Is it worth it to hire a sleep consultant?
So your baby isn’t sleeping. Naps are short, nights are constantly interrupted, and early mornings are the usual. Or maybe your toddler keeps getting out of bed and refusing to nap. You’ve scoured the internet for every bit of information you can possibly find that will help you understand what the problem is and how to fix it, but after months of trying every strategy there is, all you can do is accept your fate to not sleep well for the next year…or more.
I’ve been there. I know exactly what that’s like. I can’t tell you how many middle-of-the-night nursing sessions I spent on my phone looking up sample sleep schedules and tips to lengthen naps! I knew of the existence of sleep consultants… I followed them on social media, after all! However, I was convinced that I could learn and apply everything I needed to know from reading their blogs, signing up for their email newsletters, and scrolling through their social media posts - anything that didn’t require spending any money! However, if I could go back in time and give myself some advice, this is what it would be: “Just pay the money and hire the sleep consultant. Trust me. It WILL be worth it.”
Generic sleep advice helps with a lot, but it definitely doesn’t help with everything. Blogs don’t know what’s wrong with your child’s sleep environment. Facebook posts don’t know what’s off with your child’s schedule. Instagram reels don’t know how your child’s nutrition is. However, when you work one-on-one with a sleep consultant who digs deeper to know all the areas that might be affecting your child’s sleep, that’s when you can find the answers, experience, and accountability to be on your way to healthier sleep for your little one!
What does it look like to work with a sleep consultant?
At My Sweet Sleeper, we have three main consultation packages that we offer: hourly, weekly, and monthly. It all depends on how long it will take to get your child sleeping well! We offer a free 20-minute discovery call where you can tell us what the issues are and we can recommend the best package for you depending on how long it may take. Often, the weekly package is enough to fix the foundations and get you started on healthier sleep, with hopes that you can continue being consistent in the following weeks without the one-on-one guidance.
All three packages start with us sending you an intake form. This intake form is detailed and, honestly, pretty long - but for good reason! It covers things such as the environment your child sleeps in, your child’s typical nap times and lengths, how you respond to night wakings, your child’s nutrition, the bedtime routine, etc., as well as what your goals are for our time together. By telling us all of this information, you’re helping us figure out how we can help your child personally, rather than giving you generic tips that we could have written in a blog or Instagram post and just sent you the link for!
After the intake form comes an hour-long kick-off call. This is where we go over your intake form and ask any follow-up or clarification questions about it. Next comes the part that you’ve been waiting to hear: the action steps and plan to give your child healthy sleep habits! Using all the information we have about your child’s sleep, we give you personalized steps to get your child on track. Some of these may be easy fixes, such as getting a white noise machine or scheduling daytime feeds differently, but some may take more effort, such as learning a new way to respond to night-wakings or trying different soothing methods. On that kick-off call, you will have lots of opportunity to ask questions and make sure you’re ready for the plan, which then gets emailed to you as well.
For an hourly consultation, that’s where our time with you ends. Armed with your personalized suggestions, you are ready to go off on your own and implement them. However, with a weekly or monthly package, you have texting access with your sleep consultant for the whole week/month! This is great for many reasons. First, it’s helpful to have accountability when you are doing something that you’re not used to doing. The sleep consultant encourages you and keeps you on track with the plan, reminding you of steps or tips that you may have forgotten or need clarification implementing. This sets you and your child up with a solid foundation of new habits that you can continue with when your week/month ends. Second, the texting access is great when tweaks in the plan are needed. Sometimes we think that one plan will work, but the child does not respond well to it and tweaking is needed. With the texting access, your sleep consultant will work with you on anything that needs to be changed. This can all be done via group text if you would like to include other family members or babysitters who watch your child.
With this texting access, it can be as much or as little as you would like! You can literally text at every nap wake-up and say, “She just woke up after only 23 minutes! What should I do?!?!” or you can just send a short update at the end of each day with how things went. The amount of communication is up to you!
At the end of our time together, the sleep consultant will make sure to answer any more questions you have that may have come up in your time together, as well as send a PDF sleep plan that goes over the plan/tips we implemented, what improvements were made over our time together, and things to know when looking ahead to upcoming milestones.
How should I choose which sleep consultant to work with?
The main red flag to look out for when choosing a sleep consultant is if someone makes a promise on how long it will take to get your child on the right track. No one should be able to confidently say, “We’ll get your baby sleeping through the night in one week!” All children respond to change differently, and improvements depend a lot on how long the problems have been going on for. At My Sweet Sleeper, we will tell you in the discovery call which package we recommend for your situation, but we can’t promise that all goals will be reached by then. I like to tell my potential clients something like, “Based on your situation, I would recommend the weekly package (for example). We probably won’t see your goals fully reached by the end of the week, but I can almost guarantee that we will see improvements, and if you stay consistent with the plan after that, you and your child will get there! If the week ends and you still want more guidance, you can always buy a second week.”
At My Sweet Sleeper, we have several certified pediatric sleep consultants that you can choose from! While you are free to book a consultation without specifically picking which consultant you want to work with, it can be helpful to check out the team and choose someone who you can relate to, maybe due to practical reasons like a shared time zone, or because you have a baby the same age or a shared interest.
How can I prepare to work with a sleep consultant?
Just sign up! Seriously, that’s all you need to do! However, I do have two suggestions for you that are helpful, but not required…
Book the consultation for a week where you won’t be traveling a lot or have anything unusual in your schedule. Of course you don’t have to be confined to your home for the week/month, but trying to implement new habits while on a vacation or weekend away is difficult!
Use an app like BabyTracker or Huckleberry to track your baby’s sleep (and feedings). Although this is not at all required, you may find it helpful to use an app to keep track of your child’s schedule. This can help you fill out the intake form, and also help keep you on track during your time with the sleep consultant. You may even find it so helpful that you continue using it after our time together! (Personally, I love baby tracking apps and recommend that everyone with a baby uses one!)
All in all, if your child is not sleeping as well as you would like and you’re considering hiring a sleep consultant, I would highly encourage you to just do it! I can speak from firsthand experience, before I became a certified consultant myself, that it is SO WORTH IT. It’s not a membership fee that you have to pay every month or so - it’s a one-time investment that will lead to better sleep for your family!
Related:
The biggest challenges & misconceptions with sleep training/teaching
Five signs that your child is ready to start sleep teaching
Is sleep training really necessary?