What does temperament have to do with sleep? EVERYTHING. This hour-long video walks you through the ways that temperament affects sleep, parenting, and everything else and gives key information about what this population needs you to understand about their experience.

RESEARCH

IMPROVING SLEEP WITH MOM
(AND BABY) IN MIND:
Strategies for clinicians

Poster presented at the Postpartum Support International Conference. Portland, OR • June 2019

This poster provides information for clinicians about normative sleep development and easy strategies that they can offer to mothers with postpartum mood challenges. Information is developmentally-focused and considers the whole family system.

"crying-it-out:" a critical review of the literature on the use of extinction with infants

Poster presented at the World Infant Mental Health Conference • Paris, France, July 2006

(NOTE: This research is currently being updated to reflect research
since 2007 and will be presented Summer of 2022). 

ABSTRACT: The most empirically supported and endorsed approaches to
preventing or ameliorating infant sleep problems involve various forms of extinction (crying it out). This approach is widely recommended by pediatricians and mainstream parenting publications for infants as young as 3- to 4-months. A review of the literature regarding the cry-it-out (CIO) approach to infant sleep reveals that empirical support for this early start date is lacking. Much of the existing literature used to validate the use of extinction with infants does not include infants under 1 year in the sample population. The subset of studies which include infants, do so as part of a much larger sample comprised of wide age ranges (e.g. 9-60 months). Results from these studies do not specify outcomes by age, and obscure the existence of differential effects for infants. Though CIO is recommended as the approach of choice for infant sleep, relatively little is known about its effects on infants under 1 year.

sleep interventions and parent-child well-being

Poster presented at the World Association for Infant Mental Health Conference • Yokohama, Japan, August 2008

Three important questions are covered in this poster: • Does nightwaking that involves parental attention invariably constitute a sleep problem for children and parents? • Does a paradigm of independent, self-settling infant sleep patterns represent a solution or an added stressor? • Are children’s nighttime behaviors and parental sleep interventions related to parent-child well-being? The three research studies presented in this poster explore the possible challenges associated with a focus on various sleeping arrangements and routines. The poster also highlights the importance of alternative approaches and flexibility in mothers’ responses to nightwaking based on maternal perceptions of appropriate care and infants’ temperamental and physiological needs.

COACH TEMPERAMENT TIPS

How to work with children who are "more" and their parents who are exhausted.

sleep for clinicians

Tips for navigating questions about sleep. There's a lot you can ask and do without ever having to talk about sleep training.