Our Approach
There is a wonderfully seductive idea that drives the booming sleep industry. The hope against hope is that somewhere in the world there is an expert who can tell us how to make us sleep when we want (read: need) to. For many of us, the hope is that we can find a baby whisperer who can teach us how to control our child’s sleep. There is good reason for this. We all know the cycle we are trying to avoid. A bad night means a bad day which means more anxiety about bedtime which guarantees another bad night, which means an even worse day. The cycle continues, accelerating as we (and our children) become increasingly sleep deprived. We want to find that person who can give us the answer, the one thing that can protect us from becoming insane. There are, however, two significant problems with this approach.
The first problem with looking for answers from a sleep expert is the fact that there are no sleep experts. It would be like claiming to be an expert on oceans after spending some time evaluating a glass of water. Anyone working in the field of sleep medicine, especially pediatric sleep medicine, will tell you that, while much has been learned, we are still early in the process of understanding sleep. That being said, we are eager to offer what we know in order to help people get good sleep. Given the vast diversity of cultures, family dynamics, living arrangements, and personalities of children, the way children sleep necessarily varies, but there are concepts that are core to every approach. We have designed our Sleep Empowerment workshops to help groups explore and draw on these concepts.
The second problem with looking to “experts” is that it causes us to overlook other sources of knowledge, sources that often offer more valuable insights. We consider knowledge about sleep to be scarce, held by a few people, and we come to believe that the challenge we face is to find a way to gain access to those few people. This is why the number of people who bill themselves as sleep experts is increasing. In reality, however, knowledge about sleep is abundant. Everyone on the planet sleeps. Everyone has experience with the process of falling asleep, and has managed to achieve this with at least some degree of regularity over the course of their lives. The challenge is not gaining access to the few people who have the right answers. Rather, the challenge rests in figuring out what questions will allow you to draw out those essential insights about sleep from the people in your life with whom you regularly come into contact and trust.
Keeping all of this in mind, we at Sleep Empowerment have tried to avoid playing the role of the expert. Given the multiplicity of sleep environments, personality types, family dynamics, etc it is impossible to know exactly what will work for each child. Accordingly, we do not offer a list of steps and promise that, if followed exactly, our method will get your child to sleep perfectly. Instead we review some essential attitudes, concepts, and skills parents must develop in order to help develop a healthy sleep pattern. Our hope is that with these tools parents will be able to work together and help each other empower their children to sleep well throughout their lives.