Why Having Self-Soothing As Your Baby’s Sleep Goal Is Your Parenting Nemesis, and What To Focus On Instead

Self-soothing is often proclaimed to be the ultimate goal when it comes to your baby’s sleep, but I believe that focusing on this is actually your parenting nemesis, and that by reframing this focus point you’ll be able to shift your perspective when it comes to your baby’s sleep, and feel more secure and confident in your approach.  

So, firstly, what is self-soothing?

Self-soothing is a component of self-regulation, which is our ability to adjust and control our energy levels, emotions, behaviours and attention at times throughout our day. In adults, not being able to self-regulate might look like struggling to control your emotions when you’re in traffic or getting overly frustrated and anxious when you’re late for an appointment and being unable to return to a stable state.

It’s vital to remember that our babies are all unique individuals, and are born with varying abilities to self-regulate from birth, and so although it’s easy to compare your baby to other babies you know of the same age, give yourself and your baby the compassion you both deserve and know that, despite whatever you are doing in your parenting, an element of it inevitably just comes down to their nature and their uniqueness. 

When does the ability to self-regulate tend to develop?

Allowing for each baby’s individuality, we generally start to see the beginning signs of the capacity to self-regulate from the age of around 3-4 months, but for some it might be closer to 6 or 12 months – and it actually isn’t fully developed until our early 20s!

This means that our babies will not self-soothe until they are developmentally ready to, but what we can control is creating an environment for this self-soothing capacity to evolve, by nurturing trust, safety, and developing our own tools to help support this.  

These are the 1-2% changes and the small steps that you can be focusing on in the here and now, rather than solely focusing on the end goal of getting your baby to self-soothe. It’s these small changes that ultimately make the biggest difference because they help to foster trust, safety and confidence around sleep.

By taking the pressure off yourself and your parenting, you can sit in the more comfortable place of developing your confidence and skills, rather than focusing on the end goal and feeling like you or your baby are failing.

So how can you help your baby develop more confidence and capacity for this? 

Firstly, we can work on modelling self-regulation ourselves, which will also enable us to become co-regulators for our children, because when our children are unable to self-regulate on their own, they need to regulate off someone, essentially borrowing or mirroring some of our regulation. This looks different for everyone at any time. For example, sometimes you may need more in the form of physical touch such as from a hug with a loved one, other times someone's presence and soft tone in their voice is enough to soothe you. When you become your child’s investigator and learn what works for you, it has the power to create an amazing shift! You can remain a stable anchor for your child to return too, when they are done with riding the waves in the midst of their own dysregulation.  

Secondly, and related to this first point, we can focus on what we can control and look at managing our stress levels. Utilise the power of taking proper breaths throughout your day, to bring your nervous system out of a fight, flight response. You can even stick post-it notes around your house to remind you to breathe throughout your day! 

Next, we can set realistic expectations about the situation. This particularly applies for those babies who may have had reflux, for example, and therefore need to have their stored memories and bad associations with sleep rewired and replaced with a new relaxing response to sleep. This isn’t going to be a quick fix and it will take time to nurture these new responses, but by loosening your grip on the end goal of self-soothing, you’ll be able to be more attuned to where your baby’s at as you help them on this journey. 

We can also focus on supporting and encouraging our babies, allowing them to exercise the muscle of regulating themselves over time. Tune into your baby’s signs of progress to see If they’re beginning to exercise small instances of self-regulation, for example if they can return to a relaxed state when you return to a room, if you don’t immediately go to them. 

Lastly, we can focus on creating an environment that allows our babies to practice their capacity for self-regulation, with more ease. This can include paying attention to what we can control, such as nutrition, timing, the activities leading up to sleep time, our body language and our stress levels. We can take ownership of these factors to ensure that we are creating the optimum environment for our babies to exercise their self-regulation muscle when they are ready to.   

So the next time you’re feeling like you’re failing, and feeling like your goal of getting your baby to self-soothe is out of reach, take a step back and forget about that goal – have faith that it will happen and focus on all the little steps and the building blocks leading up to it instead. 

As Rachel Samson said, “the capacity for self-soothing is born out of hundreds of instances of being soothed by someone else” – so make that your focus point. 

For more support, just like this, check out my Thriving Parent-ing podcast here 

To check out the show notes for Episode 2, 5 Things Holding You Back In Parenting, And Actionable Steps You Can Take When Parenting Just Feels Hard, click here

To check out the show notes for Episode 3, A Growth vs a Fixed Mindset In Parenting – How To Overcome Challenges And Boost Your Parenting Ability, click here 

For my Sleep Godmother Program, my most tailored sleep program going beyond sleep itself, click here 

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