baby sleep

The 4 month sleep regression, the 12 month sleep regression, the 18 month sleep regression – what is happening?

“Is he a good baby?” If you are a new parent, you can bet your boots this will be the first question almost everyone will ask you. Get that puzzled look off your face and come up with an answer quick, smart. Tell them, “no he’s a little brat, he’s already robbing old lady's handbags and betting on horses!" Maybe even, “we’re ready to list him on…

All babies are different! How could a ‘one size fits all’ approach to baby sleep possibly work (particularly an approach that advocates separation of mother and baby)? In this insightful episode, Pinky interviews Carly Grubb, Founder and managing director of Australian charity, Little Sparklers, home of The Beyond Sleep Training Project and…

"I feel like a really bad mother," confided Sarah, mother of four month old Molly who, apart from an early bout of colic that was overcome with some simple changes to Sarah's own diet, has been an easy, happy baby who rarely cries. Sarah explained, "the other mothers at mums' group all talk about hungry cries, tired cries and angry cries and I am…

While advice may be well meant and grandparents are simply be trying to be helpful or feel connected to their grandbaby, some of grandma’s wisdom may now be outdated and even unsafe – even though she did a damn good job of raising you!

We all have sleep associations, we don’t bat an eyelid about our own quirks or needs around what helps us sleep. Yet, with even a very young baby, there is pressure to ‘teach your baby to self-settle’ – to fall asleep without any help from you.

Unrealistic expectations, pressure to be the perfect mum and too many ‘rules’ are making mums overthink – and blame themselves when they don’t have a ‘good’ baby.

It can be so difficult as a parent to sift through a minefield of conflicting advice, can’t it? Who do you trust? Which advice is ‘right’? Where is this advice coming from? Almost as soon as you baby bump begins to show, it seems that everyone is an expert about YOUR baby! Whenever you hear advice that doesn’t feel quite right to you or if you…

“I feel like such a failure.” I hear this every single day from mothers. The saddest thing is that every time I hear these words, the mother is doing a wonderful job: she is intelligent and responsive with a beautiful connection to her baby. Her baby is proof that she can’t be a failure – alert, animated and engaging. So why is her confidence so…

“I was incredibly stressed and I knew something was very wrong but I thought, I am a mum, I should be able to cope,” says Sandy, a Melbourne mother of two who was diagnosed with postnatal depression when her first baby (now three) was three months old. Sandy’s bubble of pretence burst when, after a few days in a mother baby unit, she was told it…