The Netmums Podcast - Transforming Baby Sleep: Expert Tips from Eve Squires

Episode Date: August 25, 2024

Transforming Baby Sleep: Expert Tips from Eve Squires Welcome to another episode of a brand new Netmums Podcast mini series: Milestone Moments, brought to you by Aldi Mamia.  Looking at some of the biggest milestones for new parents, our hosts Alison Perry and Wendy Golledge will be having bite sized chats with experts.  On this episode we are looking at the all-important SLEEP! If sleepless nights are taking their toll and the endless cycle of night waking, resisting naps and early starts are leaving you feeling desperate, then this episode is for you. In this episode, baby sleep expert Eve Squires, founder of Calm and Bright Sleep Support and co-author of Love To Sleep, offers practical advice and emotional support, empowering parents to reclaim their nights and sanity.  From validating exhausted parents to debunking common sleep training myths, Eve shares her personal journey and professional insights on tackling sleep deprivation. Grab your free pack of Aldi Mamia Newborn Nappies from Netmums here. The Milestone Moments podcast is bought to you by Aldi Mamia and produced by Decibelle Creative.

Welcome to Milestone Moments, a Netmum's podcast mini-series brought to you by Aldi Mamiya. I'm Alison Perry. And I'm Wendy Gollich. Aldi Mamiya is an excellent range of great value and award-winning baby and toddler products. Aldi Mamiya products include weaning essentials like stage one fruit and veg purees and biscotti fingers. They also have all the products you need for your newborn like extra sensitive baby wipes and newborn nappies. And they have brilliant buys to help you with your baby's bedtime. Mamiya Bedtime Bath has the most amazing soothing aroma. Plus with Netmums and Aldi new parents can get a

pack of newborn nappies to try absolutely free. So log on to netmums.com and let your friends know about this brilliant offer with Netmums and Aldi. In this series we'll be talking about a key milestone in early parenthood and chatting to an expert guest. Today we're talking about sleep. Let's face it, getting your baby or child to sleep is the holy grail of parenting. We are joined by Eve Squires who is the founder of Calm and Bright Sleep Support and the co-author of the book Love to Sleep. Eve has helped countless families from celebrities like Harry Judd and Aston Marigold to regular people like me. But before we hear from her, Wendy,

I want you to sum up your own baby and child sleep experience in one word for me. Lacking. I mean, that's like, that's mega relatable. How would you describe your experience in one word? I would probably say desperate.

That's how I felt at the point. That's right. Eve, a warm welcome to the Milestone Moments podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's an honour. So Eve, Alison and I have just described our own experiences of baby and child sleep as two fairly dismal words, lacking and I have just described our own experiences of baby and child sleep as two fairly dismal words, lacking and desperate. Is that a common theme that you find when working with

your clients? Absolutely. I just want to start by validating exhausted parents' experience, because if you feel like it's horrendous and torturous you're not being dramatic you're not weak you're not doing any less well than anyone else it is those things and the sheer fact that we use sleep deprivation as a form of torture in warfare to break people down should really say enough about the fact that it is absolutely it's the worst thing about parenting i think many people would have many more children if it wasn't for the distinct sleep deprivation that goes on so true i think i'm probably one of those people actually uh but you're not just some lofty expert who hasn't experienced this stuff

yourself are you i mean you are you're a lofty expert but you're not you're not just a lofty expert who's experienced who haven't experienced this stuff tell us about the awful moment that led to you starting calm and bright sleep support absolutely and I get goosebumps when you ask me that Alison because I may have now helped and I've got to kind of pinch myself when I say it like over 15,000 families had sleep but I am and was just one mum just one exhausted first time mum like you guys like the people that might be listening to this I was so anti sleep training control crying cry out and by the way we don't do cry out just before anyone goes oh god she's one

of them and I absolutely the biggest most important thing to me was my baby's emotional security and happiness way above their grades or whatever i just wanted them to be kind and secure and to to be the best version of themselves and the attachment thing was massive i'm very much what i call a left-wing parent in the sense that i'm baby wearing breastfeeding on demand i co-slept um bare feet and i'd i'd love to have a goat and chickens in the garden but I just don't have enough but the point is is that because I was so against sleep training which interestingly the objective of being against it was that I would be a present calm patient creative playful perfect mom that that say doesn't exist and the avoiding the sleep training and therefore the sleep deprivation was

making me the opposite. So it was really ironic that the very reason I was avoiding sleep training was to not be the thing that I was more and more of, which was resentful, snappy, bitter, emotionally volatile, up and down, unpredictable, scraping my car, scraping my husband where I got half the chance because I literally hated his guts, wanted to stab him between the eyes or in the eye even. I mean, it depends what day it was. And so how I got there was through holding off and being scared of and afraid of and actually dehumanizing people who I was really firmly against. I thought they shouldn't have had kids if they didn't want to be tired. And all the things that I now deconstruct, those awful things that we do, which by the way, is natural, because when we're doing something wrong, where we have to make the other bad so that we can justify our

exhaustion and how awful our experience is. So we have to go, well, that's, I can't do that. That's awful. But anyway, as a result of pushing that away, I crashed my car with my 10 month old baby in it my first born who was 16 yesterday um who now by the way since I did sleep training when she was 10 months old has had less than five broken night's sleep since um I did it including being apart from self-induced ones because now she's up a lot later than me but that's by choice um but yeah I had this great um it wasn't it wasn't awful but it did have an alarm going off. It did have a screaming baby. It did have a real shock. So my one word to explain things is actually that my sleep deprivation was destined because through my sleep deprivation, I came up with my own

super responsive, super baby led, super left-wingy kind of version of control crying, which is a horrible word, but actually it's not to do with any of those things which we can discuss. It's actually just comforting, but just not doing the thing that you were doing before, which is what is the obstacle to sleep. So that's my story. It's through the car crash and the realization that I couldn't do this on my own at all and that it was the support element that was the key. My mum came to stay and help me. That's how I got to where I am now. And since I have, of course, trained as a sleep consultant

and we now train other people and wrote a book on it and love to chat about it. But I am just one once very exhausted mum. So Alison, what do you wish that you'd known about sleep when your girls were smaller? I think I probably wish I'd known what like that it's really worth calling in the experts and doing it sooner so I had around a year when my twins were probably about two or three when we didn't get a full night's sleep and I ended up sitting on their the floor of their room every night or on the sofa because one of them was in our beds and my kids aren't great cool sleepers

they're like punching and kicking and I would end up like getting to the board to the end of the edge of the bed edge of the bed edge of the bed and I've been like right stuff this I'm going to the sofa and it was miserable and because they were like two or three, I felt like, well, sleep experts only help, you know, parents of babies. We're past that point. And actually, I wish I'd kind of called in the experts sooner because once we did, it was just a game changer. And it was incredible. We have all been there. Eve, is there a point when it's too early to call upon an expert to

help with sleep? Because newborns don't sleep. Everybody knows newborns don't sleep. So is it always just that it's hard getting a newborn into a routine or when's it too young, I guess, to call you? So we don't do what we call corrective sleep teaching, as in undoing anything. And there's no such thing as bad habits, but there are things they come to rely on, as we all know. But that is not pre-six months. So the first six months, they're in the fourth trimester. And the reason why we use that phrase, if anyone's wondering, is when they're in the womb, everything's delivered on demand. They're swayed naturally, they're fed through the tubes. So that's why we talk about the extension of the fourth trimester, because it's about doing things on demand and

being responsive and building a beautiful attachment. So yeah, I wouldn't be doing anything correctively because there's nothing to correct pre five, six months of age. But from that mark, every parent needs to know that whilst it's not that their baby should sleep through from six months, they can they are every baby that's healthy and happy is capable of sleeping 11 12 hours beyond the age of six months so i just want parents to know that they can not that they should so pre-six months i would say you please don't worry it's hard and we have lots of support and nurture in our nurture plan and in via the inbox and through our content that we make so it's hard and there

are things you can do but you don't want to be doing any kind of control crying or anything like that before that and is it ever too late i mean i called upon your services when my girls were they must have been they must have been three um yeah is there ever a point where you're like nah you've made your bed you've got to lie in it literally no no it's never you've made your bed because i co-slept with my child from the age of six to nine so it's never you've made your bed. You've got to lie in it, literally. No, it's never you've made your bed because I co-slept with my child from the age of six to nine. So it's never you've made your bed. And that was for my own personal reasons. I don't mind sharing that I was separating from her dad at the time

and I needed that for me, that comfort. And also it kept him out of my bed. I didn't know that at the time, but looking back, there was a payoff like there always is, by the way, for any sleep issue. There's always something in it for someone. But we personally can't help beyond the age of five. But to be honest, that covers a huge range of people.

So my favorite age to sleep teach, Gemma loves the babies. I do it with my sister, who's a pediatric nurse of 20 plus years. But my favorite is sort of, I just love kind of eight months onwards to like, I like the three-year-olds, four-year-olds. I love helping so much with the older children yes it's more complex but it's also more simple because you don't need to worry about foods or nappies or anything like that so yeah it's not too late good i'm sure people will be relieved to hear that um okay so your turn wendy i want you to tell me what you wish you had known about sleep when your girls were little?

I wish I'd known that I was going to get none for approximately two and a half years, but actually four years. For me, my eldest was a terrible sleeper and I bought the books and I tried all the techniques and nothing worked and I had no idea the impact it would have on me I was diagnosed with postnatal depression when Chloe was two and I do genuinely think that my two years of no sleep had a significant impact on that and I joked before we came on air that I just wish I'd known Eve but I really really do wish I'd known someone who was just could say it's okay it's all right and yeah I don't know it was a big deal I think I think that the impact that this has on parents lives can't be underestimated and can't be understated can't I mean I mean you literally crashed your car yeah yeah and and that's just one of many things there

are lots of things out there and i really don't want parents to be scared i really don't so we don't share a huge amount of information that we could about how you know it's it's not safe for us but we do know if we look into it that the brain the body the immunity our mental health massively linked to with sleep and the amount of ladies and men in fact fact, that I can tell you now, the amount of families that had been touched by what they believe to be depression, but genuinely was sleep deprivation, it's impossible to count. It is transformative for mental health and for attachment to the ones that we love. Alison tell you it's you feel so much more connected

and present um and mentally like i definitely was slipping down that route without question when i was exhausted and i still do when i get a few bad nights i can i can feel the glitching sort of starting and the emotional volatility and even the rage as well i know that everybody is different, but could you just speak a little on the fact that for me, when I had Chloe, I'd worked at Mother and Baby magazine for three years. So I felt like I'd written the features about sleep and you shouldn't cuddle your baby to sleep and you shouldn't feed your baby to sleep. And now with 12, 13 years hindsight, I realized that actually I think the problem was that I was being too restrictive of those things. So people still say to young mums or mums with babies, oh, you're cuddling that baby too much. What would you say to that? Because that's what

I felt was the problem. so it's there's two parts to answering this so the first part is we should absolutely as mothers without question tune into our instincts our instincts should be our compass which by the way is hard when you're exhausted there's so much noise lots of it conflicting um no mother should ever be told that you're doing too much comfort right right? And especially in the first six months, it's impossible. However, the other side of that is, and I will never say to any parent, you should not do this. However, what I will say is when you do this and you get them to sleep yourself. So when beyond the age of six months, you take them over the finish line to

sleep through what I call the ings. So feeding, rocking co-sleeping hand-holding etc then that is the thing that they will come to be reliant upon and both they and you will believe strongly that that's the only way sleep can happen and the truth is that that's not the only way sleep can happen so whilst there's nothing wrong with doing all of those things for as long as you want it's your baby not mine you can do what you want you will find that it won't go hand in hand with the sleep they're capable of which as i said is those 11 to 12 hours so you can do that as long as you want but it won't go hand in hand with their best possible sleep it's only when they feel empowered and confident and safe enough that through you giving them the opportunity to show you they can do it and show themselves that they will take the sleep they're capable of

so it's it's an answer of two halves um finally eve what would you say is your most asked question about sleep from parents like what's the biggest issue that they're facing it's it so it's it's more can you help it could be any issue and and every single issue such as night wakes nap resistance early starts you know coming into your bed or you having to get into their bed staying all of those things the question is here but will it work on my baby you know are my babies particularly and you could fill in the the adjective you know and and the truth is that yes it can absolutely work for everybody there are times when it won't but i'm telling you now i heard you say earlier

on wendy you know it didn't work for me but it's more often than not that it wasn't able to work because we don't have the confidence to actually see it through consecutively and stick at it and other things come in and we feel bad and so we go back to doing the things from before so it's very very rare for something not to work it's more that it didn't get the chance because we didn't have the the support we needed to follow it through oh thank you eve thank you for joining us on netmums and on milestone moments it's been lovely to meet you oh thank you you're so welcome thanks for having me don't forget you can get all your baby and toddler essentials at great prices with Oh, thank you. You're so welcome. Thanks for having me. Don't forget, you can get all your baby and toddler essentials at great prices with Aldi Mamiya. And head to netmoms.com now to claim your free pack of Aldi Mamiya newborn nappies.