Let’s say you’re a baby. You reach the end of a sleep cycle and become partially alert. What do you do? Ideally, if nothing is wrong, you settle back in for another sleep cycle. But this is something babies need to learn to do, and while some of them pick this up very quickly others initially come to full alertness every time and won’t doze back off without some combination of cuddles, noise, and motion. Sleep training is essentially a collection of strategies for teaching babies (a) the skill of falling back to sleep on their own (“self soothing”) and (b) when they should use it.
In this case Nora has already solidly learned (a) and mostly learned (b) but still tests the boundaries some times. For example, we were recently on vacation in a tightly packed house (28 people in a 5br) and Nora quickly figured out that every time she cried at night she pretty quickly got cuddles and nursing (because we didn’t want her to wake up our older kids, 8y and 6y, sleeping in the same room). Over the course of the week she started crying more and more often during the night, correctly (and unfortunately) learning that the adult-implemented pattern for when she needed to go back to sleep on her own had shifted. After we got back home, we had about a week of gradually re-teaching her the normal pattern.
Let’s say you’re a baby. You reach the end of a sleep cycle and become partially alert. What do you do? Ideally, if nothing is wrong, you settle back in for another sleep cycle. But this is something babies need to learn to do, and while some of them pick this up very quickly others initially come to full alertness every time and won’t doze back off without some combination of cuddles, noise, and motion. Sleep training is essentially a collection of strategies for teaching babies (a) the skill of falling back to sleep on their own (“self soothing”) and (b) when they should use it.
In this case Nora has already solidly learned (a) and mostly learned (b) but still tests the boundaries some times. For example, we were recently on vacation in a tightly packed house (28 people in a 5br) and Nora quickly figured out that every time she cried at night she pretty quickly got cuddles and nursing (because we didn’t want her to wake up our older kids, 8y and 6y, sleeping in the same room). Over the course of the week she started crying more and more often during the night, correctly (and unfortunately) learning that the adult-implemented pattern for when she needed to go back to sleep on her own had shifted. After we got back home, we had about a week of gradually re-teaching her the normal pattern.
Expanded into a post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EAKjaLhEpphLj6vTK/sleep-training