Sleep Training Myths – The Real Impact on Kids and Parents
00:00:00.000 | To talk about sleep training, we're generally referring to some system
00:00:03.160 | where a child is crying for some period of time during the night
00:00:07.360 | and with the intention that they fall asleep on their own.
00:00:10.160 | So people sometimes call this "cry it out."
00:00:12.200 | There's a method called "verberizing,"
00:00:15.040 | which is named after a guy named Verber.
00:00:17.040 | And there are many different variants on this,
00:00:19.280 | but the basic core item is that the baby is crying,
00:00:21.600 | you are not going in to help the baby,
00:00:23.360 | and they eventually learn to fall asleep on their own.
00:00:25.400 | It's extremely polarizing because people worry
00:00:28.840 | that if you sleep train your kid,
00:00:30.280 | it will cause them to never be attached to you
00:00:32.920 | and to have long-term psychological issues.
00:00:35.960 | We have a fair amount of evidence on sleep training.
00:00:38.200 | We can see that it does improve sleep.
00:00:39.640 | It does actually improve parents' sleep,
00:00:41.480 | decreases postpartum depression.
00:00:43.800 | And then when you look at long-term outcomes,
00:00:45.760 | either long-term or short-term outcomes,
00:00:48.040 | for kids, you just don't see any differences.
00:00:50.040 | For kids who are sleep trained and not,
00:00:51.400 | there's just not any evidence in the data
00:00:53.280 | of this kind of attachment issues.