewhere in the world — somewhere not in my living room — spewing her own cognitive dissonance all over the internet.

“The scientific literature is overwhelmingly in favor of sleep training” she wrote.

I looked down at my son, his vulnerability now amplified by her sterile words.

The scientific literature is overwhelmingly in favor of sleep training. Her closing line kept echoing in my head, haunting me.

I closed the Instagram app and threw my phone out of reach as though it was a hot potato. A potato on fire.

I looked back down at my son, still asleep on my chest. Right where he belongs.

My heart started to race. I regretted throwing my phone out of reach as comebacks and retorts appeared in my mind.

I needed to answer her. I needed to address the dangerous inaccuracy of her claims.

But I couldn’t. Because my son was asleep on my chest. Because I don’t sleep train. Because I won’t sleep train.

Because to bring a baby to Earth and then leave them to cry is to disregard the sacredness — the sentience — of human life. Of life itself.

To use (misread, misinterpreted) science as a scapegoat for intuition — for the deepest of truths — is to propagate myths of colonization.

Like independence instead of interdependence.

Like individuality over collectivism.

Like control over coexistence.

To reject the reality of a human baby’s total and complete dependence on touch, warmth, connection, and coregulation under the guise of “science” is to admit the death of our hearts. The divorce from our knowing.

We don’t need science to tell us what we have intuitively known for millenia: babies cries deserve a response. Babies are people too.

They’re not objects to be optimized or controlled or coerced. They’re humans. Humans learning how to speak — how to advocate for their needs.

And in the absence of a voice that speaks words that we understand in our native tongue, we subjugate their basic biological demands and chalk it up to “manipulation”. We train them not to cry and in doing so teach them to disassociate from their needs, which we rationalize through “science”.

What about morality?

What about ethics?

What about considering the same care we’d give to an elderly grandmother or a person with disabilities who can’t articulate their own needs?

What about our HEARTS?

Attuned care is our birthright.

And so it occurred to me, while rocking with angst in my green boucle rocking chair, that we’ve lost the plot.

Humanity has lost the plot entirely.

Despair tried to creep in, but it was met with a groundswell of hope, initiated by my son’s deep REM sleep smiles. By the entire future that lay before him. By his warmth. By the innate goodness that lives in him and in every baby I’ve ever encountered.

The innate goodness in all of us.

I thought about writing a line-by-line rebuttal, demonstrating with references exactly why that sleep trainer’s claims were irresponsible and asinine, but something else wanted to surface.

Something deeper. Something truer. Something ancient.

We’ve lost the forest for the trees. We’ve forgotten entirely. We’re so caught up in patriarchal models of thinking and being that we forgot what it feels like to feel anything at all.

We’ve externalized our authority and our intuition so regularly that we need science and studies and sleep trainers to tell us what to do with the very babies that left our very bodies. The babies WE CREATED THROUGH OUR BEING.

I sat. I rocked. I filed through the archives of my brain, reaching back into the recesses of my explicit memories to the place in upstate New York where I studied history as an undergrad.

I was in my living room in California and in my lecture hall in Cortland all at once.

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It was Fall of 2009 and I was in my second year of study, reading everything I could get my hands on about indigenous wisdom.

Having grown up in upstate New York, I was familiar with the significance of the Iroquois Confederacy and the brilliance of the Six Nations, but I was a product of the public school system and the accompanying narrow narrative I was fed.

My history professor — a gorgeous, earthy woman named Gigi who lived all over the world studying indigenous cultures — stood at the front of the room pacing back and forth with her long skirt flowing, emphatically describing the indigenous worldview.

Respect for all beings. Respect for the earth. Respect for seasons.

It felt intuitive to me. It landed. It settled. It just “made sense”.

I voraciously read everything I could about life in the Americas pre-colonization after taking Gigi’s class.

I was already quite a radicalized kid for no apparent reason (maybe it was growing up in the same town Kodak built an empire in and seeing the progressive proliferation of “no swimming — polluted water” signs from the empire’s toxic sludge that snuck into the waterways I swam in every summer), but my anti-establishment rebellion was cemented after that Fall semester.

I had planned on teaching. I wanted to play and read and write and LIVE amongst children. Because they just “got it”. They understand.

They approach other living beings with care and caution. They’re quick to smile. Quick to cry. Quick to empathy.

They’re connected. They haven’t yet been conditioned otherwise.

But after her class, I switched my major to history. I remember leaving my advisor’s office with hot cheeks and shaky hands. He begged me not to leave education.

“There’s no money in history. There’s no purpose. What are you going to do with a degree in history?”.

I didn’t know. But it didn’t matter. I just needed to go deeper. I needed to figure out where we went wrong.

I needed to know where we lost the plot.

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I finished out my last two years of undergrad and walked across the red-and-white-clad stage in the Spring of 2011 with my history diploma in hand.

And then, of course, realized shortly thereafter that my professor was right.

There was no money in history. There were no jobs yearning for a 21 year old girl with a bachelor’s degree in history.

But I didn’t care. Really — I didn’t.

Because I didn’t subscribe to the dominant western worldview. I didn’t live at the altar of capitalism.

I spent the summer without a “real job”, living in a rural town bartending and waitressing, like so many other liberal arts kids trying to untangle the strange systems they find themselves in shortly after graduation.

But I had something far more valuable than a “job”.

I had WISDOM. I had fresh air. I had slowness.

And I had a framework for existence — a framework that didn’t include selling my soul for money.

I wanted to be close to the land. To people I loved. I wanted to live gently. Consciously. Respectfully.

And I wanted to write. I wanted to feel. I wanted to help other people feel. I wanted to wave the flag of awareness to wake people up from their slumber.

I wanted to be a piece in the puzzle of reconnection. In decolonization.

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21 turned into 31 and a decade passed. I had my daughter, and then my son.

And as fast as I time traveled to those Thursday afternoon lectures, I was back in my body, rocking in my green boucle rocking chair with my son asleep on my chest.

We’ve lost the plot entirely. And no one even knows.

Well, some people do, of course. You probably do if you’re reading this. Even if you don’t have an intellectual knowing of where we went astray and where we fell apart, you know it in your body.

And even if you don’t know, your baby knows.

Because your baby hasn’t yet lost the plot. They’re brand new but they’re ancient. They’ve got this indigenous wisdom deep in every cell of their being.

They remember. And you can, too.

All you’ve got to do is listen. Listen to their cues. Watch their reactions. Study their communication. Move at the pace of their body. Lay on the earth with them.

Tune into your baby and tune out the noise of our logical reasoning-obsessed, left-brain dominant, very sick, very stressed society.

Tune into your heart.

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We’ve got entire bodies of research to reject the Instagram Sleep Trainer’s erroneous claims that sent me into a spiral. We’ve got entire academic disciplines demonstrating the illegitimacy of claims like “sleep training causes no harm” when human infants rely entirely on cue-based care for surviving and thriving; when care in neurobiological infancy (the first three years of life) forms the foundation of human stress systems that then inform life-long mental, physical, social, and emotional well-being.

But this post isn’t a place to breakdown the research. That isn’t what I’m doing here. Not today, at least.

This is a post to help you remember when you’ve forgotten. To remind you that there was a time — not too long ago — when every being was sacred. When babies were revered. When their mothers were, too.

There was a time — not too long ago — when ethics inherently included respect for all life (not just life with a voice that speaks in words we can understand).

And there is no amount of mental gymnastics to justify intentionally ignoring a baby’s bid for connection. Their bid for survival.

We can talk about the systems of oppression and inequity and the impossibility of parenting in the context of capitalism. We need to include the nuance of privilege and the absence of informed consent.

But if we desire a healed world — if we desire a world climbing out of despair and ascending toward anything that resembles peace — we have to awaken to difficult truths.

So science is important (and instructional) but it’s actually irrelevant once we tune into our hearts.

It is from our heart-space — not our headspace — that we can return to ecological and relational harmony.

It is from our heart-space — not our headspace — that we can heal humanity.

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It was my stated intent not to make this post about science and scientific literature. If you are looking for evidence outlining the myriad serious concerns non-responsive sleep training poses to the developing brain (and the parental brain) I’d recommend referring to the work of Dr. Greer Kirshenbaum, Dr. Tracy Cassels, Dr. Deborah MacNamara, Dr. Gordon Neufield, Dr. Rocio Zunini, Dr. Gabor Mate, or Dr. Darcia Narvaez. I’d start by reading Dr. Kirschenbaum’s The Nurture Revolution or Dr. Narvaez’s The Evolved Nest. If you’re looking for a succinct breakdown of the current sleep training studies, head to Dr. Jessica Guy’s Instagram Page (@infantsleepscientist) and look at her “ST research” highlight.