Episode 03: Sleep coaching
Note that in this episode we discuss various sleep training methods for infants. The sleep coaches we interviewed and other experts agree that sleep training is not appropriate for infants younger than six months, or for children with health problems that are negatively affecting their sleep.
In this episode: Joshua and Cressida talk with Jeanique Tucker, who worked with Cressida on the first ever study of infant sleep coaching in Canada. We ask what sleep coaches actually do (11:17), and discuss the politics of coaching, including how class and gender shape its practice (17:39). Why is there a coaching industry, and where is it headed (30:30)? We discuss fashions in parenting (43:15) and speculate about how Gen X survived their horribly neglectful childhoods. Don’t miss a widely shared sentiment in our outro (51:36).
Mentioned in this episode: sociologist Arlie Hochschild, famous for her work on outsourcing intimate life; evidence on preventing SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome); research on the history of advice to parents on children’s sleep (full article behind paywall); Heyes and Tucker 2025, “Selling Sleep” (open access!); Heyes 2023, “Advice to Parents About Children’s Sleep” (full article behind paywall). Outro sound clip is Samuel L. Jackson reading from Go the F**k to Sleep by Adam Mansbach, illustrated by Ricardo Cortès.
Transcript:
Jeanique: 0:00
There's so many ways to apparently screw up kids that parents just can't there is no letting up. There is no like really getting it right. Because even if you're doing everything right, there's something you're doing wrong.
Cressida: 0:11
Everything you do with your children is a mistake.
Jeanique: 0:15
Exactly. Exactly.
Cressida: 0:39
I'm Cressida Heyes, and I’m a professor in the departments of political science and philosophy at the University of Alberta, and I'm often to be found awake in the middle of the night, which is probably a reflection of my advancing years now, but not so long ago it was because I had a baby who cried or just woke up all the time. So that is a big part of my sleep experience.
Joshua: 1:05
And I am your co-host, Joshua Ayer. I'm a PhD student also at the University of Alberta in the political science department. I myself am someone who has long struggled to sleep, often laying awake one to three hours just thinking about the mistakes I made in that day long before I fall asleep. So I have a very personal stake in this series. I'm hoping to learn more about why I lay awake and also how to fall asleep faster in this series, and also why I care about that. And I'm sure all of our listeners will also want to learn those things.
Cressida: 1:46
I like that, lying awake thinking about all this all the mistakes I made.
Joshua: 1:50
Yep, just pondering.
Cressida: 1:52
Okay.
Joshua: 1:53
Today we're looking at the budding cottage industry of sleep coaches. How did you get interested in this topic, Cressida?
Cressida: 2:01
Well, you can guess. As we as I think many parents do, I got interested in infant sleep when I had a baby. I've I've only got one child, so I only need to do one. And that was enough. The the experience of sleep deprivation when I had a baby was so radically different than any previous experience of sleep deprivation I'd had, whether it might come from, you know, staying up all night to write my doctoral dissertation or having terrible jet lag and getting really tired. All of those sorts of experiences were nothing compared with having a baby that just woke you up every two hours. And it went on for a really long time. I think everybody has the experience of sleep deprivation at the beginning. But my son didn't sleep through the night until, or didn't sleep for more than about five or six hours until he was one. And that's not long enough for me. So so at the time I read a lot of literature. It was long enough ago that I was taking books out of the library and as well as looking at websites and just trying to work out what I needed to do. And I was really struck by how bad the advice was because it was too complicated. It was presented in a padded and confusing sort of, I had to publish my book, so I had to produce 60,000 words when I could have given you this advice in 500 kind of kind of thing. So I was very isolated, my then partner and I were far away from both of our families, and not that many of our friends had young children, so we didn't really have anybody else. And we realized that we would have to draw on a kind of para-professional cadre of people. And so I had a midwife, I had a midwife-assisted birth, and she helped me when I was pregnant, but also for six weeks after my son was born. And I had a a doula who also helped me, and then I hired a postpartum doula, and then I hired a part-time nanny, and all of these people I think of very fondly because they were exceptionally important. Your lifeline. They were real lifelines, all of them. But it did make me realize that it's really, really difficult to outsource the work of sleep because who wants to work at night? Who wants to come over and look after your baby while you sleep? All of which to say I got uh sort of involved in the politics of pregnancy and birth and postpartum, as one does, and started reading self-help literature, but also some of the community literature that's produced by people working in the in the industry and realized that all of a sudden these sleep coaches were popping up. People were advertising themselves as sleep coaches, and I didn't really know what they did. And by the time I I got that far down the track, my son was obviously too old to benefit from that service and and could sleep if he wanted to, you know. So it was too late for me. But when I started to write the book about sleep, I thought, well, I want to find out really how this industry is shaping up. And so that was the the first part of this research was to interview sleep coaches.
Joshua: 5:21
So it really came from a place of personal experience. Yeah, it did. Yeah. When you say you became involved in the politics of the sleep coaching industry, I think we'll get into this as we go, but do you want to say a little bit more about that?
Cressida: 5:38
Yeah, I mean, I I was curious about this this collection of people who often have not very formalized training, or sometimes like midwives, very formalized training, but there's lots of people that now one can invite into one's life. So Arlie Hochschild, the sociologist, calls this the outsourcing of intimate life. So it's not just with regard to children, although they do provoke a lot of it because they need a lot of care, right? When it comes to elder care, when it comes to even having a life coach or an executive coach or a personal trainer, there's a whole sort of diffuse group of loosely speaking experts who exist to advise you on things that we used to do ourselves, or maybe even not bother doing at all. And so you can approach this from the perspective of childcare, or you can approach it from the perspective of that genre of professional. And we sort of did both.
Do you want to just begin, Jeanique, by introducing yourself?
Jeanique: 6:53
So I am Jeanique Tucker and I'm a PhD student at the University of Alberta in the Department of Political Science, and I worked on this project on sleep coaches a few years ago, and I'm excited to get into it again.
Cressida: 7:15
So Jeanique and I did 30 interviews. Um, and Jeanique did more than me. I think you did about 20, and I did about 10. And in all cases, these were either sleep coaches or clients who were seeking help with the sleep problems raised by there being a new baby in the house. So there was a kind of uniformity to them, and they all happened in either Calgary or Edmonton, a couple in sort of outlying parts of those two cities, and a few in Vancouver. So they were big Western Canadian cities. Um, what is a sleep coach, Jeanique?
Jeanique: 7:52
A sleep coach is someone that has done some work to learn about how to get babies to sleep more regularly, more predictably, and are hired by parents often to come in to teach them how to get their babies to sort of conform to their schedule so they aren't as sleep deprived and tired. So the sleep coaches had varying degrees of experience with children, and the bulk of their work was just trying to help caregivers to get babies to sleep more easily.
Cressida: 8:30
And at the end of this, why do you think people hire sleep coaches? It might seem obvious, but I'm not sure it's quite that obvious.
Jeanique: 8:37
I think for a lot of people that we talked to, it was desperation a lot of the time. The night, two, three in the morning, they're not getting to sleep, they don't know what to do, babies are crying, they don't know who to call, and they may get a Facebook ad or be in a Facebook group and someone recommends and they go looking. Sleep deprivation caused people to just not be able to think through how to like handle a situation and having someone come in and show you helps. A lot of people we talked to just didn't have friends or family who could help to advise them, uh, or they just didn't trust the advice they were getting because the people had different parenting styles or different philosophies around parenting. So they went out looking for experts because they thought there were experts out there. So they thought, you know, if we can, if I can hire one, it's going to make all the difference.
Cressida: 9:21
Yeah, there are two things in what you just said that I want to stress for our audience. The first is desperation. Yes. And the second is something to do with the cognitive failings. So I have a kid myself, had a baby and looked after that baby. And there is something about the degree of sleep deprivation that you that you experience when you have a new baby that's really incredibly overwhelming. And like we shouldn't forget that this is, you know, something that's used as a mode of torture for a reason. And so the desperation was really striking to me in talking to all of the women that we interviewed. There's just this feeling of, you know, I'm I could die or become psychotic one in either order, you know, if I don't get some help. That feeling of being completely unable to make decisions or just completely unable to take control of the situation. That feeling among the parents was really palpable, but also that the coaches really understood that and were really responding to that sort of lack of capacity and desperation on the part of their clients.
Jeanique: 10:32
We had some parents describe just not being able to think straight, not being able to follow through, not being able to keep track of time, like how long have I been doing this, and not, you know, not being able to sort of function in the way that they had planned to, because a lot of them had read the books beforehand and had a game plan going in and just had underestimated how exhausted they would be and how much they wouldn't be able to function and just needed some help. And I think a lot of people really pointed out that it the guidance wasn't even that out of the box, but in those moments, just having someone direct them made all the difference. Just somebody presenting a paint by numbers sort of plan and checking in made the difference. That's right.
Cressida: 11:15
So I'm sure that there are people listening to this who are thinking, so what does the sleep coach actually tell you to do? Maybe I could get the advice now on this podcast for free. So, what did the sleep coaches actually tell mothers, mostly mothers, to do?
Jeanique: 11:29
So there are different approaches to sleep coaching in terms of the kind of advice they would give. Number one was not co-sleeping as much, that having that sort of separate space and being able to close a door and sort of step away often made a difference in terms of parents being able to get some sleep themselves. Another one was allowing babies to cry. There are different philosophies about how much time was appropriate, but that was something that crying didn't necessarily mean pain or suffering, that it could be a little bit of discomfort and that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. Another one was just sort of teaching them sort of step-by-step methods about how to like retreat from a room without sort of startling the baby, how to sort of give yourself permission to take some of the, take some of this advice and take some of these steps without feeling terrible about it. I think that was one of the main things that they did was like all moms are doing this. You're not a bad one if you just like let them cry for 10 minutes. And that was one of the main things they gave them advice about, which made all the difference, I think.
Cressida: 12:34
I think that's right. I mean, the actual advice that sleep coaches gave, as you say, was not very distinctive. And you can read the books. And what you just just described is sometimes called “graduated extinction,” right? Where you which sounds creepy, but it just means that you you sort of put your baby down to sleep at a regular time and then you gradually increase the amount of time that you leave them, including leaving them if they're crying. The various ways of doing it, one is just put them down and then you know come back at certain intervals, making it gradually longer intervals. There's the chair method. I seem to remember that, where you sit on a chair next to the baby's crib and then you sort of move the chair further and further back away in the hope that they they won't notice. My baby would totally have noticed, but yeah.
Jeanique: 13:22
They have different like steps in terms of like, okay, so the first time they cry, you pick them up, and the next time they cry, you touch them, and the next time they cry, just sort of stand over the crib, and then you do different things, just sort of creating these routines and practices that are repeated every day until the baby sort of gets used to it and like whatever the strategy, sort of picking one and sticking to it and getting into a routine seems to be like the best advice that they could give, regardless of the approach the parent wanted to take.
Joshua: 14:03
So I'm listening to this and I guess I'm surprised it doesn't actually sound all that hard or radical.
Cressida: 14:11
Thanks for that. Yeah. Well, what what I concluded not very profoundly is that the advice is easy to give and hard to follow. So the medical evidence base on managing infant sleep is still fairly inconclusive. It it seems to be the case that if you co-sleep, if you sleep in the same bed, if you bed share with an infant, that you increase the risk of SIDS or smothering, especially if you've been using drugs or alcohol. So that seems to be fairly well established. And it it also seems to be true that it, although it's methodologically very difficult to know, that if you do leave your baby to cry it out, they're not going to be obviously psychologically scarred. But again, you know, people have tried to do studies on this, but how do you how do you measure that kind of impact later in the child's life? It's very difficult to know, but there's some, I think, interesting research on that. But the fact that it's relatively inconclusive leaves the field open in a way for the proliferation of advice. So there's there's advice from people who are fully qualified pediatricians specializing in infant sleep, but there's also advice from you know, Josephine Schmoe, who had three kids and is now a sleep coach. So the quality of expertise is very wide-ranging, and hence the quality of the advice is also very wide-ranging. But given that there isn't really a gold standard, it's also very difficult to know what to do or who to follow. And there's always been advice to parents, as long as there've been parents and children. There've been there's a lot of quite old, you know, textual evidence about how to bring your kids up right. So this isn't a new idea, but the the 20th century in particular had a real mania for advice to parents, particularly the post-war period. So I would say that the kind of 1950 to the 1990s was a real profound period of time in terms of giving advice to parents about all manner of things. And this incredible proliferation of the ways that one can get advice. So, post-digital revolution, we've got more ways of giving people advice.
Joshua: 16:35
Right, of course.
Cressida: 16:37
Even before that had really taken off, there's amazing growth in written sources of advice to parents about children's sleep, which I've published on. So, really, the post-war West went to town on children's sleep.
Joshua: 16:51
Yeah, and I guess the same way that the way that we sleep and our sleeping practices and habits are shaped by the time and place that we're in, the advice that you'd be giving to parents, the different things that would seem important and significant for raising a child will also change depending on that time and place. These are historical values and normative practices, right?
Cressida: 17:23
Yeah, that's right. So Jeanique and I talked about some of the specifics of the context that we researched. I mean, there's a lot of politics, I think, to this, even at the same time as the people that we were talking to were very commonsensical, very kind, I thought, actually, if I had to describe the coaches. They were very ordinary women who genuinely wanted to help other women and families, and who were very kind and generous in their advice. They weren't people who were making a lot of money, scarcely any, really. And so there was something very homespun about the sleep coaching industry. But nonetheless, partly I guess because of the place, the relatively wealthy part of a wealthy country that we live in, uh, that there was a sort of an assumption that you would have a room for your baby that was separate from your room, that you would have a crib that was separate from your bed, that you would be able to manage some of the stuff like the white noise machine or the blackout curtains or the crib itself.
Jeanique: 18:32
Or you'd have cameras that you could watch them from the other room to make sure everything was okay. Like, and I think that was one of the interesting things about creating this sort of zen space for the baby. And then there had to be like this sort of curated room of things that made sleep easier. They were very sort of adamant about that. And I don't know if I necessarily bought that idea that it had to have all of these things in order to create like the environment for sleep to happen, but maybe so, you know, I'm not sure. But there was that sort of sentiment that setting up the room was a big part of getting ready for having a baby because it would make all the difference in terms of how easy children would sleep. Because if there was any sort of chaos or light or noise or anything, then that would disrupt things. You had all of this technology involved in managing the space that assumed that, you know, everyone could afford to do all of that and had the space to do all of that.
Cressida: 19:29
Yeah. Yeah. So there was a sort of culturally and class specific kind of setup that came along with it that wasn't much questioned, I think, at least by any of anything I remember from the interview transcripts. But there's more, there's a politics even beyond that. I remember we worked together on calls for participants. So, as you do with academic interview studies, we sent out all sorts of messages saying, Would you like to be interviewed for this project? And people responded, those materials were all gender neutral, like we never said, we're looking to interview women. But everybody who we interviewed was a woman, coaches and mothers alike. Why do you think that is?
Jeanique: 20:13
Just based on the stories they were telling, number one, their trust in the process of using a sleep coach seemed often more gendered. Many of them reported their partners not really buying into the idea that a sleep coach could do very much or wanting to rely more on family members and relatives rather than a stranger to do all of that. Also, based on how work is structured here, and a lot of the women that we talked to being middle, upper middle class, um, wealthier women, a lot of them were on mat leave and their partners weren't. And so they were doing a lot of the heavy lifting as far as um, you know, this sort of sleeplessness at night. And so they were the ones really going through it and struggling and were really responsible for taking care of sleep, the baby sleep. And so I think that's partly why we've mostly heard from women. I mean, in some of the interviews we did, we had sort of husbands sort of in the background sort of responding to things where we heard about their input or their feedback. I remember one woman I interviewed in Vancouver basically said her husband saw how she was struggling, was like, oh, do whatever you need to do to like figure this out. And so she decided to hire a sleep coach. So that seemed to be like the general advice is like, oh, take care of yourself by doing what you need to do or spending what you need to spend to take care of that, versus being part of that process. Not to say that some of those partners wasn't part of like the methods to try to help babies to go to sleep. They just seemed more directed by their partners in terms of what they needed to do a lot of the times.
Cressida: 21:54
Yeah, I remember a couple of the coaches saying to me quite varied things, actually, like saying, on the one hand, dad thinks that this is a waste of money. And sometimes I have to persuade the dads that this is a job that I'm doing, and that their wife usually really, really needs me, that in fact this is a health crisis, a crisis in the family that requires some sort of intervention and that they're not taking it seriously enough. But sometimes the converse, one of them said, if the dad calls, you know it's really bad. And the sort of the view was if a man in the household has realized that sleep is a big enough problem that he's reaching out for a professional, quote unquote professional support, then it's a really serious situation. And even he has noticed. So there was sometimes a bit of skepticism about the lack of involvement of fathers, but that they weren't absent, right? It wasn't that dads were completely absent from the story. But yes, overwhelmingly the sense was that women are responsible for managing babies and including the sleep of babies. And that's partly because people have sort of essentialized beliefs about what men and women do, but it's also structural because especially here, there are a lot of men who are working in relatively well-paid jobs and women who are staying at home on maternity leave. And so that structure of a family encourages the woman to be responsible for early childcare. Um, and men can, of course, take parental leave, but are less likely to do so and are less likely to do so, especially at the beginning of a baby's life when a woman is more likely to be breastfeeding. And so nursing kind of plays a role, I think, in some of this too.
Jeanique: 23:46
When you were talking, it reminded me of two things that came up while we were doing the interviews. One was how frequent we saw partners who like went to a different part of the house in those early those first six months. So they weren't really like witness to the sleep deprivation and the crying and all of that. They were sort of out of air shot. They're in the basement, they were somewhere else. That was one thing that I was surprised about. The second thing was how often the women who were sleep deprived were apologizing for the inconvenience of the babies crying on their partners, even though they were struggling, feeling as if their partner shouldn't feel any of it. And I, you know, I was like, you you hear misery looks company, you think they'd want to share, you know, I'm struggling, you should be struggling just a little bit as well. And they're like, no, no, no, they don't want them to struggle at all. I'm like, I'd want them to struggle too. I know exactly what it's it's like with me. But these women were like, no, no, no, they have work in the morning. I don't want them to be tired at all. Well, you're tired, so I don't know. It's just a different sort of care, I guess, care extending past the baby to their partners.
Cressida: 24:49
Yeah, there was a lot of role protection, even to the extent where bringing dad back from the basement, which was a line I heard a few times, right? We've got to bring dad back from the basement, seemed to extend to the marital relationship. So it's not just that dad needs his sleep, but that he needs to come back from the basement so that he can have a relationship with his wife, including having sex. So sometimes in some of the interviews, not with the women themselves, but with the coaches, that was explicit, right? That dad needs to come back into the marital bed so that this couple can have a relationship in lots of ways. I mean, people said to me things about how it's really nice now that the baby goes to sleep at eight o'clock and we can sit and watch a movie and have a glass of wine and be adults together. But there was also a bit of hinting about sex that this means that dad will come back to the marital bed with everything else that happens in it, and that that was another way of protecting men from the consequences of having a baby. Yeah.
Jeanique: 25:52
One woman I talked to, she was very resentful because her husband had gone to the basement and was insisting that she, you know, get the baby to sleep more, but sort of looked down on the idea of getting a sleep coach as well. So just wanted her to sort of figure it out and figure it out quickly. And she she was one of the people who got to it a little bit later because she made it to almost a year before sleep coaching just sort of gave up and was like, I need to get some help here because I'm co-sleeping still, it's a year out, and I don't see an end in sight. And he is now talking about the kids should be two years apart. So we wants a second one and I'm drowning still and just sort of frantically trying to figure it out. And you can see how not sort of taking care of this earlier or not having that support or even that acknowledgement that what is happening is difficult can make it so that like even the idea of a second child coming into that and having it be similarly difficult just makes it a complete like turn-off of some of the women we talked to.
Cressida: 26:53
Yes, if you want to do this more than once, then you're gonna need a different strategy. Yeah, yeah for sure.
Joshua: 27:08
I thought the descriptions of dads was both funny or I guess funny in a pathetic kind of way, especially for dads.
Cressida: 27:18
This is all reporting on dads, right?
Joshua: 27:19
So there's definitely a, yeah, it's coming from a certain perspective for sure. Someone who would love more help and is most very tired. Yes. Yeah. But certainly the way that the dads were presented seemed very like all right, I'm home, you put the kid to sleep and come get me when I saw I'll be down the bunker, right? Sort of hiding from the food throwing and the crying. And then when there's peace on the land, I will come back up and re-emerge from the cave. Which I thought, yeah, was both a little funny and sad. But then you and Janique tie this to structural pressures that are also on people, that maybe this is the man's or historically the man's domain, going to work, coming back while the mom is supposed to take care of the crying child and the way that those expectations have been built in and have been sort of carried across different places in history.
Cressida: 28:29
Yeah, I was surprised actually by the extent of the traditional gender roles that people followed. And I think like the one interviewee who said, My husband says that there's blue, there are blue jobs and there are pink jobs, and putting the baby to sleep is a pink job. That was very explicit, right? An ideological understanding of gender. But some of it was structural that even people who might have wanted a more egalitarian family found that when a breastfeeding mother was on maternity leave and a father was working, that to demand of him that he also participate in childcare felt to them uneven. So there's reasons why people divided the labor that they did in the way that they did. We didn't quite have enough data to write about that, I think. But at one point I did want to write an article called Bringing Dad Back from the Basement. Because there was this palpable sense that dads had to, in order to be sort of maintain whatever psychological equilibrium they thought they needed, they did have to physically absent themselves, which is another thing that architecture enables. So because our interviewees came from Western Canada and were mostly middle class people who had relatively large family homes, which I know because quite a lot of the interviews were conducted in people's homes, that they had space in their houses to effect this division of labour and it does take a certain kind of space. Yeah. And so nobody where I grew up had such a thing as a what a Canadian would call a finished basement. I'd never seen such a thing before I moved to Canada. So very much of its time and place. Yeah. So if that's sort of what people are doing in descriptive language, what what does it mean or what does it sort of signify? I mean, I'm when I started out on this project, I knew that there was a lot of interest in coaching more generally, like as a phenomenon. And there's this literature about why we are more interested than we used to be in bringing experts into our personal life, whether it's personal trainers or executive coaches or even life coaches. There's lots of personal organizers, there's lots of people who will come into your intimate space, right? Whether it's absolutely literally or kind of metaphorically, and talk to you about how to organize your life. And the sleep coach is a really 21st century phenomenon alongside that, those other forms of coaching. So why this? Why now?
Jeanique: 31:23
I think a few things. Number one, I think we're living, um, and I've fallen victim to this post um 2020 of like the Task Rabbit sort of phenomenon of just having strangers come into your home to help you with the tasks of life that typically you'd be responsible for. But if you're working longer hours or you think life should have a balance of all of these activities and hobbies that happen outside of the home, having time to do everything becomes so much harder. You don't have enough, you don't have as much time to spend figuring it out, and you want to have someone sort of explain it to you. You go to TikTok to sort of search and figure out the answer very quickly rather than reading like a cookbook. Everything is just done a little bit faster. I think there's also a prioritization or like an idealization of like science versus like folk wisdom, and a lot of times where we'd maybe ask our grandparents or parents about how they would do things. And we think that maybe science has a better answer, that there's been research and data, and there's been results that we can look at to tell us, you know, what the right thing to do is. And I think people want to do the right thing, and they think this is one avenue where the right answer exists if they find an expert. A lot of people that I ran into and spoke to and interviewed had issues with how they were parenting, didn't want to replicate, and didn't want advice from the sort of the people in their families, relatives in their families, people have talked about their parents, not wanting advice from the sister-in-law because of how she parents her children and having sort of judgments around that and being further and further away from family who can come in and sort of show you how to do things. Because that sleep deprivation is real, and not wanting to impose and ask someone to come in to help. Whereas when you're paying somebody, you know, you feel entitled to their time in a way you don't, someone you're not paying. I think it definitely is a cultural thing. Um, I don't know if it's it speaks to my entitlement, but I was like, oh, if I had a kid, like my mom would have to move in with me, like obviously. But she has a life and a job. And I was like, I don't know she'd have to time off, you'd have to help me. Like, obviously. And like I talked to the people who's like, I would never expect much like ask someone to like put their life on hold for months. And I'm like, oh, but she would be, she'd feel privileged to, you know, stop all of that. I think that's the assumption. Like, I think that's a cultural thing. Yeah, you know, growing up back home, it's harder to afford to live away from home. So you mostly, you know, live across generations in the same home. So there's an expectation when you bring a baby home that there are parents and sisters and so on who you can turn to for help who want to help. But there's also like, because they help, they get a say in what you're doing. And that's very different in terms of how parenting is done here, where the parents are like the deciders of what is appropriate. It's not a team decision because it's not like a team task, whereas back home, it is a team task. So your parents do have like, oh, I don't like how you're doing that, and you don't take offense to it. You sort of have to like listen because they're helping your parents. So all of those things sort of feed into it.
Cressida: 34:26
Yeah, that's a great perspective. I was really struck by how isolated some of the mothers that we talked to were people who lived in these, you know, quite comfortable suburban homes in Edmonton or Calgary, and who really didn't seem to have anybody to help them. So, as you say, on the one hand, they were rulers in their own lives, like they had a sort of sovereignty over the home, but there was also nobody there, that they were separate from extended family, whether, whether by choice or or not, and that they didn't have people around them to help them in this little kingdom that they had in their suburban home. And that's very isolating. And it's, I mean, so much of this depends on all sorts of relationships in the labor market that you need to have a cadre of people who are available for this kind of poorly paid, super flexible work, who are willing to look after your baby or do your dishes. And at the same time as you have women in the workforce who are well paid enough that they can afford to have somebody doing that, but not so well paid that they can afford to not work. And then you've got, you know, their husbands, especially in Western Canada, especially in Alberta, where there's a huge gender pay gap, who are even better paid. And so there's sort of several layers of people beneath them who are running around. But then you've also got above those men, you've got bosses who are making millions. I mean, there's a sort of very elaborate kind of system of layers of employment here that depends on the availability and the needs of certain groups of people who are forced into certain kinds of labor. So I'm not an expert on any of that, but it's fascinating to think about what makes it possible for this even to exist as a service.
Jeanique: 36:09
Yeah. I don't know if this is actually true, but I think about like friends that I have who feel a kind of resentment in their own like families to have all of their free time be spent doing domestic labor and thinking like it still needs to get done, but I work too hard so that like that's all I'm doing in my free time, and feeling as if I'm willing to sacrifice some of the extra pay that I'm getting to make that part of my life just a little bit easier and feeling less uh ashamed of wanting that or needing that. And I think that's a big shift is like not just feeling entitled, but feeling feeling less, less worried about judgment than I've seen before. Just like sort of having those conversations. I'm gonna pay to like have the furniture built before it shows up so I don't have to do it myself when it gets to the house, things like that. This is a YOLO generation of like, I'm I'm willing to like have less and have less in investments and have less for retirement if it means that like my life is slightly easier, which I think is a different approach. And I think, yes, with millennials right now, but I think even more so with Gen Z, who I think have been talking a lot about like, am I even living to 60? I'm just gonna go on that vacation and I'm just gonna do the thing and I'm just gonna get the beautiful vase or the beautiful cup that I want instead of the cheapest thing, you know.
Cressida: 37:33
Yeah, if I've learned anything about sleep, it's that it's all so closely connected to time that when we're when we talk about sleep, we're always talking about time, we're always talking about work. Those terms are all implicated. So people who are trying to fix their sleep are trying to do so in the context of their relationship with work and their relationship with time. And so, yeah, that was for me what sleep coaching exemplified was how can I be the servant of work in the way that I have to be and reclaim some of my time. Yeah.
Jeanique: 38:09
Not just for the sleep coaches themselves and what they represent, but also we saw like that sort of cottage industry much smaller of like helping adults sleep, right? And it's that whole idea of um really prioritizing your own sleep as a form of self-care and self-management. Like to be the most optimal worker, I need to like sleep well, which means having the right bed and the right sort of setup and the right environment, and not having the TV in the bedroom and going to bed at a certain hour and like what medications you need to take, and sort of really hyper-focusing on sleep as like the first line to being well before anything else. But it happened doesn't happen initially, right? Like it happens eventually. Like I feel like you eventually enter the space of like really thinking about your own sleep and wanting to like optimize your own sleep to work better, I think.
Cressida: 39:03
Yeah, we haven't talked about that because we didn't interview those people, but I wonder if that isn't the next phase of this industry is sleep coaches for teens. I've seen that. And I've seen sleep coaches for adults who work shifts. Like that's a big, a big thing. And maybe just moving into regular, regular old adults who don't sleep well, you know, yeah. Like the insomnia coach or whatever it might be, the person who's trying to help you with your ordinary adult sleep is going to be the next growth sector in sleep coaching.
Jeanique: 39:39
It comes up a lot more, I find people who have recommendations about the pillows and you know, whether it's weighted blankets or not weighted blankets, and cotton sheets versus linen sheets and magnesium versus melatonin, like you know, the blackout curtains and the lighting and the all of the other things that they recommend for babies to sort of create an optimal space. Like people have such very specific recommendations that's entering a lot of the conversation now. I find where people are more eager to share their sleep best practices and ask for advice as well. And it is increasingly, I think, becoming a topic of conversation as people sleep less. So, you know, you're online, you do things, you're not sleeping as much. So I find it comes up a lot more people wanting to sleep better and wanting to invest in creating that space.
Joshua: 40:40
So this idea of sleep and time comes up again, and we've talked about this in some of the other interviews, there'll be in some of the other episodes. And I guess part of the context of what we are describing as sleep coaching is this idea that we should be optimizing our time, and that we might need a coach or professional to come in and help us and show us how to optimize our time and what we're doing. And in this case, showing us how best to prepare a sleeping space for our child or the conditions so that the baby will fall asleep faster so that you can reclaim your own time, whether that's for work or for recovery, as much and as quickly as possible.
Cressida: 41:26
Yeah, I think that's right. Of course, in general, sleep is so much about time, but getting the baby to sleep at the right time is 100% of sleep coaching. And that's because you might have a circadian rhythm that you couldn't match to your baby's no matter what, which is why the advice sleep when the baby sleeps is so annoying. Because if you could sleep when the baby sleeps, you'd be a baby, right? You wouldn't be its mother. That's right. Yeah. So, of course, at a certain point you're so completely exhausted that you pretty much can sleep when the baby sleeps. But you know, it's not a way of sleeping that your body is ready for.
Joshua: 42:02
So that's not a natural rhythm. No, that's a sleep deprivation.
Cressida: 42:06
Yeah, you're an adult. So I think that there's always something to me, anyway, annoying about that advice. But it's also because there are so many temporal pressures on parents, whether it's that you have to get the dinner ready, or you have to pick up your other child from school, or you have to look after your elderly parents, take them to a doctor's appointment, or at some point you most likely have to go to paid work yourself. And so you need your baby to conform to a schedule. And there's a lot of more recent advice books that make these temporal promises. So in the literature, there are a lot of these promises, like there's one called baby sleep training in seven days, the fastest fix for sleepless nights.
Joshua: 42:52
Wow, perfect.
Cressida: 42:53
And there's one called the 90-minute baby sleep program or 12 hours sleep by 12 weeks old.
Joshua: 42:59
Yeah, these are perfect examples.
Cressida: 43:01
All these titles are making these promises about time.
What does the practice of sleep coaching tell us about the practice of mothering?
Jeanique: 43:18
I think there's a lot of guilt around mothering and getting it right and getting it done right, and how your children turn out or whatever issues they have being a reflection of decisions you made, and everybody just wanting to do a good job and trying to figure out what that looks like and um how they can make that happen. And so I think the practice of sleep coaching shows, I think, on the one hand, that people are willing to spend what they have to sort of problem solve this issue. But I think as well, especially on the side of the sleep coaches themselves, like wanting to have a balance between like work and mothering that allows them to be in the home a little bit more, and that becoming, especially, you know, with how expensive things are, becoming more of an issue where a lot of women were looking for a side hustle that allowed them to stay home and help other mothers and feel useful outside of their parenting duties, like they were doing good generally. So I think it all sort of came together in all these different ways and showed how how guilty a lot of these women felt that they even needed help, but we're so grateful to have that help.
Cressida: 44:39
Wow. Who'd be a mother? Sounds like a terrible job.
Joshua: 44:43
It does. But but maybe parenting doesn't have to be all that hard. I mean, we hear all the time about how Gen X just rode their bikes all over, ate dirt, and never checked in with their parents until they absolutely had to, or until they came home, I guess. Because one of the biggest markers for Gen X is they didn't have cell phones, so they didn't have to be constantly checking in. And likewise their parents couldn't constantly be checking in with them. I think today we would say that's a more hands-off approach to parenting, and uh they seem to have turned out okay.
Cressida: 45:19
Yeah, I mean, with with older children, I think that there are lots of really interestingly variable discourses about how much you need to parent, how you need to parent. I'm I'm a Gen Xer, right, right in the middle of that cohort. And when I only know this with hindsight, but when I was a baby, it was the peak of Cry It Out, which I think maps to the general theme of retrospectively interpreted neglect. You know, you just the idea is that you just put your baby in a room and you close the door and they cry and you come back 10 hours later.
Joshua: 45:54
You both go to the basement.
Cressida: 45:55
You both go to the basement. Yes, exactly. Mum and dad are in the basement. Yeah. Um so there's lots of these discourses, whether it's intensive mothering or helicopter parenting, which is I think bad always, or attachment parenting. So the pendulum swings. Now people are constantly telling me about free-range kids.
Joshua: 46:20
You're raising the kids for slaughter on a farm or something.
Cressida: 46:23
Let's give them a nice childhood while it lasts!
Joshua: 46:26
While it lasts, yeah.
Cressida: 46:27
Um, but the idea that you just have this kind of benign neglect approach to parenting. And they come in and out of fashion. I've started to think of parenting, the more I read about parenting, the more I think of it as being like high fashion, where what looks absolutely ridiculous this year will be very on trend next year. And it cycles quite fast through different looks. And the way that people talk about parenting also seems to be cycling more quickly and proliferating between these more intensive approaches where you're supposed to manage your children and anxiety about that management that in turn has to be managed. So, unlike at least in the historical fantasy, the Gen X childhood, where your parents genuinely did just send you off and say, come back at supper time, you might free range your kids, but you've actually they've got phones in their pockets and you've got Find My switched on. So you actually you know where they are and you've carefully curated their independence. So yeah, it seems a bit different, but in any case, just as with older children, there are all of these trends. So with babies, with the parenting of babies and baby sleep, there are also all kinds of back and forth trends. One of the coaches that I interviewed was very funny, and she talked about growing up in a rambling farmhouse in somewhere in Western Canada, and she grew up in a big family, and she said, My parents had no idea what we were doing once we were told to go to bed. So she's obviously not talking about being a baby, but she's talking about being quite a young child. She's like, we were just, you know, we were in our rooms, but we weren't in our rooms. Sometimes we were in each other's rooms, we were climbing out the window, we were doing, you know, doing all sorts of things. My parents just went to bed and went to sleep quite early because they were farmers. And we were doing all sorts of stuff. And now the parents that she works with, she said, almost everybody has a video baby monitor, and they're watching their child sleep in its room. Um, so even if they're not standing right there next to the crib, they're able to see their baby asleep, and that they have so much anxiety. So many of the parents she works with are thinking, you know, what if somebody comes into my house and steals my baby? Thank God I have this video monitor. Or what if, you know, my baby cries and I'm not there immediately, maybe they'll be damaged for life and they'll have to go to a therapist until they're 80. And so she sort of was wryly recounting all of these tremendous anxieties that parents now have about their their young children in general, but particularly their young children when they're asleep or their young children at night, in contrast to her experience of being a little hooligan and kind of her and her siblings just running wild, and then the parents, it's probably a little bit exaggerated, but the parents just, you know, unconcernedly going to bed and going to sleep.
Jeanique: 49:46
I mean, I think that there's something to that, like this idea of like, oh, sleep is natural, they'll figure it out. When they're tired, they'll go to sleep, sort of an attitude. But we did talk to some mothers who talked about um like feeling guilty, turning off the monitor to go to sleep themselves. Because if they left the monitor on, any sort of breath or like anything, they would jump up and this sort of constant nervousness, watching, looking throughout the night, they turn over, they'd look at it. They just they never sort of switch off themselves and feeling as if they were to sort of shut it off. And then if something happened, you know, they would feel so incredibly guilty about that. So I think it was a much different time before. I also think that there is a lot of pressure on parents to get it right and to take responsibility for who their children become and like thinking that everything is going to have like an outsize consequence. So not teaching them how to sleep well today means that they may not get into a grad school in 20 years, right? Like the two things go together, right? Like you have to be on it from the moment they're born in order to create the best versions of them. And if you don't, then you're failing them. And the parents do feel, you know, very scared of that. And so they have like all of these anxieties about like how this thing would result in all of these, all of these other things. But it's on the flip side as well, where it's like if you attach my parent too much, like there are also all these other things, and you can call sleep for this long, but not till this long, because like there's a line and you can mess it up. Like, there's so many ways to apparently screw up kids that sleep being as important as it is, it makes sense that they'd be focused in on sleep as much as anything else.
Samuel L. Jackson narrates: 51:31
We're finally watching our movie. Popcorn’s in the microwave, beep. Oh shit, god damn it, you gotta be kidding! Come on, go the fuck back to sleep.
Joshua: 51:55
Well, that's the end of the episode. Thanks again for listening, and next time on Sleep is the New Sex, we'll be talking about working from bed with Hannah Haugen.
Cressida: 52:08
Thanks everyone. This series is recorded at the University of Alberta, which is located on the territory of the Nehiyaw, Nitsiitapi, Métis, Nakota, Dene, Haudanosonee, and Anishinaabe, lands that are now known as part of Treaties 6, 7 and 8 and homeland of the Métis. As we talk about the history and meanings that sleep, rest, leisure, and productivity have for us, we also want to recognise the way each of these ideas participates in the history of colonialism that has shaped and continues to shape relations between settlers and First Nations. Our sound engineer is Tom Merklinger, who also wrote and performed our music. To find our first season, please see the link in the show notes, and for more information on this project, visit sleepisthenewsex.ca.