72 | April 2020 |motherandbaby.co.uk
SOOTHE TO SLEEP‘It was my experience with my
oldest son’s sleep that first got
me interested in how babies
learn to self-soothe,’ says Lucy.
‘When Jesse was born he was a
brilliant sleeper, and so I assumed
that I was just naturally good
at getting babies to nod off.
But then Jesse’s sleep started
to degrade – to the point that,
by the time he was nine months
old, he was up every hour.
I was tearing my hair out,
trying to work out what was
wrong, and feeling like a
complete failure. After a lot
of trial-and-error I started
separating his milk from sleep
and I got rid of his dummy, as itwas constantly falling out of his
mouth and waking him up. Then
I had my second child, Ellen, who
had silent reflux. She didn’t sleep
for eight months!
I was working as a chartered
surveyor, but I was reading
everything I could about sleep.
I had my third child, Eden, who
was a brilliant sleeper and then,
when I was pregnant with my
fourth child Harry, I started
training to be a sleep consultant.
I did courses in the UK and in
the US: I learned exactly what
children need in order to sleep
well but Harry still struggled
with sleep! He woke up with
every tooth that came through,he had a constant cold that
interfered with sleep, and he had
food intolerances that affected
his snoozing, too. But going
through all those different
experiences really helped me
learn how to settle different
kinds of children. And all the
work I’ve done with other families
since then has shown me that all
babies can learn to self-soothe- 98 per cent can do it with
my Stay-and-Support method,
and the two per cent that can’t
tend to have an underlying
issue that’s interrupting their
sleep, usually a food intolerance.
Once that is addressed, they
do learn to settle.’
THE BABY SLEEP SOLUTION – LUCY’S STORY‘The
thing that helps
Hope to feel settled is
having a log skin-to-skin
cuddle. It just seems to calm her
down after the day, and I’ve found
that she really likes having her
nose or ears gently stroked while
we’re cuddling. I don’t know
why it relaxes her, but it does!’
Celia Stanworth, 35 from
Towcester, is mum to
Hope, 11 weeks