Do you have a “tricky kid” and good sleep is feels impossible to achieve ?
Today, we're diving into a topic that's close to my heart: understanding that while some skills, like sleep, come naturally to some children, others may need a bit more guidance and support from a professional baby sleep coach. And that's perfectly okay! It's a journey, and sometimes reaching out for expert help can make all the difference.
Recently, I had the pleasure of working with Jack and his lovely 21-month-old daughter, who we affectionately nicknamed the "curveball queen." This family’s journey was a testament to how challenging sleep can be for some children and how seeking the right guidance from a certified baby sleep coach can lead to incredible results.
In our conversation, Jack shared how his daughter struggled with sleep. Before reaching out, their nights were marked by long, drawn-out bedtime routines where their daughter needed a lot of physical touch from dad to get sleep. Naps were brief and inconsistent, leaving everyone exhausted and frazzled. Nights were even more challenging, often ending with reactive co-sleeping out of necessity rather than choice, as their daughter would wake up in the middle of the night and couldn't fall back asleep in her own bed. This situation wasn’t working for anyone; the whole family was sleep-deprived and struggling.
Jack and his partner tried various baby sleep training methods on their own, but nothing seemed to work or feel in alignment with their family values. Their daughter’s strong need for physical touch made it hard to implement these methods effectively. That’s when they decided to seek professional help and contacted me, an EXPERIENCED Trained and Certified Gentle Sleep Coach. My process that utilizes an alternative method to cry-it-out was a good fit for this family.
What Jack and many other parents discover is that sleep is indeed a learned skill. For some children, it comes naturally; for others, it takes more time, patience, and sometimes the right guidance. It's important to recognize that every child is different, and there's no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to sleep training.
We've captured their experience in a testimonial video, which you can watch below.
During our work together, we took a compassionate, child-led approach. We created a personalized baby sleep coaching plan that respected their daughter's needs and temperament while also setting up a routine that WORKED for this family’s lifestyle. This included a consistent bedtime, a soothing bedtime routine, and a gradual transition to help her feel secure in her crib.
One of the most beautiful aspects of our journey together was the collaboration. We worked as a team—Jack, his wife, his daughter and I—checking in regularly, adjusting the plan as needed, and supporting each other through the challenges. Jack noted how this collaborative approach, combined with the accountability of having regular check-in zoom meetings every 2 days and discussions, made all the difference. It wasn’t just about following a rigid plan; it was about adapting to their daughter's needs and celebrating each small success along the way.
And the results were truly remarkable! Their daughter now sleeps through the night, from around 8 PM to just after 6 AM, and takes a solid nap during the day. She's happier and more content, both during sleep and awake times. Jack and his partner have reclaimed their evenings and are enjoying the simple joy of having time to themselves.
Jack's story is a powerful reminder that it's okay to ask for help. Sometimes, as parents, we feel we “SHOULD” be able to handle everything on our own, but there’s no shame in seeking expert guidance. Just as we wouldn’t hesitate to get support for teaching our children to read or swim, the same goes for sleep. A TENURED, trained and certified sleep coach can provide the expert guidance needed to navigate these challenges. It's a skill that can be learned, and with the right support, even the toughest cases can find resolution.
So, if you're a parent struggling with your child's sleep, remember that help is available. Whether it's understanding sleep patterns, establishing routines, or just needing someone to guide you through the process, don't hesitate to reach out to a baby sleep coach. Together, we can create a peaceful, restful environment for your family.
Thank you for reading, and a big thank you to Jack for sharing his family's journey with us. Remember, you're not alone in this, and there's always a path to better sleep.
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So, hello, I'm Joanna with blissful baby sleep coaching. I'm here with Jack. We are doing a sleep success story. We just finished with his daughter, who is 21 months. Hi, Jack. Thanks for being here to share your story. Yeah, of course. All right, so I always like to ask the first question is, what did it look like with your 21 month old daughter before you called me? When was she going to bed?
When was she waking up? What was happening in the middle of night? What was happening with naps? Like, give me all the juicy details. Naps were. I mean, we'll kind of start in the middle of the day. Like naps typically, you know, she would need a lot of physical touch. Like she had this thing where she would like, stroke my arm a lot. And so, you know, she would take anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes to fall asleep.
And then she would really only sleep for about 45 minutes, maybe an hour, sometimes less. And then nights, same kind of thing, like, needed a lot of physical touch in order to soothe herself to sleep. So basically I'm being held prisoner the entire time, and same kind of thing takes anywhere from 30, 40, 50 sometimes, you know, an hour and a half to get to sleep. So, you know, it was just really fitful for her.
Like, it wasn't, you know, it was not at all like, restful. And so, you know, as a parent, then I'm in there for, you know, up to 2 hours, you know, every single night. So, like, that's just after a while, it just kind of becomes, you know, untenable. Right, exactly. And like you said, like, naps would take you an hour, then she'd only sleep for 45 minutes, and then she'd wake up cranky from the naps.
So then you kind of had a cranky kid that whole afternoon. And then you roll into bedtime, and then it would take you up to 2 hours to get her to go to sleep. And by the way, you guys, dad was handling all nights and naps, so he was like on duty for all these challenging sleep things. Like she wanted just to touch his arm, touch his arm, touch his arm, touch his arm.
And then in the middle of the night, what would she do? She would wake up. Yeah. So she would probably sleep, you know, anywhere from three to 5 hours in her own bed, you know, 5 hours if it was a good night, you know, and so. And the other thing to say is, you know, she would get to sleep finally. Maybe around 9930. Ten. Yeah, so, you know, she's sleeping three to 5 hours.
She wakes up anywhere from midnight to two, then she would never get back to sleep in her own bed. So she would always end up co sleeping with mom and dad. And I'm a heavy sleeper, so, you know, she would still do the whole arm touching thing in order to self soothe. But mom is not a heavy sleeper. And so, you know, that was depriving mom of a lot of sleep.
And so, you know, she would wake up in the morning and, you know, she's not at 100% right. You know, so it was just not a great situation all around. Plus, you know, as partners, you don't have any time for anything, right? Because if you're in the bedroom with baby girl until 930 or ten at night, then right after that, everyone's got to go to bed because, you know, that baby's back in the bed arm touching somebody, either mom or dad, all night long.
And that, you know, no one's going to get any sleep. And the thing that's hard was hard on mom. So I just want to make it clear, like, co sleeping can work fabulous for many people. But what I always say about co sleeping is co sleeping only is a only works, if you will, when I. Dad is totally well rested, mom is totally well rested, and child is totally well rested.
And that was not the case here. This was like what we call reactive co sleeping, which is it was just easier to bring her into the bed and let her arm touch each parent all night long instead of dad going back to the crib rail and leaning up against the crib rail, waiting for the child to do her, you know, touch them long enough to finally fall asleep.
So I get it. It's hard because you guys were, you know, so patient and loving. But then it got to the point where, like, no one was getting any sleep, even though you were co sleeping. It just, that wasn't, that wasn't providing the rest that everybody needed. So then how did you guys decide to ask for help? Like, what was the breaking point? Or what led you to finally say, okay, wait, I think we need some help?
Because I think you said that you had tried on your own or you had done a ton of reading. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, I mean, we had done a lot of reading just around different sleep training methods. So extinction, the sleep lady shuffle, ferber, all of it. And we had tried all of them to some extent, but our daughter was just so attached to this need for physical touch in order to soothe herself.
And so the idea, you know, say, ferber, for instance, of doing, you know, intervals of checking in, that sounds great on paper, but when your kid only knows, like, how to fall asleep when, you know, stroking mom or dad's arm, you know, leaving them in the room and then coming back and saying, it's nighttime, mommy and daddy love you, it's time to rest, and she's just inconsolably screaming.
Right. Well, that's not very helpful. Right. The methodology, you know, the methodology itself is sound, but meeting your child where they are and how they are is a lot more difficult to navigate. And I think that's what we were realizing we were having trouble with. And so we thought that we really needed an objective third party who could come in to kind of lend us guidance and their expertise and just kind of all around just, like, help guide us through the process of figuring out how to get this kid to sleep.
Yeah. And I want to say here that their 21 month old daughter, her nickname that she became, that I nicknamed her, I call her curveball queen because she was a difficult case. And I have been doing this for, you know, over 13 years. I think I'm almost at 14 years now. So I have worked with many, many, many families and many, many, many children at her age, right around two years old.
And so the. The fact that Jack and his, his, and, you know, his partner said, you know what? We really need that. Like, like you said, third objective, third party to guide us. For sure you guys benefited from that because the collaboration that we needed, that I had a ton of knowledge, but I even went out to some of my colleagues to talk about it. So sometimes there are cases that are really tough, but this is why I wanted Jack to talk to us today is because even the hardest cases are solvable.
That's the good news here. Right? And because we built this beautiful teamwork approach and we worked in a very, very sequential way for his daughter, we could move at the pace using the methodology that really, really suited her. And we created kind of a team environment where we were all moving in the same direction. And over time, everything just started clicking, clicking, clicking, which is awesome. And I love the fact that you reached out to people in your neighborhood network to say, hey, hand raise.
We've done all the reading. We've done some trying out, sleep coaching. We need some additional support. We need some expertise and some accountability and some collaboration here. So I love that you were ready to raise your hand and that you were able to find me. And then the next question is kind of like, well, what did you love most about working with me and working and getting that support.
Yeah, I mean, I think, like, the tier that we did was the hold my hand one. I think very much like we needed our hand to be held throughout the entire process. And so, like having consistent check ins and calls and I submit sleep logs and we have a discussion about it or emails, you know, or text, you know, the, the following days, you know, like just kind of that, uh, that kind of responsive environment.
Good, because then, you know, we can test that out, you know, whatever suggestions you might have, we can test it out like the next night. Yep. You know, or the next nap, whatever the case may be. And, you know, it was great to have essentially someone to also be accountable to because if you do this on your own as parents, it's easy to let things slide. It's easy to be like, well, yeah, we moved to the center of the room doing a sleep lady shuffle, but now she's getting really cranky and, well, we should maybe move back to the, you know, the side of the bed because that's, you know, where she was really comfortable there.
So it's really easy to kind of let things regress. Whereas I think if you have somebody who is really, you know, mindfully coaching you through this, you know, you feel, hey, like you're getting advice, you know, it's hard to ignore it. It's like, okay, we're here. We need to be here. So they're always keeping you moving, but also, you know, you feel accountable to that, of like, okay, like we've gotten this far.
You, you know, the only way, the only way out is through, you know, so we have to chart that path and, you know, for, for everybody's sake, you know, otherwise, you kind of feel like you're, you're letting the team down. Right, exactly. And, and the accountability is like a good type of accountability. You know, it's not like I'm going to come and be like, well, you didn't do this.
It's never like that. It's very much a, we co create the goals and then we do the thing, you know, whatever the next step is. And then we evaluate, evaluate, evaluate. Like, is this working for you? Is this working for your wife? Is this working for the baby? It is. Okay, so now we have proof it's working. So now we have the accountability because we all agree this is like working in our favor.
So it's like the best type of accountability because it doesn't, there's no shame or judgment associated with it. It's like, it's all like informed consent, consent in many ways. And then it's like this feeling of validation. Like, oh, my God, we did. We make. We collaborated, we executed, we made a good decision, and now we have proof of the good decision. And so now we can collaborate again.
We can execute, and then we can evaluate, and then we can make another good decision, and then we can keep going. So that's what I think is super important. And, you know, in a case of a curveball queen, you need that even more, right? So we were, like, in constant contact just all the time, right? So. So what does it look like now, dad? Like, we have. We, you know, this is our celebration call.
Like, he has achieved everything on his wish list. So give, like, tell me what it looks like now. Like, what time does she go to bed? Where is she in bed. How long does she sleep? What's her naps like? So now at. At nighttime, you know, we start around, you know, anywhere from, like four and a half to 5 hours and 15 minutes awake. Whereas before, you know, she was going to six, six and a half, seven more hours awake.
And, you know, we have a routine. You know, she takes her bath, put on her PJ's, brush her teeth, you know, she says, you know, gives mom a hug and a kiss and a high five, you know, and then, you know, me and her, we do pretty much like two books, max. So in the crib, we read a book, you know, and then I tell her, we're going to do one more book, and then we're going to rest, and then we hold.
I hold her to that, even if she's, you know, you know, complaining. And then, yeah, I give. We do the same thing as we did with mom. Hug and a kiss and a high five. And then she says, night night, dad. Night night. And then she lies down. And she lies down and goes to sleep. And the other day, even when she asked for the book, she went, daddy, rest, which is so amazing.
And I said, now we've reached the threshold. Right around two, they get body awareness. She's right on cue. She's almost 26 months. Right on cue. She's like, I am having body awareness. I'm actually tired. And that, to me, is, like, golden because it means that her. She loves her bedtime routine so much that she can be relaxed about her bedtime routine. She's not scared to go to sleep.
She's not scared the dad's leaving nothing. It's like she likes her crib. She likes a routine so much so that she can feel drowsy and actually want to rest, which is so beautiful. And she does that. She does rest. So cute. Yeah. Um, amazing. And then for naps, she now is taking one big giant nap. And, yeah, she's now extending it. Used to be 45 minutes. Now we're getting 90 minutes to 2 hours.
Yeah. And nighttime sleep, um, to kind of go back to it. Like she's, she's sleeping through the night now. Yeah, she's falling asleep, you know, around 08:00 and she isn't waking up until just after six. Amazing. So she's getting 10 hours consolidated sleep in her crib all night long and wakes up happy. Right, dad wakes up happy. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Wakes up happy. Like she, she's at the point now where to.
We're trying to kind of get her more comfortable, her own bed in the morning where she kind of hang out. So we'll go in and we'll check on her and say, do you want to read a book in bed? And she says, yes. So we give her a book and that kind of lets us get ready for our morning, kind of brush her teeth and change her clothes and kind of get prepped for the day.
Whereas before she would wake up and she would want out of the crib immediately. She wants nothing to do with her crib. She doesn't want to be here. She just wants to be with mom and dad. Where's mom and dad? You know, now she's just so much more comfortable in bed and comfortable in her own skin. You know, I can't, I can only guess that, you know, in terms of just like her independence generally, you know, when it comes to play or other parts of her life, you know, I can only think that this will also start to extend to that because, you know, she has a feeling of contentment here and, you know, she's okay on her own.
So maybe, you know, she'll start feeling that she can do the same in other areas. Yep, yep, yep. So, like, independence grows. Can, you know, being content and happy with their crib both at bedtime and in the, in the middle of the night and at nap and she's taking that big, beautiful nap and not, she's not waking up cranky. And now mom has a really reliable schedule so she can, like, anticipate, like, okay, my child's waking up around six.
We can have breakfast, we can plan for a morning activity, we can come back, we can have lunch, we can wash hands, go down for nappy, wake up from nap, have a, have a little afternoon time, come back for dinner. Because now we know the intervals that mom has mom has about 6 hours in the morning and she's got about 5 hours before bedtime, after nap. And it's like now everybody can plan their day, their work life, their personal life, their social life.
And most importantly, you guys have your bed back. You have your master bedroom back, and you have the evenings now to yourself where Jack was Mia in the bedroom until 10:00 at night while his wife was getting ready to go to bed because they knew it was going to be a bad night of sleep. Now you guys can hang out. It's like, it's so amazing what becomes possible that wasn't even possible several weeks ago.
It's like, yeah, life was this and now it's that. Yeah. In such a short span of time, too, to kind of go from essentially her co sleeping in bed to now she's getting to sleep on her own and she doesn't wake up until 06:00. We don't want to do with ourselves anymore. Oh, this is what it was like before. We have lives again. Yeah, we have lives again.
I know oftentimes families will say, oh, my God, I have my life back. That's what they always say. I got my life back. I'm like, that's such a good way to put it. So if you were to meet a family, parents that had a child that wasn't sleeping from ages six months to ten years of age, because, remember, it's never too late to learn their sleep skills. And they were complaining about it, they're like, oh, my God, my kid that doesn't sleep.
You know, and now that you've gone through this process, like, what do you want people to know about hiring a sleep consultant? Or what do you want people to know about sleep training in general now that you're a true believer? So the thing that I didn't really understand at the beginning was that sleep is a learned skill. You know, it's not for some kids. It's something that happens.
It's something that they can figure out and they can navigate, and that's great for other kids. They need a lot of help. And, you know, I think a lot of people, you know, we definitely, you know, saw sleep training, especially, like, we tried extinction before, right? And we felt terrible because it's kind of like, what am I putting my kid through? You know, all they want is just like, they just want mom and dad.
So, yeah, like, having, there is a stigma around it, and I think having someone to guide you through, to kind of navigate, you know, because every kid's different and you know, the process you're going to have to go through is different. I think the big thing that one thing that stuck out at the beginning of the process that you said is like, you know, this is primarily going to be guided by your child.
Like how your, like how your child reacts to things, you know, whether positively or negatively. It's mainly going to be, you know, guided by, you know, them. Like, they're, they're going to be, we're going to be, you know, kind of putting up the guardrails, but they're going to be steering the boat. So I think that's a big thing, you know, that people might have a misconception about. It's like, oh, it's like a hard and a fast thing.
No, it's extremely organic. Mm hmm. Yeah. And, you know, and, and, you know, like you say, it's never too late to learn, right. It's never too late to learn. Well, thank you so much, Jack, for sharing your story again. He, you guys, Jack had the curveball queen. It took us a long time. We even had to take a break, which was fine again, because we were collaborating, evaluating, checking in, co creating, executing together.
And, and that's what it's all about. Because when you're working, when you have the right coach, using the right methodology for the right temperament of your child, and you're working at the pace that honors the child, because, again, this child literally led the program. Like, she guided us on what was possible every step of the way. And what we were doing is paying very close attention and we were collaborating with her.
And when you get that combo, even the toughest cases can be remedied. That is the good news story here. That's why I wanted Jack to come on today to talk to you guys. So thank you again for sharing your story and thank you for being such an incredible, patient, loving parent. He never gave up, and, and I never gave up. And that is so good because when you're thinking, learn skill.
Like kids learn how to walk, they learn how to swim, they learn how to read, they learn how to do mathematic. This is no different. If your child had a learning difference, you would be working really extra hard with them to help them move through their obstacles to learn to read or to do their math facts. This is no different. It's like we can create the learning container and go at the right pace, and the child, it will click.
It will click, it will click. And it clicked. And that's why Jack is here today to tell us the good news. So thank you so much, you guys. Thank you.