Thanks for sharing @Simone! That’s great!

@Beth – You’re very welcome! Please keep reading and sharing!

@Sabrina Thank you for pointing that out! We have updated the link. It looks like the website changed. Thank you for commenting and visiting our sleepy little village!

1. the reliance on cortisol levels as a quantitative measure of “toxic stress” is flawed, as the FitMom article points out. Cortisol ebbs and flows naturally throughout the day and is a product of both negative stress (distress) and positive stress (eustress). So it may actually be more helpful to consider elevated cortisol levels as less-than-ideal indicators of distress.

2. Implicit in your question is the assumption that (a) all stress is the same and (b) babies always cry as a result of stress. However, I’d suggest that all stress isn’t equal; I imagine that for a child, the stress of being handled by an unfamiliar caregiver vs. the stress of having a fever and being ill feels quite different.
So it may be helpful to parse out different kinds of stress and treat those types differently.

Second, you mention in your comment, ” why, if they had so many actual good reasons to be stressed and upset, were they not crying to try to tell their mothers about it?” In response, I would assert that the “natural” response to stress does not have to be crying. Indeed, that is the a premise upon which the whole theory of sleep coaching rests.. Simply put, when you sleep coach, you are gently teaching your baby that he or she can soothe himself/herself through minor stresses (like waking briefly at night or feeling sleepy). Gradually, your child learns how to cope with those small stresses himself/herself, through self-soothing activities like sucking a thumb or stroking a lovey. By contrast, we would not expect (nor does sleep coaching teach) a child to self-soothe through larger stressors (like being ill, experiencing physical pain or discomfort, being frightened, etc.) This is anecdotal, but 4.5 years of working here has taught me that even the most perfectly sleep coached babies still wake during illness, or due to abrupt life changes (like birth of a new sibling or moving to a new home); indeed, many wake often during developmental leaps like sleep regressions.

So, to summarize, I’d say that sleep coaching teaches a narrow set of self-soothing skills designed to help a child cope with minor, sleep-related stressors like wanting to fall asleep, feeling sleepy, and waking in the middle of the night. These things may feel minorly upsetting to a child, but they are mild stressors that we can reasonably expect a child to soothe himself/herself through over time. But, for better or for worse, sleep coaching will not create a situation in which your child no longer EVER cries for you, even in situations when he/she probably should. In my experience, that just doesn’t happen. That’s no doubt because the self-soothing skills that can work to alleviate minor stress won’t work for larger stress situations: in other words, no amount of thumb-sucking will make a fever go away, and no amount of lovey-stroking will make the scary barking dog noise stop. In my experience, babies and toddlers know this difference and don’t hesitate to call for mom or dad during times when mom or dad are needed.

Sorry this comment is so long, Kathleen – hope it helps! 🙂

@ shayla mcgill – absolutely! So glad to hear we helped 🙂 And thanks for commenting!