In this three part series, guest expert Gwen Kiehne shares her most impactful strategies for helping families work out their struggles with sleep. part 1 of 3

Gwen with my older daughter in 2016

Gwen Kiehne has a passionate interest in human development, with a particular focus on newborn, infant, and child emotional development and the transition to parenthood. She has been a postpartum doula for almost 8 years, and a certified sleep coach for 3 years, among other various birth professional hats. Gwen has worked with hundreds of families and cares deeply about helping parents find their inner wisdom and cultivate their own path on their parenting journey. She is the proud mother of a wonderfully curious 10 year old and a community organizer here in Seattle’s Central District.

Sleep is cultural Parents get to decide the sleep culture of your family Here are some helpful notes from Gwen:

1. As a postpartum doula, I observed that almost all parents pass through similar phases as they learn to parent newborns and infants. The first phase tends to center around feeding. I like to call this the “keep the tiny human alive” or “survival” phase where many parents are learning to breastfeed, they are focused on their changing and healing body, and their growing and changing baby. Once this phase starts to feel resolved, which happens at various stages for parents, the focus tends to become on sleep and figuring out how to which pieces of their life before baby they’re going to carry forward and how to integrate this new person into their life routines. I think of this as the “establishing the family culture” phase and a big part of that is doing some longer term sleep planning.

2. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive

   1. People having kids today are more informed than ever. Parents are often pulled between extremes. For example, I often reference the work of Dr. James McKenna who is a biological anthropologist who studies the breastfeeding relationship dyad in primates and humans. Most recently he coined the term breastsleeping to describe the natural biological interconnectedness between nursing and sleeping in human babies. His work is often used to describe a scientific basis for bed sharing and giving babies open access to the breast through the night. On the other side of the spectrum, you have the American Academy of pediatrics who focuses on Sudden Unexplained Infant Death and suffocation, warns against bed sharing, and makes a scientific argument for keeping babies flat on their backs on a separate flat firm sleep surface designed for infant sleep. If we’re looking for sleep solutions or support online, parents are often faced with choosing what kind of parent they are, one that cares about the psychological and biological connectedness that their baby feels or one that cares about whether their baby survives to breathe another day. It can be confusing and overwhelming t