I nearly closed the door on my baby…

Seven years ago, when my daughter was 8 months old, I stood outside her bedroom door with my hand on the handle, ready to close it and walk away.

She was crying. After 8 months of no sleep, I was beyond exhausted. And every voice around me - the internet, the mother's circle I attended, firends - was saying the same thing: "If you want to sleep, you need to sleep train."

In the end, I couldn't do it - and I'm SO glad I didn't, but I came close.

I remember the sound of her crying through the door, terrified. The part of me that felt like I must be doing something wrong — I was the definition of a responsive parent, a classical attachment parent — but my baby didn't sleep.

What I didn't know then was that she was highly sensitive. I didn't know how trauma or the nervous system worked. How experiences like being left alone to cry are not forgotten, they are held in the body and show up later as separation trauma and patterns we don't always connect back to those early nights. I didn't understand then that babies have real feelings, and real memories (even if they haven't yet developed recall memory).

I see this now in the parents who reach out to me, years after sleep training, describing toddlers who are terrified at bedtime, who can't be alone for a second, whose separation anxiety is so intense it's affecting the whole family. They're confused because "the sleep training worked" but now at two, four, five years old, there's an irrational fear of separation or dissociation that goes unnoticed until it starts causing challenging behaviour.

This isn't about judgement. We are all doing the best we can with whatever information and support we had in that moment. When you're barely functioning from lack of sleep, you're vulnerable. You'll listen to anyone who promises relief.

But here's what I want you to know if you're in that place right now, weighing your options, feeling like you're drowning:

Sleep training is not your only alternative to sleep deprivation.

There's a third way. One where babies are never left alone to cry. Where we work with biology instead of against it. It's what saved me and my baby. It's the Aware Parenting way.

Because here's what most mainstream sleep advice misses: babies are wired to sleep well. When they're not sleeping, it's usually because something is blocking their natural ability to relax and rest. More often than not, it's about feelings that haven't had a safe place to be expressed.

When we understand how babies' nervous systems actually work - what supports natural sleep versus what interferes with it - we can make changes that help everyone sleep better, without ever leaving babies to cry alone.

I'm not interested in "cry it out" versus "wait it out" That's a false choice. I'm interested in what actually works with human biology, what respects your child's nervous system, and what doesn't create problems you'll be unpacking years later.

If something about the mainstream sleep advice isn't sitting right with you, trust that feeling.