By the time we finally decided to try sleep training, I had done what a lot of first-time parents do: read a ton, researched different methods, bought a popular sleep course, and tried very hard to make sure we were doing everything “right.”

But we still ended up making quite a few mistakes. So, in the interest of helping others avoid these, here are five things I wish we had done differently.

Up until this point, our son had been sleeping in our bedroom. But, as you know, sleep training asks for your baby to have their own sleep space — a space that you can exit to prompt the learning of self-soothing.

We had our baby's new room all set up and ready to go. The sleep course we took said it was okay to make this transition at the same time as starting sleep training. And I’m sure for plenty of babies, it is fine.

Unfortunately, our house had a weird little quirk: a nonsensical heating and venting system.

Our bedroom—where our baby was sleeping up until this point—barely got any heated air through the vents and always ran slightly cold (it was December).

Because of that, we always dressed our son in warm pajamas. They worked wonderfully and kept him warm and snug.

But his new room got much more air through the vents and ran a bit warmer.

We knew this, but we just didn't realize how much of a difference that would make.

When we started Night One, we kept our baby in the same warm pajamas (because it was December!), and we turned the heat down to compensate for that room being warmer. We thought that would take care of it.

Narrator: It did not take care of it.

As we dove into sleep training, my baby cried so hard.

And what I didn't know is a crying baby somehow produces a lot of heat.

A couple of minutes into sleep training, I just didn't feel right and wanted to go check on him. When I picked him up, his whole head of hair was absolutely drenched in sweat.

I felt so bad. Like the worst mother who'd ever lived.

I think it was at this point (again, mind you, like two minutes past the starting point) that I began crying too.

Of course, we promptly changed him into regular pajamas, cuddled him until he calmed down, and restarted the process...

In retrospect, putting him in pajamas that were too warm was just a surface-level mistake.

The bigger underlying mistake was putting all of us in a completely new sleep environment that we weren't familiar with on Night One.

We hadn’t spent enough time in this room to learn what it was actually like. If we had moved him into this room a couple of nights earlier (while continuing to put him to sleep the way we normally did), we probably would have figured this out.

If I were to do it all again, I’d try not to introduce so many new variables at the same time.

Our son was seven months old by the time we finally started sleep training.

For context, the popular sleep training course we had taken recommended starting around five months.

And our very smart, very cool friends had done it when their baby was four months because the wife was simply DONE. I still remember the husband telling us about the night they decided to start. He came home from work and she was basically like, “It’s happening. Tonight.”

Meanwhile, I was over here doing the parenting equivalent of:

I’m sorry I’m late. I didn’t wanna come.

Because I hated the idea of sleep training. Like, what do you mean I’m supposed to put my baby down, walk away, and just let him cry? On PURPOSE?!

So I kept waiting.

I had a friend whose baby eventually just started sleeping through the night naturally, so obviously I was hoping mine would do the same. Maybe, I thought, once he started eating solids and had enough energy stored up to sleep longer. ... Nope.

And while I was busy trying to avoid sleep training, my baby was getting older, stronger, and considerably more capable of pulling himself up to a stand.

And that's exactly what he did the minute we walked out of his room on that Night One. There he was, standing there, gripping the crib railing with his tiny little hands and absolutely wailing his little head off.

I am not a scientist here, but I’m gonna go ahead and wager that it is considerably harder for a standing baby to casually drift off into peaceful slumber than it is for baby who hasn't learned to stand yet and so is already conveniently in a lying-down position.

We did not make that mistake with our second baby. We sleep trained her at five and a half months. Spoiler: it went a lot smoother.

Of course, we talked about sleep training ahead of time, but in retrospect, I wish we had talked through more of the details. We just didn't know what would come up. How could we? We'd never done this before!

Questions like "What exactly are you going to do during the check-ins?" stumped us in the process. We disagreed about the approach. My husband wanted us to stick to the course recommendations, keep our check-ins to a minute, and try not to pick the baby up. He was worried that if we didn't follow the course material closely enough, our sleep training wouldn't work. But I wanted to hold my baby so bad during the check-ins. I wanted to comfort him fully before putting him back down. So we butted heads.

Let me tell you—the worst time to butt heads is when there's a crying baby involved.

But there we were—negotiating, in real time, and trying to figure out how to reconcile each other's preferences.

Another example: one of my friends had given me what she considered to be very practical sleep training advice:

“Just pour yourself a glass of wine to help you get through it.”

And I was like, honestly? Okay, good idea.

So I did. What I did not know was that my husband really did not like that idea. I found this out after I had already taken a couple of sips. To be clear, I barely drank any at all. But that wasn’t really the point—from my husband's perspective, we were going through this difficult thing together, and he wanted us both to be fully present and weighing in soberly (pun intended) on the decision-making. It was less about the actual amount of wine and more about wanting to feel like we were a team.

If I were doing this again, I would spend a lot more time talking through the nitty-gritty details before Night One. Questions like, "What are you going to be doing during the interval?" are key to discuss. Are you going to be sobbing on the other side of the nursery door, or in a separate part of the house, listening to calming music? Are you going to be watching the monitor? Is the sound going to be on or not? Let me tell you—my husband wanted to have the monitor up and the sound on, and I couldn't take the crying coming from both places: the monitor and our child's room across the hall.

These questions can sound almost comically specific when you’re calmly discussing them ahead of Night One. But trust me, they'll feel significantly less silly when it’s 8:30 at night, your baby is screaming, and you suddenly discover that you two had completely different expectations about something. Figuring these out in advance will help you better support each other on the other side—once you start the sleep training.

The popular sleep training course we took called for starting with a 5-minute interval, then a 10-minute interval, then 15, and then continuing with 15-minute intervals until the baby self-soothed and fell asleep.

Our friends who had gone before us (with sleep training as per this popular course) said their first night took something like 45 minutes.

Forty-five minutes sounded horrible to me, but at least it was a goalpost I could look forward to.

When 45 minutes came and went for us, and our baby was still very much not asleep, I really started losing grip on my sanity.

By the time we hit around an hour and twenty minutes, I couldn't do it anymore. I clutched my baby to my chest and declared that I WAS DONE.

The biggest problem wasn’t even that our baby had cried for an hour and twenty minutes. It was that I had absolutely no idea when it was going to end. Another ten minutes? Another hour? Another two?

We had essentially signed ourselves up for unlimited crying.

After that first night, I felt like such a failure. It was months before I was willing to try sleep training again. We tried everything in the book first. And of course, none of it worked.

Finally, my husband suggested that we try something different. Instead of committing ourselves to however long it took our baby to fall asleep, we would decide ahead of time how much crying we were willing to endure.

There was a limit. There was an end.

We could give our baby a real opportunity to practice falling asleep independently without feeling like we had signed up to keep going indefinitely.

And surprisingly, that more flexible and gentle approach was the one that ultimately worked for us.

And that's the approach I put into a guide to help other people with sleep training their baby gently. You can find it here.

Sleep training is already one of those parenting decisions that can make you second-guess yourself.

Then add the imaginary commentary from everyone you know.

What would my mom say if she could hear him crying right now?

What would my stern grandma raised in the ruthless climate of Siberia think about this?

Suddenly you aren’t just dealing with your own feelings about your crying baby. You’re carrying everybody else’s feelings too.

I wish I hadn't allowed these opinions to take up so much space in my head while I was already trying to do something difficult.

If I were doing this again, I’d want to get to a place where I was comfortable articulating what we're doing, why we're doing it, and what kind of support we need from friends/family in lieu of strong opinions.

At the same time, though, one thing that we did do right—and that I'm very grateful for—is that we had really good friends around us to go through this with. We had two couples whose babies were just a couple of months older than ours, and they had already been through sleep training themselves.

These were the people I could text after our first disastrous night and say, basically:

“I feel like a complete failure.”

And they would immediately text back:

“You are NOT.”

“I cried too.”

“Our first night was hard as hell.”

That kind of non-judgmental I've-been-there-too support mattered enormously.

So I don’t think the lesson is to shut everyone out. It’s to be a little more intentional about whose voices you let in.

Protect your peace a little. You’ve got enough going on.

We waited too long because we were scared.

We hadn’t talked through enough of the details with each other.

We changed his environment at the exact same time.

We (well, at least I) let other people’s opinions take up too much room in our heads.

And most importantly, we were using a method that essentially told us the finish line was: your baby falls asleep. No matter how long that takes.

That didn’t work for us. What ultimately did work was a gentler, more structured approach that gave our baby the opportunity to learn how to fall asleep independently while also giving us a clear limit. We knew before we started how much crying we were willing to tolerate. We could comfort him during check-ins. And if we hit our limit, we could stop.

So if you’re sitting there thinking, I know my baby needs help learning to sleep, but I genuinely do not think I can handle traditional cry-it-out sleep training, that is exactly why I wrote our guide.

Here's the guide if you’d like to try it → Gentle Sleep Training Guide on Gumroad