As a single mom by choice, rest was my top priority. Here's how I sleep-trained solo

“Sleep now ... after the baby comes you’ll never sleep again.” This so-called advice was the most common insight I heard from other new parents while I was pregnant. Since I thrive on eight-plus hours of sleep each night, sleep deprivation was my biggest worry. And as a single mom by choice (SMC), surviving wasn’t my only goal as a new mother; I had wanted a baby for so long that I dared to dream I might actually enjoy the newborn stage. While I knew being a solo parent would be challenging, I was determined to love it, too. For me, that meant making sleep a priority.

With only one month of maternity leave before I went back to work full-time, I had the audacious goal to get back to eight hours of sleep a night within four weeks postpartum. Since I didn’t have a partner to share the “night shift,” I looked to other resources to help. Since formal sleep training methods (like extinction or Ferber) are only recommended for babies after they are 4 or 5 months old, I first focused on newborn sleep resources. What I learned is that there isn’t one magic formula that works for all babies, or for all parents. The advantage in being a single mom is that I could pick the strategies that felt right to me, for my daughter and my life.

The premise behind my favorite newborn sleep book, Dr. Harvey Karp's The Happiest Baby on the Block, is that you can help your newborn sleep by replicating the environment of the womb through the five “S”s. While helping my baby sleep was the priority, I knew that if I had to rock my baby all night long for the “swinging” movement, I wouldn’t be getting any sleep myself. So, I invested in a six-month rental of a Snoo (a more affordable alternative to purchasing one). The smart bassinet was like having a night nurse, rocking my daughter to sleep each night. At times, I felt like a robot was helping raise my baby. But during those first weeks recovering from an emergency cesarean birth, that extra rest was essential to helping me heal.

After I went back to work, I turned to video courses to learn how to help my daughter start developing good sleep habits. Although I felt like the language in the course I took, "Will I Ever Sleep Again?" by Taking Cara Babies, isn’t inclusive to non-traditional families like mine, the principles of the lessons were still applicable to me as a single mom. With the understanding of wake windows, bedtime routines and connecting sleep cycles, building good newborn sleep habits meant that my baby has slept 10-plus hours a night since she was 10 weeks old. That isn’t to say that I’ve never felt tired or overwhelmed. But, getting sleep has been the key for me to feel successful as a single mom.

While the resources I found were essential in my journey, they don’t apply to all babies or all families. Hindi Zeidman is a SMC to her 3-year-old daughter, Olive. As the founder of The Ollie World and armed with an education in infant mental health, Zeidman was confident that she would have her daughter would be sleeping through the night in six weeks. However, even with her extensive knowledge, sleep was still a struggle. She shares, “Olive was born with an immature digestive system and we struggled with breastfeeding. She wasn't sleeping through the night at six weeks as I had hoped. When I came home from the hospital with Olive, it was nothing like what I expected.”

Zeidman felt like she didn’t see herself reflected in many of the resources she came across. “I think most everything is geared towards a stereotypical two-parent household. I don't feel that information is really directed towards single parents by choice.”

Abby Wolfson had two babies as a SMC and found that sleep training helped her children be happier as well as achieve the sleep she needed. She now helps families sleep-train as a child sleep consultant with Peaceful Parent Sleep Coaching and estimates that 20% of her clients are single parents.

“Single parents have more responsibility; if you don’t sleep you can’t be the parent you want to be," Wolfson says. "At first, I was worried that sleep training might emotionally damage my older daughter. I actually hired a postpartum doula to keep me company while I sleep-trained.”

Now, Wolfson believes sleep training is safe and effective and she tailors her coaching based on the family setup. She explains, “In two-parent households, if a baby is breastfed I will suggest the non-breastfeeding parent sleep in a different room during sleep training since the smell of breast milk can make it harder for a baby to sleep through the night. That option is more difficult for single moms.” She continues, “Single parents often need emotional support while sleep training. Hearing your baby cry can be difficult both emotionally and physiologically — your body responds as if there is an emergency.”

I can relate to this. When my baby cries it feels like physical trauma, my cells vibrate with pain and heartache. I know it's normal and natural for babies to cry; that it’s how babies communicate. But listening to my baby cry is really, really hard. So, eight months into motherhood, I’m hoping that we’ve built enough good sleep habits early on that I won’t need to do any version of "cry it out’ sleep" training. If I do, I don’t know how I’ll handle it, and I don’t know how I’ll manage. But, having now found a community of other SMCs makes me feel that while I’m parenting by myself, I’m never truly alone.

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