Finding Resources to Help Parents Create Healthy Sleep Environments

Knowing the importance of helping parents create healthy sleep environments is an important first step in supporting new parents-and one that is not new to lactation consultants. The next steps can be the more challenging step-finding ways to clearly and easily help parents understand the importance of responsiveness in care. This can be a particular challenge when so much best practice information focuses experimental research with animals and research with humans, now documents the detrimental effects of early stress on brain development. These effects can occur not just in response to intense and repetitive stressful situations, but with some probability may also occur in situations of parenting that is not responsive. Below, and in the article that follows, are some resources for parents that address the biologically and ethologically based reasons that cry-it-out and sleep-training programs are detrimental to infants' development-negatively, impacting neurological structures, stress responses, physical health, and socioemotional well-being.