"She's not cheap and we were pretty sceptical, but my God she works."

I am three months post-partum, sleep deprived, and reading a DM from a former colleague of mine.

He's suggesting a sleep trainer, who he says "trained all of my friend's kids".

"It's the best investment," he insists.

Bleary eyed, I head to the 'expert's' page and my eyes bulge.

$800. For a one hour phone consult and an emailed copy of a 'curated' plan for you and your baby. Plus a further week of support via text message.

You've got to be joking.

**

This was an interaction I had in April, 2023, and in the moment I remember thinking….surely that's not right? Surely you can't charge that much for a phone consult on baby sleep? I refused to enquire out of principal.

12 months later, still in a world of sleep pain, I cracked. After months of anguish, I handed over the lesser amount of $300 to a different 'sleep expert' who promised me they'd get my now toddler sleeping well.

Watch: The trailer for our brand new podcast, Dairy Of A Birth. Post continues.

She did help. Her tips pulled my then 15-month-old back on track, and my son does sleep better now.

In the end, I had a lot of environmental elements to tweak (he wasn't warm enough, or full enough), and then I did do some training, where I would come in and out of the room every few minutes, encouraging him to fall asleep without me physically helping him. He cried less during that whole process, than he did when we were actively trying to avoid 'training.'

By the time I reached out to a sleep consultant, I was broken. I'd spent the entirety of my son's life thinking and worrying about sleep. I'd given myself deadlines for 'if it's not better by X, I will pay someone.'

I had spent hours upon hours in a dark room trying to rock, pat, shush and will my baby back to sleep, and my mental health was crumbling as a result. But social media kept telling me I was the devil for considering sleep training and so I would put it off and off and off.

It was made all the worse by my social media algorithm, which had cottoned on to the fact I was vulnerable and looking for sleep solutions. It bombarded me every time I opened my phone.

"Sleep training is torture. No baby should be left to cry."

"Sleep training saved my life."

"I shortened my daughter's naps, and now she sleeps through the night."

"I feed my son this ONE item before bed, and now he's a dream sleeper."

"I regret sleep training, here's why you should never do it."

"Your baby is never going to sleep well if you keep feeding and holding them to sleep!"

"Get this noise machine."

"Get these blackout blinds."

"Get this specific sleeping bag."

It was never-ending, all-conflicting and completely overwhelming.

From the Ferber method to the Possums approach, to controlled crying to co-sleeping, I read every single technique there is on the internet. I think I actually reached the end of the internet on this topic, if that's even possible.

All it did was left me feeling more confused and more conflicted, and there's a good reason why.

'Baby sleep' is the wild wild west. A place where scam-artists are all mixed in with qualified professionals and well-meaning mums turned sleep-consultants, who can all charge whatever they want for their services.

It can be impossible to work out who to trust and where to go, when the industry is so unchecked and the price scale so exorbitant.

The unregulated world of baby sleep.

Absolutely anyone can offer their services as a sleep consultant.

There is no central body ensuring the quality of this kind of service and there's no state licencing.

Which means, as a mum of one whose child now sleeps *relatively* okay, I could effectively create my own website tomorrow, and start offering sleep solutions to sleep deprived parents. I don't have to have any background in infant or maternal health to do so.

As paediatrician and baby sleep expert Dr Daniel Golly told Mamamia, "there's no regulation for training providers globally.

"We need to have some sort of governance board, it's absolutely necessary."

It's actually something that's on Dr Golly's own to-do list, as it's an area he feels passionately about.

"[There's] no guard rails, no authority, and there's lots of mixed messaging going around which is really really dangerous for extremely vulnerable parents," he explained.

Dr Golly wants this board to be jam-packed with psychologists, paediatricians, midwives, maternal nurses, peri-natal psychologists, lactation specialists and dieticians.

Listen to Dr Golly on Diary Of A Birth. Post continues after podcast.

What he's witnessed of the many, many 'sleep options' doing the rounds, is that often these 'services' aren't trying to find a cause for the unsettled sleep, they're just implementing a solution.

"That's not fair," Dr Golly told Mamamia. "And I specifically mean not fair to the baby, because if you force a baby into a routine without trying to find a cause, it's torture if you ask me.

"My approach is not about getting your baby to sleep through the night, it's about finding out why your baby's not sleeping through the night, implementing those changes, setting up for success, removing the hurdles that are in your way, and then the baby does it themselves."

Here in Australia, there a few government funded options offered to help get your baby sleeping well.

Services like Karitane and Tresillian are both covered by Medicare, and offer free help-lines and in-patient stays where qualified nurses help teach you settling techniques.

I called them both, and used Karitane's virtual residential parenting service, and while I've heard people have had fantastic experiences with them, I found their advice to be generic and unhelpful. It's why I started delving out into the wild wild west of paid consultants.

Some sleep consultants simply list their accreditations as "mum of four," while others say they are "accredited" through one course or another (but anyone can offer a course on baby sleep).

The parameters I gave myself while searching for someone to engage with, included finding a consultant who actually worked in the baby medical field in some capacity — like a midwife, paediatrician or a nurse. But realistically, even they should be held to some kind of national or international standard.

Of course there's never going to be a 'one size fits all solution' to baby sleep, but surely there needs to be some parametres in what advice is being shared?

We have it when it comes to the safety of 'sleep aids' and cots which is tracked by the Australian Competition & Consumer Comission. We have 'sleep and rest' requirements in education and care settings via our various governments.

We have Red Nose recommendations (which is considered a recognised national authority), when it comes to safe sleeping practices for children in our homes — that's for things like heat, positioning and swaddling.

But no one is regulating the sleep coaches and consultants who are handing out routines and rules for how to get your baby to fall and stay asleep.

Right now the world of baby sleep isn't a regulated industry in Australia, or anywhere. Image: Getty.

As I dug for any studies or research into this topic in Australia, I came across a 2021 study out of the University of Western Australia where researchers wrote of their aim to provide 'the first estimate of sleep knowledge, practices and attitudes' regarding paediatric sleep in Australia.

I was gobsmacked. The first one?

What they found while surveying 263 health professionals anonymously in Australia, was that professionals answered less than half (44.5 per cent) of paediatric sleep knowledge questions correctly.

So what does that tell us?

Not only is it an unregulated industry, it's an area that hasn't been scrutinised or studied enough to even provide benchmarks for those practicing in the space to adhere to.

What that leaves us with is a lucky dip. It's up to (very tired) parents to try and work out if the consultant they're paying money to, is someone they want to trust.

What boggles my mind, is I am yet to meet a new parent who isn't consumed by this topic. Baby sleep is such a huge part about parenthood, and yet we are leaving mums and dads completely in the dark to fend for themselves.

'I still have anxiety about what I did to my daughter.'

Hiring a sleep consultant was not in the budget for Stephanie, but she was desperate.

It was 2018 and she handed over $600 for one two hour at-home visit, and a week of support, only to be told at the end that her child was "just a bad sleeper".

The consultant had Stephanie attempt a "slow cry it out" method that left her feeling "disgusting."

Fast forward five years, and Stephanie's daughter has been diagnosed with ADHD.

Speaking to Mamamia, she still has anxiety about her experience with a sleep consultant and it's experiences like this that Dr Golly is worried about — where underlying health conditions are ignored for cookie cutter 'solutions' based advice that doesn't interrogate the root cause of bad sleep.

Lauren had a similar experience. Now that her son is four, she can look back and see that the advice she was given left her "feeling anxious and mentally much worse off".

She was consistently told her son's room was too cold, and she stuck to the advice even as her child broke out in sweats and eczema.

"Eventually I stopped and listened and trusted my instincts but it took longer than it should have," she told Mamamia.

The guidelines for 'safe sleep' are well known, but what about the safe practices for actually getting your baby to sleep? Image: Getty.

Cass hired a "leading mothercraft nurse" for an at-home $300 visit, and was offered little advice other than her "floorboards were too creaky".

"She stayed for all of half an hour, and I soon realised she was akin to a snake oil salesman," she told Mamamia.

I was also inundated with plenty of parents who had positive, glowing reports when I called out to the Mamamia community. Mothers who claim their consultant "changed their life" and "empowered" their parenting. But one thing the dozens of families that responded to me could agree on, was that sleep expectations tormented them in those early months and years of their child's life.

"The constant marketing from sleep consultants made me think something was seriously wrong with my child. That their development would be hindered and that they'd never sleep alone," said Libby.

"I caved a couple of times and sought advice from friends who had purchased sleep guides or personalised advice — and each time eat myself up that I couldn't make it work for my baby," said Jami-Lee.

"Sleep expectations ruined me. It wasn't that my little girl didn't sleep it was that my expectations of her sleep were so high and I felt all of this pressure to 'fix' it. It left me mentally broken. Pressure for her to sleep independently, to self settle, to link sleep cycles, ect," said Ash.

I see myself in all of these women. In many ways sleep ruined or at least tainted my experience of motherhood in those early months.

What the researchers from Western Australia discovered through their study, was that while the importance of sleep was well recognised — sleep was considered less important than a healthy diet and exercise by those in the study.

As someone who experienced 15 months of extreme sleep deprivation, I truly think this is underestimating the impacts of bad sleep. How are you meant to exercise, when you can't even keep your eyes open? Sleep is an important biological function that is essential for life. Not only does it allow your body to physically repair, but mentally rest.

As neurology and sleep medicine specialist Dr Carl Rosenberg writes, an ongoing lack of sleep has been closely linked with "hypertension, heart attacks and strokes, obesity, diabetes, depression and anxiety, decreased brain function, memory loss, weakened immune system, lower fertility rates and psychiatric disorders".

As mum-of-two Anna told Mamamia, "at the end of the day if it's severely impacting your quality of life and mental health of course you need to implement something or have additional help for the baby's benefit and your own, not to mention other children in the house. People are far too judgmental about it either way instead of being supportive of what that parent needs to survive".

It's that judgement that's often at the core of why mainly women, feel so conflicted by this topic.

"I just want help without the shame, and shame is everywhere in the info online," Clare told Mamamia.

The cost is another huge factor. Many families are down to one income with one parent on maternity leave while they're grappling with this problem, and paying for help just isn't in the budget.

But it's in that headspace that families are going down this route — with far too many being left financially and emotionally worse off.

"We spent hundreds of dollars on different programs," said Hannah. "What annoyed me so much about the first program we bought, is it takes advantage of sleep-deprived parents who will pay anything for answers."

For those looking for help, Dr Golly says that trusting your parental instincts is key while you navigate this world.

"Ultimately, there is no one size fits all model. The absolute core to my philosophy is dialing up the volume on that innate maternal and paternal instinct. We all have it in us, and I don't want to come across wishy washy but this is fact — we have a sixth sense."

Dr Golly is talking about the "noise."

"Information is way too easy to get, and often it's pushed on us, and all of that noise drowns out the volume of our innate instinct," he explained.

"All we need to do is learn to read our babies better. Learn to listen and understand our baby's communication, because they are excellent communicators."

In other words, if something doesn't feel right — don't do it.

The 'experts' aren't always as they seem.

Feature image: Getty.