As a sleep consultant who doesn’t sleep train, I’ve heard every myth, misconception, and “should” about baby sleep imaginable. These myths don’t just create unrealistic expectations – they can actually make your life harder by causing you to work against your baby’s natural biology and your own instincts.
The truth is, much of what we’ve been told about infant sleep comes from outdated research and cultural biases that don’t reflect how babies actually sleep or what they truly need. Let’s debunk these myths one by one, so you can release the pressure and embrace what’s actually normal for your baby.
This might be the most damaging myth of all. The idea that babies should sleep 12 hours straight by 6 months comes from 1950s research on formula-fed, solitary sleeping babies – a completely different scenario from today’s breastfed, room-sharing families.
The Reality: According to Professor James McKenna’s research, babies who sleep near their parents actually wake more frequently – and this is a good thing! These wakings serve as a protective mechanism. As McKenna explains, “infantile cardio-pulmonary perturbations are corrected by the infant arousing from sleep that leads to oxygenation. Arousing is an infant’s best defense against a range of potential physiological challenges.”
We want babies to wake when they’re cold, wet, hungry, or having breathing difficulties. Night waking is not a flaw – it’s a feature.
How many times have you been warned about creating “bad sleep associations”? This myth suggests that if you help your baby fall asleep, they’ll never learn to do it on their own.
The Reality: Throughout human history, no infant was ever separated from their caregiver at night. As McKenna notes, “Until recent historic periods in the Western industrialized world, no human (primate) ancestral or modern infant was ever separated from its caregiver… nocturnally, or at any other time.”
Helping your baby fall asleep isn’t creating a bad habit – it’s meeting a biological need. Your baby’s nervous system is designed to seek you out for safety and regulation. The Moro reflex (startle reflex) literally makes their arms fly up to reach for you. This is survival, not manipulation.
Our culture values independence above almost everything else, and we’ve extended this to our tiniest humans. We’re told that babies need to learn to “self-soothe” and sleep alone for proper development.
The Reality: The current pediatric sleep paradigm that promotes independent sleep “was never based on any kind of scientific research on who infants are and what they need,” according to McKenna. It “emerged from a few mainly white male physicians, who never took care of their own infants, and knew nothing about human evolution or infant development.”
Babies who cosleep with their parents show different sleep patterns – they stay in lighter sleep stages, breastfeed more, interact more with parents, move more, and cry less. These aren’t problems to fix; they’re normal, healthy behaviors that support development and bonding.
You’ve probably heard that carrier naps, stroller naps, or car naps are “junk sleep” and that your baby needs to nap in their crib for “quality” sleep.
The Reality: For most of human history, babies napped while being carried as their parents went about daily life. Motion sleep is not inferior – it’s biologically normal. If your baby naps best in a carrier or while you’re walking, that’s perfectly fine. A well-rested baby is more important than where they sleep.
Perhaps the most pervasive myth is that all babies eventually need to be sleep trained, that it’s just a normal part of parenting.
The Reality: The obsession with sleep training is cultural, not universal. As parenting expert Tracy Cassels points out, there are over 26,000 books on Amazon about child sleep – nearly as many as books on poverty and racism combined! This obsession doesn’t exist in most cultures around the world.
To suggest that sleep training is necessary would mean that 90% of the world’s population is doing it wrong – which is simply not true. Babies in other cultures develop just fine without ever being sleep trained.
This myth is so persistent that many parents start solids early, hoping for better sleep.
The Reality: There is no research supporting the idea that starting solids leads to better sleep. In fact, starting solids before 6 months (the WHO recommendation) can have the opposite effect, potentially causing digestive discomfort that disrupts sleep even more.
Babies wake at night for many reasons beyond hunger – for comfort, connection, and safety. Food won’t change these needs.
The sleep industry has convinced us that babies need blackout curtains, white noise machines, and perfectly controlled sleep environments.
The Reality: While some babies do sleep better with these tools, they’re not universally necessary. Babies around the world sleep in all sorts of environments – bright, noisy, cool, warm – and develop normally.
What matters more than perfect conditions is that baby feels safe and connected. If your baby sleeps better with some light or household noise, that’s okay!
You’ve probably read that babies need naps of at least an hour to be restorative, leading to stress when your baby takes 20-30 minute naps.
The Reality: If your baby wakes happy from a short nap, that’s all the sleep they needed! Some babies are naturally short nappers, especially around 4 months when sleep patterns change. Fighting to extend these naps often creates more stress than benefit.
These myths persist because our current society isn’t conducive to having a baby. We’ve lost our villages, our extended family support, and the understanding that raising babies was never meant to be a one or two-person job.
As psychotherapist Sarah Patterson explains, when we lose control in the first year of parenting, we look for something we can control. “For many women they feel like they are being a great mom if they are following these so-called rules of infant sleep.”
But following rules that go against your baby’s biology and your instincts doesn’t make you a better parent – it makes you an exhausted, stressed parent.
1. Trust Your Instincts: You know your baby better than any book or expert. If nursing to sleep feels right, do it. If bedsharing helps everyone sleep better, consider it (following safe sleep guidelines).
2. Seek Support, Not Sleep Training: Instead of trying to change your baby’s normal sleep patterns, seek support for yourself. As Beth Berry notes, “We’re all feeling the loss of support, community, and alloparents, and it’s stressing us, our children and our partnerships profoundly.”
3. Adjust Your Expectations: Your baby isn’t broken. They’re doing exactly what they’re designed to do. Adjusting your expectations to match biological norms can relieve enormous pressure.
4. Focus on Connection: When you stop fighting your baby’s need for closeness and start embracing it, everything gets easier. Yes, you might wake more, but you’ll stress less.
5. Remember It’s Temporary: No baby wakes every hour forever. No toddler needs to be rocked to sleep at 15. These intense needs are temporary, even when they don’t feel like it.
These myths about baby sleep haven’t just made parenting harder – they’ve made us doubt our instincts and fight against our babies’ biological needs. The truth is, your baby’s sleep patterns are likely completely normal, even if they don’t match what the books say.
Instead of trying to force your baby into an arbitrary sleep ideal created by “white male physicians who never took care of their own infants,” trust yourself and your baby. Seek support, adjust expectations, and remember that around the world, babies are thriving without sleep training, without 12-hour nights, and without perfect sleep environments.
Your baby doesn’t have a sleep problem. Our culture has a support problem. Let’s focus on fixing the right thing.
