what is sleep training

Sleep training is a set of parental intervention techniques with the goal of increasing nightly sleep in infants and young children, addressing sleep concerns, and decreasing nighttime signaling. It involves teaching the baby to fall asleep without help from the parent, and to self-soothe and fall back asleep if they wake up. Popular methods of sleep training include extinction or "cry it out," the Ferber method, the chair method, and more improvised "gentle" methods. Sleep training is safe for babies and does not increase emotional or behavioral problems. It can be started as early as 5 months of age and can be applied to naps as well as nighttime sleep