If you’re like many tired parents, Google opens on your phone at three in the morning and you immediately type, “How do I get my baby to sleep through the night?” Or better yet, “How do I keep my toddler in his own bed?” Your first step to solving your sleep struggles is understanding that many parents struggle with sleep challenges and that sleep consultants are available to help.
Your goals and your overall parenting style are going to dictate the process of finding the right sleep professional to help you. Many parents are unsure of when they should look for help and when it makes sense to hire a sleep consultant.
The First Step in Hiring a Sleep Consultant to Help
Your Baby Sleep or Beat a Sleep Regression:
The first thing that you want to understand is what are realistic expectations for your child’s age. Between 4 to 6 months of age, children should be close to being able to sleep through the night with the exception of perhaps one night feeding. You want to make sure that you’re managing intake. A lot of their ability to sleep through the night is determined by whether or not they get the right amount of milk during the day, which is 24 to 32 ounces.
Next, you want to make sure that you’re avoiding them becoming overtired, as an overtired child can have trouble settling and have early morning wakings. In the overnight hours, you want to make sure that your child’s avoiding props: things like rocking to sleep, nursing to sleep, bottle feeding to sleep, etc. This is any time you’re noticing a pattern that when you do something to help your baby to fall asleep, they then look for that in order to stay asleep through the night. These props need to be eliminated.
And finally, we need to teach your child the skill of falling asleep independently. How a baby learns to fall asleep and stay asleep is going to be the skill set that they repeat over and over, every single night. If your child has the skill to fall asleep independently, they will do so on a much more consistent basis, assuming that you’ve taken off all of the other items that I just listed beforehand.
The Second Step at the Point You’re Ready to Hire a Sleep Consultant
and you want your Baby or Toddler to Sleep:
When researching a sleep consultant for your baby or toddler, you want to make sure that they have vast expertise in the space. There are many sleep consultants that just graduate from an online certification program and call themselves an expert, and I can tell you that they are not.
You want to make sure that they’ve gone through a specific certification program, mentoring, and have seen a large number of clients, giving them real-world experience.
Look for additional certifications as well, like a postpartum doula certification, a lactation designation, perhaps even a history in the field of OBGYN or postpartum care. All of those things air extra credibility that is certainly going to be helpful on your journey to help your child sleep.
Check their reviews on Google & Yelp – If they have 6, stay away. I see so many sleep consultants with the SAME reviews as other sleep consultants – they are reviews from who certified them, not clients they have worked with. Review from “Fiona” anyone.
The final thing that you want to make sure you’re getting during your sleep consulting services is that the person you hire is there to support you using a communication channel you are comfortable with. Many sleep consultants will only talk to you through email or via a voice messaging system like Voxer. For many parents, that isn’t going to cut it. Using the good old fashioned phone can be very important to ensure you get great communication during your sleep coaching services. Read the details and work with someone you can count on to be there, how you prefer to communicate when you need them.
Finding Someone YOU Trust to Help Your Child Sleep
One of the things I am most proud of is the level of support we bring to the table. Both myself and my team of over 12 sleep consultants across the U. S. support you through the mechanism in which you’re most comfortable. We offer unlimited phone calls, email support, extended hour support, weekend support, and WhatsApp messaging support through text to ensure that we are connecting with you when you need us for guidance on your sleep journey, every single day.
In addition, here at Tiny Transitions, we provide ongoing support once our formal sleep training program is completed, through weekly live training and weekly free Q&A’s, to ensure that you keep successful sleep.
There are no other sleep consultants who are providing this amount of information to you, and that is certainly something that you want to make sure you’re going to get. Of course, we may not be the right fit for you as a sleep consultant here at Tiny Transitions. However, I CAN tell you that we are unmatched in service, support, education, and ability, which is something you want to look closely at when you’re selecting a provider. We want to ensure that you are getting all of this to make the transition to better sleep one that comes simply and easily for you. Sweet Dreams, Courtney
Courtney Zentz is an Award-Winning Author, Baby Sleep Expert and Founder of Tiny Transitions. Her background as a Pediatric Sleep Specialist, Lactation Counselor, Postpartum Doula and Sleep Coach to her team of Sleep Consultants around the world provides parents with a solution to their sleep struggles, that is backed by science and balanced with your love and support.
The mission of Tiny Transitions is to teach healthy sleep hygiene and parenting education to parents and their babies, toddlers and young adults who struggle to sleep through private sleep consultations or their more intensive 12-month program, Making Over Motherhood.
Named by Tuck as a Top 200 Sleep Professional in the United States, Courtney is a 4x “Best of Philadelphia” Sleep Consultant. She writes & contributes to Fatherly, Yahoo, Thrive Global, Medium, Nectar, Romper, Parentology, The Sleep Sense Show, and Bustle among others in the field of Pediatric Sleep. Courtney hosts The Kids Sleep Show podcast, and is a frequent guest with companies like Slumber Pod® and The Magic Sleep Suit® Company.
Courtney resides just outside Philadelphia, with her husband Adam and two children, Max and Sovella. She has always felt passionate about making sleep & healthy living a priority in her family’s life and Tiny Transitions would welcome working with you. Setup a Free Preliminary Sleep Evaluation with Courtney or a member of her Slumber Squad®
