“We are absolutely thrilled with his progress this week!”

“He responded so well to the controlled crying.”

“In just 5 nights he’s basically sleeping through with only one brief wake during the night (we just leave him) and minimal crying when we put him down for his nap and bed.”

It Had Been A Long Hard Road for the Past 11 Months …

This mum had tried a number of things to help her son sleep, including:

• Seeing various Doctors

• Ear-Nose-Throat surgeons (to assess potential sleep apnea)

• Pediatricians

• Sleep Consultants

• Online Baby Sleep Programs

• Controlled Crying (so what did we do that was different..?)

• Cry-It-Out

• Driving her son around in a car

The only thing that was working was rocking her son in her arms.

But one night, this took 3 hours of rocking.

That’s when a friend recommended she see us.

And she was willing to do what we recommended.

Are Babies Sleeping Worse Because of COVID?

When the world radically changed their lives by self-isolating in March 2020, it was clear that the unpredictability was stressful.

Many experts - including ourselves - speculated that COVID would cause sleep problems.

Not just due to increased stress and possibly anxiety, but also the removal of the structure of one’s day.

What do we mean by that?

When the alarm goes off, people get up out of bed, they shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, and head out the door - these are all strong signals to our mind and body that it is time to wake up and start our day.

We spoke about this in more detail back in April in our video - COVID + Insomnia Part One.

At the same time, we begun working with the team from Nanit in the USA to study the effects of COVID on Americans.

But not just Americans - little Americans.

Nanit’s cameras are designed to be placed above infants’ cots and record when they’re awake and when they’re asleep.

They also record how many times a parent comes in to visit their baby during the night.

And the cameras were recording continuously whilst the world went through a radical change.

And despite the virus emanating from Wuhuan Province in China, the USA soon became the epicentre of the outbreak.

The majority of Americans became quarantined within their own homes.

But not all of them.

Essential workers continued to have their alarm go off, get up out of bed, shower, get dressed, eat breakfast - and go out the door.

Our latest study that will be published in the journal Sleep Health recorded the sleep of babies in families where - to some extent - life continued on as normal.

As well as the sleep of babies from families that quarantined.

In total, over 500 babies were followed from late March to early May 2020.

What did we find?

Well let’s just say I loved what we found.

It reminds me of an earlier study where we (purposely) exposed university students to a traumatic video in the evening - so we could see whether insomnia could be produced.

In that study by Dr Cele Richardson - yes - we saw the beginning of insomnia.

But then sleep returned to it’s good old healthy self a few days later.

And so in this latest study we found that in late March that babies in the USA slept differently.

But it was mainly those babies that were in families who were quarantined.

When we followed up the ‘quarantined’ babies in mid-April, their sleep was no different to the babies from families where there was an essential worker.

And this continued on until early May.

The 2 Take Home Points?

This study shows the sensitivity of sleep to stressors.

But it also shows that good sleep can be robust and return to normal levels.

But this is for the majority of human beings.

There are some humans - big and small - that just need to be shown how to sleep.

Fortunately, they are few and far between.

But they are not alone.

And we know how to help.

• Prof Michael Gradisar