by Becky Vieira posted in Parenting

I couldn?t whistle or snap my fingers when I was a child, and told my mom she forgot to ask for those skills when I was born. According to that thinking I must have followed in her parenting footsteps, as I neglected to request sleep skills for my son.
Yes, babies don?t always sleep well. They cry, they wake, they need to eat often. But my son was beyond this. He was the stuff urban legends are made of.
Eventually I became so severely exhausted that my postpartum depression reached frightening new heights. It became medically necessary for us both to get help. At the suggestion of our pediatrician we hired a sleep consultant.
I wasn?t alone. The baby sleep industry is a big deal. Huge. $325 million in 2016 alone, according to the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association. I?m not surprised, the cost of the sleep aids my husband and I purchased was in the thousands. We could have saved most of that by starting with a sleep consultant. Something to keep in mind for hypothetical baby number two.

When I first spoke with our sleep consultant, Kerrin Edmonds of Meet You in Dreamland, I made one thing clear: I would not, in any way, be comfortable letting my son ?cry it out,? or the more modern term for this method, ?extinction.?
Not only did she assure me that wouldn?t be a problem, she explained she had several methods we could use to teach my son how to sleep. I laughed at the idea of teaching someone how to sleep, but she explained that...