Yes, earplugs help

My daughter was 8 months old and I had breastfed her for every single nap, every cry and every bedtime since she was born.

I was trapped in a very specific kind of exhaustion - not just from tiredness and lack of sleep, but the feeling of being the only thing that could get her to sleep and calm down. If I wasn't there, if the breast wasn't there I thought nothing worked. And I truly believed that if I got the timings, wake windows or nap lengths wrong, we'd be looking at another sh*t show of a night. 

Then I heard about Aware Parenting. I didn't fully understand the theory yet, but something about it made me exhale. The idea that I didn't have to stop every cry. That a crying baby, whose needs had been met, wasn't a problem I'd failed to solve. That I hadn't got the wake windows wrong or misread her cues. That babies have REAL feelings, that need to be expressed. 

So one evening I tried something different.

I breastfed her to sleep as usual. But when she woke up again after 45 mins, I didn't rush to feed her again. I went to her, but held her instead.

The crying escalated fast.

It was early evening. I held her for a while, then passed her to my husband to hold her. She cried. She raged. She cried some more.

I had to put earplugs in.

Mostly because I cared so much that I needed to stay in the room without my nervous system taking over and stopping everything.

The fear sitting in my chest was this: she won't stop. This is harming her. I am traumatising my baby by letting her cry in my arms.

She did stop.

And within a few nights, something shifted. She relaxed. She fell asleep without the breast - for the first time in 8 months. 

And then the daytime naps changed too. I could hold her and listen for a few minutes and she'd go down. I could transfer her without her startling awake. No more false starts, no more resettling-every-45 min naps. 

I wasn't trapped anymore. She'd fall asleep when she needed to, for as long as she needed to, without me having to orchestrate every single second of it.

I finally saw that the crying hadn't been the problem. It had been the release she needed all along.

If I could go back to the version of me standing there with earplugs in, I'd tell her: it gets easier to listen. It becomes a gift to you, and to them. You start to see the difference in sleep, in behaviour, in how present and settled they become. It never lasts forever. It always, naturally, ends.

And on the other side of it is something that feels almost radical after months of surviving bedtimes: freedom. The quiet confidence that your child can move through their feelings and that you don't have to fix, stop, or distrac them.

If you're somewhere in that story right now — dreading bedtime, tied to a specific routine that only you can do, freezing in public when the tears come, wondering if you're doing something wrong — I made something for you.

Tears Without Fear is a 9-part audio course (think: private podcast) that gives you a completely new way of understanding why your child cries, and how to be with them through it without panic or dread.

You get lifetime access to all the recordings + plus access to every live round, which happens once or twice a year.