Triggered by Crying to Calm: How One Family Found Sleep Success with My Gentle Sleep Coaching Method
Laura’s little boy was struggling with sleep, and it was affecting the entire family.
Nap times were exhausting.
Tantrums and meltdowns were happening all the time.
Parents were feeling “nap trapped” due to contact napping
Nighttime was no better.
Multiple failed transfers to crib and Frequent wake-ups.
Co-sleeping became their only solution, but even that stopped working.
Exhaustion took over daytime patience.
Laura’s frustration was palpable when she described how her son's crying triggered her. Laura says… "My mental health was really struggling," acknowledging how severely sleep deprivation was affecting her ability to be the mom she wanted to be.
Alternative to Cry It Out Methods
One of the biggest concerns I hear from parents is their fear that any sleep training method will involve endless crying and distress. Laura and her husband shared those same fears.
But as they quickly discovered, my gentle method doesn’t involve leaving your baby alone to cry for hours. Instead, it’s about working with your child’s natural rhythms and teaching them the skills they need to sleep peacefully—without trauma, stress, or guilt.
The Shift Toward a Restorative Sleep Solution
What Laura and her family were experiencing is all too common. The frustration and exhaustion were taking over their lives, yet they didn’t know how to make the necessary changes. The good news is, they didn’t have to navigate it alone.
Their family’s journey with sleep coaching allowed them to check off every box on their wishlist ( and QUICKLY!):
✅ Sleeping through the night
✅ Hands free naps
✅ Sleep well in a pack and play for family trips
✅ Parents sleep in the same bed together at night
✅ Grandma babysit overnight with no stress
✅ Aunt babysit with no nap drama
✅ Anybody can put him in for a nap easily
✅ Go on trips and family holidays
In Laura’s words: “We were surprised how easy it was. We expected a big battle and fight from him, but because we were methodical about the process, it was so much easier than I thought. There was no drama. It wasn’t traumatizing at all. It flowed very naturally.”
A Return to Balance for the Whole Family
Perhaps the most heartwarming part of Laura’s story is how much sleep coaching transformed not just their son’s sleep but their entire family’s quality of life. Laura’s husband reflected on the overwhelming anxiety that used to dominate their nights.
"Our whole day was just about fighting him to sleep, and then our whole nights were anxiety about him not sleeping and us not sleeping. Now, I get 6 hours of my day back. Before, it was a multi-hour process for each nap. Now I run through our 10-minute routine, and he falls asleep within 15 minutes without crying or screaming."
Not only did they regain their time, but they also learned how to soothe their son effectively, a skill they’ll carry with them for Baby #2.. But First! This family is looking forward to their GUILT FREE Hawaii Trip knowing their son’s sleep demands won't stress out grandma while they are gone
Your Path to Restful Nights Starts Here
If Laura’s story resonates with you, know that you don’t have to endure the sleepless nights and endless nap battles any longer. Sleep doesn’t have to be a source of stress, and your family deserves rest—without the drama.
Let’s work together to create a sleep plan that works for your family, just as we did for Laura and countless others. Your journey to peaceful nights and happier days is just a step away. 🌙
-
Well, hello. I'm Joanna with blissful baby sleep coach, and I'm here with Laura and Nate, who have a baby boy who is nine months old at time of coaching. Thanks, you guys, for being here. We are sharing their success story because it's a big, amazing success story. So I always like to start with the question is, what did it look like before you called me? So before you.
Before we reached out to you, we were really struggling with his naps. So he was still doing contact naps twice a day, and sometimes those would take us a few hours where we would have to reset, but we didn't really know how to reset. And he was having these massive meltdowns, and he was doing alligator rolls in our arms, in the chair, and we just had no idea, like, how to get him to go to sleep during the day.
Nighttime was the same routine. He had to fall asleep in our arms, and we had to transfer him to the crib. Sometimes that failed. Um, and then he was having frequent wake ups, a lot of early wake ups. And by the end of it, we just resorted to completely co sleeping because that was the only way that we could get him to sleep throughout the night. Yeah. Yeah.
And you guys had been, you know, thinking about it, doing some research, like, trying some things. It wasn't like. It wasn't like this all cascaded. It was like things just kind of kept getting worse. And then all of a sudden, like, whoa. Yeah. First it was just early rising. When we first reached out, he was just getting up early in the morning, and then it was this whole thing of, now he's fighting all naps, now he's waking up all night.
And then, you know, when it was co sleeping, he'd sleep like a little angel baby, except for we would not. He actually slept well for a little while, and then it just. Yeah, after six or seven months, it just all went downhill. Yeah. To get worse and worse and worse. He was a really good sleeper up until about seven months, and then he started crawling, and that was it.
We just didn't. And that's what can be so hard and confusing for parents, because if you had a good sleeper and then, like, a couple of funky things, like early rising, which is. Early rising is defined as, like, waking between four and 06:00 a.m. and then, you know, oh, maybe a couple of contact naps, and then all of a sudden, oh, a couple of bad nights, let's co sleep.
And so it's just like, it went from good to, like, a little funky, a little bit more weird. And then all of a sudden, like, full blown, I cannot sustain this. And that's kind of what happened to you. I think that's an important thing for families to know is, like, you can go from a good situation to a funky situation to just flat out bad and it's fault.
Right. That was the thing that you and I talked about a lot is, like, you guys didn't do anything wrong. Like, he went through all of these milestones. He stays all these milestones back to back. He got sick. Like, a lot of things just led to the situation where it was like, okay, now we need help. So that was like, next question is like, okay, so, obviously you're like, we need help.
But, like, what? Was there any other reason why you decided to reach out for one on one support? Like, were you like, I want to do a digital course, or it didn't work? Like, what was it about one on one support with me where you're like, I need one on one support for the. Joanna? Yeah. I think for me, it's just my mental health was really struggling. I was severely sleep deprived of, and I was just getting really angry really easily.
So I get really frustrated. Like, I kept having to hand him off to Nate for naps and stuff during the weekend because he would just sit there kind of thriving and thrashing around, and I just couldn't take it. His crying was triggering me severely. And then even throughout the day, I just felt like I couldn't engage with him at all because I was just so exhausted and so frustrated.
What about you, babe? Yeah, it was definitely. It just kind of took over our lives. It was just. Our whole day was just about fighting him to sleep, and then our whole nights were just anxiety about him not sleeping and then us not sleeping, and it just. It just became clear that we just didn't have the energy or the time. Yeah. Create our own plan or to learn the skills or to figure out which method we wanted to use, and we just needed help because we needed to get it fixed fast.
That's right. Yes. Yes. Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. And, like you were saying, like, nate was home with him during the day, and, like, it would take him 4 hours to get, like, maybe two and a half hours of daytime sleep, sometimes more. I mean, sometimes he reset two or three times. It was just really a frustrated. The whole day became about naps and getting him down, and both of us just really started dreading it.
Yeah, you dread. Yeah, you dread the days. You dread the nights. Okay, so, good news. What does it look like, now. It's so much better now. Yeah. It took him just a couple of days. Yeah. And he's sleeping through the night. He still has some wake ups, but he puts himself back to sleep before. He wasn't doing that. Uh, we can put him in the crib awake, which is something that we've never been able to do ever.
And we're no longer contact napping. So that's a huge win. So Nate gets hours of his day back. Oh, yeah. At least I get like 6 hours of my day because it was before, it was literally, it was like a multi hour process for each nap. And now I go in there and I run through our routine and, you know, use all of our skills, and it takes me less than ten minutes to go into his crib.
And then he falls asleep within 15 minutes afterwards. And he doesn't cry, he doesn't scream at me, and he just goes to sleep. And then I get to go and enjoy my time. I know dad's like, quiet house. Amazing. I think the only problem is now I have less time to play games on my phone because I'm not sitting in that chair for hours a day. So that's been a hit.
Yeah. Taking a hit. Probably save some money, though, or chores. I'll probably save some money now. Yeah. Yeah. No, more like, you know, doom scrolling or whatever. So, yeah. So I think what's really important about that is that, that you, because, mom, you were feeling really sleep deprived and his crying was already really triggering. It was really important that you found a coach that was not cried out like that.
You trying to do your own version of extinction or your own version of Ferber washing, just logistically not even the right choice because you were already so emotionally fragile because sleep deprivation, that any kind of crying, like crying was too hard on your mama heart. Yeah. So Nate was the, was the coach, and we really had to. Wonderful, awesome coach. And that relieved mom to be able to take care of herself and, you know, not get triggered.
But more importantly, we moved in a really gentle pace, meaning we crafted it to meet the needs of the child so that the crying, there wasn't high drama at all. Like, do you want to talk about that? That, like, you were actually, like, pleasantly surprised? Like, oh, wow. Like, he did more settling and soothing than crying. Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think we, we learned how to soothe him, too, because we didn't, we didn't know what worked for him.
And we were trying so hard in the chair when we were contact napping and nothing would work. And so, you know, it took us a couple of nights to figure it out, but now we know it soothes him. And we actually used it this last weekend when he was having a little bit of a hard time. And it. The same thing that worked in the crib. It worked, you know, when we were out camping.
And it, you know, we know how to soothe him now what works for him. And it's so. It's super helpful. Yeah. So that leads me to my next question, which was, what are you guys doing now that you couldn't do before and you just alluded to it? Well, we sleep in the same bed together at night. Yeah. Have to sleep. Master bedroom is back in business. My mom had actually tried to have him over one night when both of us were really, really sick, and she brought him back because he was so bad before with sleeping.
So now we can have someone watch him. Grandma's watched him. My sister's watched him. Now people can watch him overnight because when she tried, she attempted to put him to sleep four or five times and he wouldn't sleep. So she's like, he's not sleeping. And now anybody can put him. Now anyone can put him to sleep. And also, we had canceled the vacation because his sleep was so bad.
We were like, well, we're going to be up all night. We don't want to cram into a queen bed together when at least here we have separate bedrooms and we can get more sleep. It was just, you know, we can go on trips now. So that's big for us because we have some big holidays that I'm very, very excited to go on that we were not sure if we get to go on.
And now we know that we can go on those. So, good. Yeah. So what, what, what I do when I work with clients is we always make a wish list of what we want. And that part of their wish list was obviously sleeping through the night and hands free naps. But the other, like, bonus, bonus was we have a wedding to go to and we want grandma to stay overnight so we can go to the wedding without breaking the baby.
Mission accomplished. What? Right? And then the other one was, we, you know, we know, we know he needs to sleep in a pack and play if we go on a vacation. And we know that he can do nights and naps in a pack and play. And you guys tried that last weekend, and he was successful at doing that. So that's leading to that possibility. These future trips, they're longer, you know, not just a weekend thing, but, like, a longer thing.
That now you have a little bit more confidence that he can actually be portable, which I think is a big thing for a lot of families. You want, like, a portable baby, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And our Hawaii trip and just knowing we were dreading it. Joanna, we had that Hawaii trip, and we were dreading leaving our baby with our grandparents, knowing that he was going to give them hell for an entire week at naps.
But now we don't worry about it at all, because they just put him in the crib and he goes, and they've already done it. And they already. They came for the wedding, and they were the ones who put him in. And my mom's going to be taking him for a Halloween trip that we used to go on every single year that we had to skip last year. So that's just because I was, you know, a couple days postpartum, we could be traveling, but so we're really excited to get out and do that.
Yeah. So literally, you guys, like, in two weeks, their life from holy crap to we're going to Hawaii and grandma. Guilt free. Yeah. And guilt free. And that's why I do. I call it guilt free gentle sleep coaching, because I don't want, as mothers and parents, like, we haven't killed for a million different reasons. Like, let's not have sleep be the reason why you feel guilty. Right. So if you were to meet a.
A sleep deprived, overwhelmed parent who was afraid to. Who was afraid to get help with sleep training, or didn't even know that sleep training was available, or maybe had some misperceptions that it was, like, bad or scary, or it was, like, high drama with lots of crying. What, you want them to know about the process? I think we were surprised how easy it was. I think that we expected a big battle and a big fight from him, but because we went with the method and we're really methodical about it, it was so much easier than I thought and so much less.
There was really, like, no drama. It wasn't traumatizing at all. It flowed very naturally. And, you know, they don't have to just leave their baby in a room to cry it out for hours. It is very possible to not do that. And I would definitely recommend that everyone try your method instead of just leaving them to cry. Absolutely. I think if we had done this on our own, it probably would have been as at the least weeks, if not more, to figure it out.
We probably would have stopped and started along the way or gotten frustrated. And, yeah, I think this was, not only was it faster. But I feel like we just learned great skills that we can use for baby number two. Or if baby number two is like this baby. If baby number two is like this baby, hopefully easier. But, you know, we just. We just learned so many, like, great skills along the way and we learned how he works.
Yeah, just. That's super helpful. Yeah, that's what I always say. What I love about this process is, like, yes, we are going to solve all the sleep struggles and get you to your. Your wish list. But so much more happens in the one on one coaching experience. Like, we start to understand your baby in a way that you didn't understand them more. You guys learn more about each other, as in partnership, in parenting partnership.
You know, in this case, Nate did all the sleep coaching and, like, so he learned this new relationship with his son, you know what I mean? And then allowed mom to get the sleep she needed so she could come back to the table and, like, not. And be joyful and being with him instead of, like. So it does so much more than just solve the problem. It really brings harmony to the household.
And you just learn about how to be more available, emotionally available to your child than you, because before you were sleep deprived. So it's just a little bit richer. Like, things end up a little bit. Absolutely. A little bit richer. Yeah. So. All right, well, thank you so much, guys. I really sharing your story. I know it's going to help a lot of people. I appreciate it. We appreciate you so much.
You have no idea. Thank you so much. Yeah, no, we have our lives. It's amazing. Yes. Lives back. Amen. I.