Self Settling – What Really Happens When You Teach a Baby to Self Soothe to Sleep
JUN 30
Posted by SarahOckwell-Smit
So many, parents and experts alike, advocate the idea of “teaching a baby to self settle” or “self soothe”. Self soothing is often referred to as the holy grail of baby sleep, once babies can self soothe, parents are told to expect uninterrupted nights and easier bedtimes. Many experts tell sleep deprived parents how vitally important it is to teach the ‘skill’ of self soothing to their offspring as soon as possible.
Only, it’s not true…..
What if I told you that babies can’t self soothe?
Babies are no more capable of self settling than they are of riding a bike. Self soothing is not something you can teach, through any amount of sleep training or techniques.
“But it works” I hear you cry……hmmmm, does it? Really?
Through sleep training you can condition a baby not to cry out for attention and go to sleep without parental input fairly easily, however this behaviour is not indicative of a baby who is calm, soothed or settled.
Self soothing is a developmental stage, a skill that infants gain as they grow older. Just as they become more physically mobile, develop the ability to eat solids and develop the ability to talk. In essence you can’t teach something that their brains are not yet equipped for (no matter what the sleep expert promises!).
‘Self soothing’ is such a misleading term. Whoever invented it has cleverly made it sound like something positive and gentle, similar to the new wave of controlled crying names such as “controlled comforting”, “spaced soothing” and “controlled soothing”. Clever marketing, same technique. In reality however you are categorically not leaving your baby to ‘soothe’, you are leaving them to cry, even if it is only for periods of two minutes at a time.
The Development of Self Soothing.
To understand the development of self settling we need to examine the psychological concept of ’emotional self regulation’. Emotional self regulation is the process where humans work through – or regulate – their emotions.
As adults we do this on a daily basis, maybe we’re watching television and a gory scene comes on that makes us wince, so we quickly change channels or cover our eyes. Perhaps we may be reading a book or a letter that makes us incredibly sad, so we put it down for ten minutes to make a drink and take a break. Perhaps we wake from a scary dream and switch on the light to check there are no intruders in our house. These are all examples of emotional self regulation, an important process to help us keep our emotions in check, otherwise we would be a bubbling, overflowing melting pot of pure emotion, unable to function on a day to day basis. Emotional self regulation is vital for not only our psychological, but our physical wellbeing, given the toxic effects of constant heightened levels of stress upon our bodies.
There are three main ways that we cope with our strong emotions, these are to: Approach, Attack and Avoid. aaaafiYou may know ‘attack or avoid’ better as ‘fight or flight’.
We all know these feelings well – something happens that causes us alarm and our bodies react to help us to either stay and fight or run for our lives.
What of the ‘approach’ though? Simply this explains our desire to approach those things, or people, that help us to feel emotionally safe and secure and in terms of your baby – that’s you. You are your infant’s safe place and naturally they will want to ‘approach’ you (usually by crying for physical contact with you), particularly when they are not emotionally or physically developed enough to attack or avoid.
Sadly many refer to babies as “clingy” or “manipulative” and see the fact that they need their parents to soothe them as a bad habit that should be broken. So many experts seem to think that once a baby is fed, changed, winded and warm that they have no further needs, they do. Their emotional needs are every bit as valid as their physical ones, why do we not pay these as much attention?
Although babies experience the fight or flight response from a very young age, they are not neurologically developed enough to regulate the resulting emotions themselves – they need us for that.
The Triune Brain
At birth the baby’s brain is about a quarter of its adult size. The brain stem and cerebellum, or the hindbrain, are fairly well developed and are the first part of the brain to develop throughout the first year and a half of life. This area of the brain is responsible for survival – temperature regulation, breathing, digestion and raw basic emotions.
The limbic system, is our ‘feeling brain’. This part of the brain is the next to develop over the first three years. It is responsible for emotions and relationships with others. This part of the brain includes the hippocampus and the amygdala amongst others.
Lastly, the Neocortex, our ‘thinking brain’ develops. The neocortex is by far the most sophisticated area of our brains and develops throughout childhood and adolescence and even into early adulthood throughout the early twenties. This part of our brain is responsible for critical, analytical and rational thought.
If we think about ‘self soothing’, in brain development terms, which parts of the brain would you think are necessary for true self settling, or emotional self regulation to occur?
Obviously the hindbrain is necessary – this is where the ‘fight or flight’ response sits and is the survival part of our brain. What about the limbic system? This too must be necessary considering it is our ‘feeling’ brain and in order to turn down our emotions – or become calm – we need to manipulate what is happening here. How do we manipulate these emotions? Well we need our ‘thinking brain’ for that.
Our neocortex can help us to rationalise and analyse a situation in order to come up with a solution to regulate our emotions. If you’re watching a horror movie you need your neocortex to say “chill, it’s only a movie, turn the light on, it’s OK!”. We need all of the parts of our brain, fully developed, in order to ‘self soothe’.
aaaabiOnly babies have incredibly underdeveloped neocortexes………..
See where I’m going?
Emotional Self Regulation (or what you and I know as ‘self soothing’) is just not physically possible for babies, or toddlers, or preschoolers………
Their brains have just not developed enough!
What Happens When you Sleep Train Then?
I know that many who read this will think “but it works, you’re wrong!”. The real issue here however is our misinterpretation of what is working and what is actually happening.
If you practice sleep training (that could be controlled comforting, spaced comforting, controlled soothing, controlled crying, cry it out, rapid return, spaced soothing, gradual withdrawal or pick up put down – call it what you will, really they’re all the same in their intent and actions) are you teaching your baby to self soothe? No. You absolutely are not, unless you have a wonder kid about five years advanced in their brain development!
What is really happening? In most cases something is happening on a very basic primal level. Let’s go back to the hindbrain and the fight or flight response. What happens when those stress hormones reach such a level that they are toxic yet you can’t take flight……..or fight…..another ‘F’ comes in, this time it’s F for ‘Freeze’. You freeze all activity in order to try to conserve homeostasis, or more simply put – conserve life. Dr Sears calls this ‘Shutdown Syndrome’.
Do you remember that NSPCC advert with Baby Miles?
aaaami“Baby Miles doesn’t cry anymore because nobody comes”.
Or footage of Romanian orphanages with rows upon rows of cots with eerily quiet babies? They don’t cry, not because they don’t have needs, or feelings, but because there are too many of them for the staff to respond to unless it is for a basic physical need.
They’re in Shutdown Syndrome, they have ‘frozen’ in order to conserve life. They know nobody comes, why cry?
They are obviously extreme examples (and I am not saying that a baby left in an orphanage is in the same position as a baby undergoing sleep training), but to a lesser extent trying to teach a baby to self soothe relies on the same principles. It ‘works’ for the same reason.
Check out this research which shows what happens during ‘self soothing’ teaching, highlighting how stressed the baby still is, despite their quietness and apparent ‘sleeping’. Chemically we can now prove that the baby is neither soothed or settled.
The Worrying Side Effects of The Self Soothing Myth
If parents believe their babies are ‘soothed’ and calmed, they naturally relax and think all is OK. But what if it’s not OK? What if a ‘frozen’ baby is in distress yet doesn’t call out for their parents?
What if they have vomitted, or slipped down under their blankets? What if they don’t cry because nobody comes, what if they become a SIDS statistic as a result?
This is the ‘self soothing’ myth at it’s most damaging and most alarming. Sadly nobody will ever research this, it would just be too unethical, but it’s not a wild theory to present despite how uncomfortable it is to think about.
If a baby has been trained to be quiet and to not call for their parents to meet their emotional needs it isn’t too far-fetched to be worried that at some point something might happen and the baby may not call out when they have an urgent need.. A baby’s brain is not sophisticated enough to know that sometimes the parents come and sometimes they don’t – depending on what’s wrong.
Nobody knows what causes SIDs, in fact SIDs, is a label given to unexplained infant death and obviously there is no one cause, but likely hundreds if not thousands. I honestly believe however that there is a potential correlation with sleep training though. Don’t parents have the right to know of the potential risks when they are advised to teach their baby to self soothe by a baby sleep expert or
read! agree to this at certain extent
but I don't think sleep training is that bad...if you also consider the emotional needs of the baby when you are doing it
I think we are just teaching the baby "we are always here" instead of "please be quiet"....and practically, we cannot hold the baby 24/7 even if the baby is insecured
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