The Netmums Podcast - S13 Ep1: Heidi Skudder: Unravelling the Mysteries of Baby Sleep

Episode Date: April 15, 2024

This episode of the Netmums Podcast is brought to you by Johnson's Baby, the family favourite brand that's gentle on babys’ skin.  In this episode of The Netmums Podcast, hosts Wendy Golledge and Alison Perry delve into the often-exhausting world of baby sleep with the award-winning parenting and baby sleep expert, Heidi Skudder. With a wealth of experience as a former nanny, maternity nurse, and mother, Heidi has been the guiding light for countless parents, including celebrities like Perry Edwards and Stacey Solomon. She brings her expertise to the podcast, discussing the often-misunderstood topics of colic, tongue-tie, silent reflux, and the impact of diet on a baby's sleep. Heidi also sheds light on the importance of the fourth trimester, advocating for post-birth recovery and the need to slow down in those early weeks. She offers reassurance to parents; don’t worry - you cannot spoil a baby with cuddles!  Heidi's new book, 'Your Positive Baby Sleep Book,' is full of wisdom for any parent seeking guidance.  Stay connected with Netmums for more parenting tips, community support, engaging content: Website: netmums.com / Instagram: @netmums 

You're listening to the Netmums podcast with me, Wendy Gollich, and me, Alison Perry. Coming up on this week's show... There's a reason for colic and we can get to the bottom of it. Is it because they're taking in air? Lots of babies now do have tongue tie or we're recognising them more potentially. Lots of babies do have unsettled tummies, you know, would they benefit from some probiotics or looking at diet and things like that? So, so much of newborn sleep is caught up in how comfortable they are but this is stuff that probably when you had your babies no one really was talking about maybe we didn't know enough about it I certainly didn't get trained in it

10 plus years ago it's stuff that I have had to learn myself and through my journey with my own three children but before all of that this episode of the Netmums podcast is brought to you by Johnson's Baby, the family favourite brand that's gentle on baby's skin. I'm a big fan of their products, especially their bedtime range. The Johnson's bedtime routine consists of a bath, massage and quiet time. It's been tested on babies aged seven months and older for a week or more and it's clinically proven to help babies and toddlers fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer oh amazing i could definitely do some of that in my house i'm heading to boots where you can save a third on the johnson's

bedtime range until 23rd of april subject to availability. Johnson's bedtime routine consists of a bath, massage and quiet time, tested on babies seven months and older for one week or more. Welcome to a special bonus episode of the Netmoms podcast. Now, before we introduce our guest, how has your week been, Wendy? It's been a bit emotional, if I'm honest. I'm managing two small people with very big very different emotions. One's a pre-teen who's feeling all the feels about pre-teen and one is eight who's feeling all the feels about being eight and it's a real drain on my emotion bank. I'd love to know if mums of boys have the same drain. Or do you get this with your girls, Alison? Yeah, I mean, I can't answer the boy

question. But yeah, it's actually quite tricky having the kind of different ages because you've got to handle them quite differently. Obviously, my 13 year olds, you know, need to kind of sit down and have little chats with her. One of my five-year-olds yesterday, she was feeling so many emotions inside, like frustration and anger. She started walloping her twin sister and then purposefully like going up

and grabbing drawings that she's done and ripping them up in front of her face. Like it's clearly in her head, she's thinking, I'm angry, so I'm going to make you angry too. And too i'm like i don't know what to do other than physically restrain her to stop her from walloping her sister i'm like i don't know how to handle this it's hard isn't it maybe the twin thing as well because when i guess when you've got a twin you've got that constant backdrop of you know that they've always they're always there for you so you can take it out on them exactly oh my goodness it's a lot isn't it it is let's talk to our guest i hope

she she's not an expert in teenage girls but you never know she might have some fun luckily she's an expert in parenting because today we are chatting to the award-winning parenting and baby sleep expert Heidi Scudder. A former nanny and maternity nurse, Heidi has worked with thousands of babies globally to sleep successfully including celebrity clients Perry Edwards, Chloe Maidley, Stacey Solomon and Binky Felstead. She's got a top podcast, The Parent and Baby Sleep Coach. She holds webinars, parenting workshops, and her book, Your Positive Baby Sleep Book, is out this week. Heidi, a warm welcome to the Netmums podcast. Thank you. Thank you for having me. That sounds lovely, that intro. It's always nice, isn't it, to hear all of your accolades and achievements in one handy paragraph.

Yeah, exactly. Perfect. Thank you. As a parenting coach, Heidi, do you feel that kind of like pressure to be the perfect parent? You know, if one of your kids goes batshit in Tesco, are you like, oh my God, do you feel really self-conscious? I do, yeah. I think it's really, really hard. A, parenting full stop and this whole sort of gentle parenting movement which I think is brilliant like this whole positive parenting reparenting ourselves amazing but the pressure to do that as a parent in this generation I think is incredibly hard um add on that that I have a you know a very large social media following where I

do share my parenting journey in my life and I'm often saying to my husband like can you just not shout because she might know me so yes I do feel the pressure um but actually I just did a reel yesterday actually about sort of not needing to be that gentle parent 100% of the time and how important that is because I think with social media as it is today it feels like we should be and we're looking everywhere and there's tips everywhere and you know we put tips out we're part of that but I want everyone to know that actually doing your best as and where possible rather than 100% of the time is such an important message. Oh it is we spoke to Joel Wicks actually on the last season and he was telling us how he really tries gentle parents but if he gets

it wrong he just apologizes. And that's OK. Exactly. And actually, it's really, really good for our children to see us getting things wrong and apologize. That's comforting. I don't know about you. I see that quite a lot. I know we're sort of talking about the baby stuff, but at the same time, I have a four and six year old. And the most powerful thing is when they then come to me and say, I mean, I'm really sorry.

I threw that toy across the kitchen. I didn't mean to. I was feeling angry. And I just think, wow, like how different is that compared to how I was brought up? It blows my mind sometimes. Yeah. I bet you get loads of friends and family asking you for advice. I know I would. Like if you were one of my school mum friends, I would always be like, Heidi, what do I do in this situation? It's really hard with friends, actually. I actually take a step back and I only,

and I say to them when they have their babies, I'm here if you need me, this is what I can do for you. But I'm not going to kind of lecture or keep checking in and ask how the sleep is going. You come to me because i think we i'm sure we can come on to this but a lot of people want to find their own journey and the last thing they want is like a baby sleep expert sticking their nose in and going well you could do it this way also you'd be like also like i'm sending you an invoice for every time i do check

in you can you can pay me yeah and do you know what it's really hard as well because when you are just doing your checking on whatsapp so with our clients we do a whole hour consultation and ask a million questions so if you've then got a friend going oh she's waking early what do you think i can do i'm like okay where do we start and i'll try and give a bit of advice but inevitably it won't work because i don't know the full backstories and then it looks like it's not working for a friend so it's just it's really hard actually with friends i find take a back seat so you've been in the parenting game as in working in parenting not being a parent for about 15 years what are the main changes in attitude and advice you've seen over that time

it's a great question so we've obviously got the the kind of gentle parenting side of things so that's all the behavior stuff um in sleep so when i first trained i mean yeah i've literally been in child care for 20 years but when i first trained in sleep training as it was back then it was a very basic course and it was it was pretty much if i'm honest leave your baby to cry that's how you do it. I was actually talking to friends about this this weekend. If they're sick, that's fine. Like, it blows my mind, really. And it was all very Gina Ford, which is fine.

You know, like, lots of people do still wake up. Well, my eldest is nearly 13, and we'll come on to this. We had absolute sleep disasters. And that was the only advice pretty much that i could find at the time leave it to cry and i can tell you now it didn't work and or yeah just you know strict routine so the very famous kind of by 8 15 if they've not napped and you've not had your toast then epic fail on your part it was awful don't get me wrong and the thing with my book I really am really proud of is that I have different options for different parents because

some people do love a routine and they want control and they've had a big job and managed loads of people and then they have a baby and go oh my god what's going on and they need that level of sort of routine and control to their day but for for other people, that completely freaks them out. And what I've really tried to do in the book is have something for everyone. So what I'm kind of saying is it's a book that works for every baby because it literally does. You can do the routine, but you can also not do the routine and still have a really happy sleeper.

I think that's what I really like about your advice, Heidi, and also the book. It's, you know, you said that there's not one correct way to bring up a baby or a child. And it can feel so often, like there's just so much noise, especially on social media, you know, telling us how to do it and try this. And it can just feel so overwhelming. So how do we work out who to listen to and who to filter out? It's so hard. And even, you know, like 15 years at K doing the sleep stuff in approaches as a new parent to be on social media to be scrolling at 3am when you're doing a night feed and to be seeing people going it's normal for

babies to wake up for five years don't do anything for other people to be like that's not okay it's just but that was about 12 years ago I was doing that 12 years ago thinking oh my god what should because you're desperate aren't you at four in the morning you're desperate someone's just mix it yeah and also we know like what sells and the content that does well of course is like cancel culture calling other people out that kind of thing which has then made it become really i just find it quite negative actually at time it's very divisive isn't it yeah exactly super divisive and think about being a new mum and trying to work out like oh I'm not gonna work on the routine or settling or am I not like that is just in itself like extremely difficult but my biggest thing is use your gut um gut for babies is a different

story but gutter than adult as a parent and just sit for a few minutes and I talk about this in the book and just say what do I want to do like what feels good for me because if you're seeing everywhere that babies just don't sleep and that's how they are but you're struggling and your mental health is struggling and you feel like you want a routine or you want a baby who sleeps better that's okay like we can get oh god I feel a bit emotional I wish I'd known you 12 years ago it's it's such a biggie baby sleep is so huge and it can make or break that early parenting experience can't it certainly broke mine and yeah exactly and I think what's really really hard now so going back to we just used to be told leaving to cry now we know so much more so I've got like all the middle section which is

like stuff that's just not in other books it talks about tongue tie it talks about air intake winding babies it talks about baby's tummies how they react to foods that pass through breast milk there is so much to baby sleep that we're not being told or we don't know or your midwife won't tell you and things like that and actually it's uncovering all of those things because if you can have a baby who's comfortable then they will sleep so it's not just about leaving them to cry that's so interesting so what are the main things then that you think we're not being told about sleep so you just mentioned a few of them are there any more being a parent can be hard at times especially when we have a million and one things to do. So it's important to slow down and cherish moments with your baby.

That's why I love Johnson's baby. For the last 125 years, they've been a part of those special moments, whether it's a chaotic or calming bath time or the bedtime routine that helps my baby sleep. And you just can't beat the smell of Johnson's Baby. Mmm, that baby smell. They've recently released an amazing docu-series called A Parent is Born, following the lives of eight families as they begin their parenting journey. You can catch the first three episodes now on johnsonsbaby.co.uk. It's an emotional rollercoaster coaster to watch but so worth it.

Now back to our guest for more tips on bedtime and baby sleep. So obviously there's a lot of talk at the moment about like our diets and processed food and whatever else and I think what we're potentially seeing is therefore our babies have unhappier guts as a consequence of our guts not being in such a great place which is having having a knock-on effect obviously like lots of babies with things like reflux or food intolerances allergies sensitivities whichever it is and that in itself if you have a baby who's unsettled and crying and not sleeping you just naturally think and your mother-in-law will tell you leave them to cry but actually it's their comfort levels so what we work really hard to do is get to the bottom

the holistic bottom of what's actually happening with the baby don't just go oh they've got colic it'll go by 12 weeks like how useless is that statement for any mum dad who's struggling yeah and screaming you know I had a client last week screaming from 4 till 8 p.m every night of the week and they've just been told by 12 weeks it will go oh I'm like no guys listen colic there's a reason for colic and we can get to the bottom of it is it because they're taking in air lots of babies now do have tongue tie or we're recognizing more potentially lots of babies do have unsettled tie or we're recognizing them more potentially lots of babies do have unsettled tummies you know would they benefit from some probiotics or looking at diet

and things like that so so much of newborn sleep is caught up in how comfortable they are but this is stuff that probably when you had your babies no one really was talking about maybe we didn't know enough about it I certainly didn't get trained in it 10 plus years ago it's stuff that I have had to learn myself and through my journey with my own three children I wanted to take you back to reflux actually because you just said there reflux was a silent reflux was a huge problem for my oldest daughter and it took months of arguing with people to get any help with that at all. Can you just help anyone listening with the things to look out for and what they can do to address it? Because I think refluxes can be so hard for parents to manage. Really hard. I would say most of reflux goes unnoticed as well.

You've got obvious reflux where your baby is bringing up milk and you can see, but a lot of parents look for that and they think well if they're not being sick then they don't exactly and we have the opposite she was never sick but she was in agony yeah and silent reflux is often the worst especially for sleep because it is silent so you go well they're fine so therefore if they're fine why won't they sleep and you must you know it must be because i'll i held them too much or whatever else, or I've spoiled them. But no, it's not any of those things. It's the fact that if you go to put them on their back, lie them down, the regurgitation happens.

And that's when they're most uncomfortable. So they're quite often the babies who will look like bad sleepers. I say bad lightly as in that's what people are told. Oh, you've just, sorry, you've just got a bad sleeper. Or you're just unlucky. Or it's just genetics. Or they're just really low sleep needs. Like actually, I would say a good 90% of those babies have silent reflux, but it's just not recognized. So that's really important.

There's a whole page of symptoms. We've got over like 40 symptoms, I think it is, or 30 in the book of what to look out for. And then it's, for me me it's knowledge is power so now I know okay my baby is showing some of those symptoms I can then decide what to do and it obviously have baby checked by a doctor but to be honest with you it's not always a medical issue it's often like change in positioning latch wise taking in air have they got a tongue tie and if you go to the doctor and look for a tongue tie they're going to say no there's not a tongue tie because they're mostly not trained to look for them right so we've got to find the right people in what we call our village and that's what we're

trying to do signpost you to a really good tongue tie practitioner have a look at that check there's no air intake because obviously if you swallow air milk sits on top of it every time the air comes up the milk's going to come up in the esophagus too so it's about doing a bit of troubleshooting um it's not a straightforward process unfortunately because we still understand or the nhs often still understands reflux are just a baby who's sick or losing weight and as i'm sure you experienced like it's actually often not those things they can be gaining weight not being sick but actually still be really uncomfortable um now you mentioned routines already and you know some parents are very pro-routine some are very anti-routine i find that especially when i had my twins i was like

i need a routine just to cling on to something some sort of framework that stopped me from going absolutely insane um but baby sleep patterns in themselves fluctuate so much, don't they, in the first year, which can make it hard whether you're in a routine or not. What's the best way of kind of adapting and working out what to do when your baby's sleep patterns change? Yeah, so quite often you'll be like, right, I've nailed their routine, they're, I don't know four months and they're going through with one nightly whatever it is and then you'll hit what I call a bit of a blip okay the bump in the road generally speaking it's quite simple normally it's a tweak

to their kind of daytime routine so do they need to drop an app or not maybe maybe they need longer awake time before bed that kind of thing we also, you know, are they teething? My one-year-old is teething. This weekend was seriously intense. Like, wow. The crying, the night waking, it's hard. Illness. So quite often, sleep will go off track before illness becomes obvious.

So I have lots of clients come to me and they're like, it's been four nights and their sleep is really broken. And I'll go, just give it a week and tell me in a week's time if they have become unwell and I had an email this morning going oh my gosh I can't believe it's so odd like yeah two nights after we spoke it became really obvious because his symptoms came like he had whatever so it can go off track um and then we can have things like you know they learn to stand so all of a sudden they want to stand at 5am rather than sleep at 5am sleep regressions are for me like they're not really set periods of time like it doesn't not every baby has a six month and eight month and a 12

month regression if you want to look for them you will see it right so i don't think we need to wait to out for them we just need to go if something happens and they start waking there is a reason they don't just learn to not sleep all of a sudden it's not like they have to you know oh just leave them to cry because they've suddenly learned not to sleep there'll be something going on but it'll take you a week or so to work it out probably by the time you've worked out they'll be sleeping again anyway right so I think it's good to know that sleep is not going to linear and there will be ups and downs but the majority of the time if you want to have it you can have consistency so what do you suggest if um I as a parent because my daughter didn't

sleep I became obsessed with sleep and then I became obsessed with naps and then I became obsessed with times and I still like I've got a bit of PTSD about it. If my eight year old doesn't sleep now, I still get a bit like, what's going on? What's wrong? So what do you say to those parents? Because it really is hard not to become obsessed with sleep when you're not getting any. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's really, really hard. And I think we need to touch on the mental health element to sleep right so we have what kind of one group of babies maybe where they are techs but they will just follow a routine sleep kind of is easy for them I don't see many of those babies obviously

for obvious reasons I'm troubleshooting I see a lot of babies who sleep very difficult for them for underlying reasons so if I'd have known you Wendy back then I'd have been like let's look at why nothing you're doing is really working and happening and that's what's adding to your anxiety it's like well it's working for everyone else so why is it not working for me? Exactly and everyone says well I did this and it worked for me so you try it and it doesn't work and then there's all sorts of other complex emotions caught up in that as well. And you feel like what am i doing wrong you feel like a failure i think it's really important that we know if your baby's not sleeping it's not a reflection on you your parenting what you've tried i have a lot of people come and they've tried

different books courses whatever but the reason it's not working is because they've underlying root causes those issues underlying are not breast like for your baby that silent reflux so yeah it does kind of make me feel a bit sad obviously that you had that journey what I would say now though is if you feel like you're starting to get anxiety around sleep perfect nap times um you know sleeping through the night whatever it is sometimes actually do you know what the best thing to do is just to step back and accept that this is where we are right now and I'm not going to keep trying 10 different things 15 different things whatever it is every week I'm just going to go my baby is my baby right now

they need me for whatever reason in the night whether it's weekflats time to whatever and almost like that piece of acceptance around is how it is and I'm okay with that rather than constantly trying to find the next solution it's really hard because like I said there's so much that you can do so I do encourage people to look for root causes but I also do acknowledge short naps is one of these things so those clients who only ever get 30 minute naps my baby only naps for 30 minutes we try a few different things but sometimes the most powerful thing to do is say what would it feel like if we just said this is just what their sleep is like right now yeah you don't need to keep trying things changing things actually just accepting and that can be really powerful on an anxiety level yeah um now I remember um when I was in strict routines with my twins when they were younger,

how important the ritual of bath before bed was. Like, I just feel like it was, do you know what, it was as much part of, again, keeping my sanity in check, knowing that this was almost like a cue to my brain that bedtime was coming and it was going to be the end of the day and I could sit down on the sofa and watch something trashy on TV. But it is, you know, it is important to so many parents. Is that something that you recommend having that bath time routine? Yeah. So if the baby obviously has like really sensitive skin or whatever else, then we wouldn't do bath time every night when they're very little but that idea of some sort of routine like that is one of the there's a lot of baby sleep that's kind of anecdotal or just opinion but that bedtime routine

is quite heavily backed in in my research sorry so yes ultimately some sort of routine to your bedtime it could be baby massage instead of a bath like if you've got a little one with eczema that flares up and they don't enjoy bath time. But that kind of set of steps, that sequence of events in the run-up to bedtime, really powerful, like for any child. Oh, sorry about that. Baby or toddler.

So can we also talk a little bit about the fourth trimester? In your book, you emphasise importance of post birth recovery. And again, it's really interesting talking to you 12 years down the line, because five days after my oldest was born, I was in blue water. No joke. I'd had a cesarean. I was in blue water, because I thought that I had, if you were up and you were out, it proved that you were up and you were out it proved that you were coping and you were doing it and now there's so much talk out there about five days in bed five days on the bed five days around the bed oh I wish someone had told me that so what do you say to the mums who are there is still societal pressure to bounce back what do you say to those who are idiots like wendy and in blue water i didn't say no that was only my eldest six years yeah so that's only six years yeah i was like on the you know up and about and put makeup on and went for lunch and stuff my thing now is take your time so i did research for the book and some cultures, they literally close their doors to anyone coming into their house for like up to 40 days, some even longer.

And meanwhile, we're like, cool, let's go shopping day five. You know, it's so hard because we don't have often lots of us don't have family around. So it's really hard not to do anything like you might have to pop to the shops and whatever else. But what I really focus on is don't worry about routines. Don't worry about bad habits, sleep, whatever. It's all about you and your birth recovery. So I love that kind of theory of like a week in bed, a week on the sofa. I did that with my second and the difference it made.

I also think to our bond, not just my recovery was massive, had way more energy. And I think just if we can, and obviously it's hard because not everyone has a partner, but if you can take your time, like you never get that time back. And there's never, to be honest, really another reason to just sit on the sofa, is there? You know, like life is so fast-paced if you can just take those at least those first few weeks if not longer to bond with your baby to establish feeding and to recover like birth can be really traumatic for a lot of people just being kind because life is so fast-paced and we need to just come back to ourselves and just again check to check into our gut instinct like what do we need right now do we really need to

see our best friend from uni or you know even like a mother-in-law right so I wasn't very popular second time around because I made rules around people get cross with you right well we haven't been invited to meet baby yet it's like so you cave to that pressure of all these people who want to come and meet your baby when actually then you're the one making tea finding biscuits making sure the house is clean and it's not until you've had a baby is it that you realize like for a lot of my friends if I go and see them I'll take a load of cook meals ready meals whatever I'll take food because you know the one thing you need apart from obviously love and attention yeah and you need to eat yeah

yeah absolutely oh you're so right it makes me so cross when i think about it only it's so hard when when it's about something that is it's so beautiful like you know a grandmother a grandparent meeting their grandchild for the first time it's really hard to be cross about it but i i just i can feel it um now he Heidi but a whole section in your book dedicated to whether we can spoil our babies with contact and cuddles um I think it's so fascinating um tell us your view on that yeah so we kind of just touched on it but ultimately the answer is no okay you can't spoil a baby so I think that where this comes from is that issue with that kind of black and white opinion, which has kind of come recently,

even more so from social media, obviously. Like, yes, put them down from day one, or no, hold them the whole time and all this attachment parenting, they have to be like glued to you all the time. Both of those extremes are incredibly overwhelming. Like to think that you've got to strap your baby to you and just have a couple of months

of like literally not having any time to yourself. It's blooming hard. But also to think, oh, I've got to put them down. I can't cuddle them. That's extremely stressful too. I love that. Don't talk in extremes because that's what commentary on parenting

seems to make people do is, well, you must do this. No, is, well, you must do this. No, no, no, you must do that. There's no kind of shades of grey in the middle of this. Yeah. And I really focus in on, for me, it's really about recovering, doing what your gut says, like cuddle your baby. I cuddled all of my babies, not so much my first.

I think his birth was quite traumatic and he had loads of stuff going on and it was just different but with my second with my third I leaned into it more I was like I can do these cuddles because I also know that by three four months if I do what I call practice naps low pressure practice naps where once a day I just practice putting them down if I do a bit of both by the end of it I'll have a great sleeper. But I also won't look back and regret it because I did cuddle them as much as I want or need to. So I think it's giving, it's empowering, isn't it, to know that you can do both. And you don't have to choose. And I think like, told to be you have to do this, or you have to do that. And actually, you can do a bit of

everything. Now, you might struggle with this last question Heidi because I think possibly there isn't one thing that you can advise people but it might you might say something about what you listening to your guts again I I get the impression so if someone listening now is struggling with baby sleep other than buy my book what is your one piece of advice to them please I would say yeah I mean go with your gut I'll put that to the side because I've talked about that a lot I would say think about what's actually going on for your baby okay so struggling with sleep in those first three to four months they come out knowing how to sleep they don't not know how to sleep so if they're struggling with sleep be curious as to what else might be going on for them okay it might be really simple an awake window tweak or winding them more but it could

also be in your experience when they decide to relax and they're always really listening to you so just be curious and make sure that you really do kind of think about the full picture rather than just thinking, well, I've got a baby that doesn't sleep and that's just kind of how they are. That's really good advice. Heidi, you're marvellous. Thank you. I wish I'd moved you in. Can you just clone yourself, please, for all the mums and dads.

Thank you for joining us. heidi thank you so much it's been so brilliant to chat to you thank you so much for having me