Dr Justin Coulson and Kylie Coulson on raising their children and the lessons they learned along the way

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Summary

Join Carly as she interviews Dr Justin Coulson and Kylie Coulson as they recount their lives raising six children, their sleep training experiences, what impacted their little one's sleep, and the solutions they found that worked for their family. Hear Dr Justin talk about how sleep is separation for our little ones and how we can help them overcome the anxiety related to that, and hear how Kylie found her way through the tough times with self-compassion and listening to her instincts.

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Full Episode Transcript: 

Carly:

The Beyond Sleep Training Podcast- a podcast dedicated to sharing real tales of how people have managed sleep in their family outside of sleep training culture because sleep looks different with a baby in the house and because every family is different there is no one-size-fits-all approach to take.

I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast is being recorded, the Kalkadoon people, I pay my respects to the elders of this nation and the many other nations our guests reside in from the past, present and emerging. We honour Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and the unique cultural and spiritual relationships to the land, water and seas as well as their rich contributions to society including the birthing and nurturing of children. 

Carly:
And welcome back to the Beyond Sleep Training podcast. I’m your host, Carly Grubb, and we’ve got a bit of a different episode for you today. This will be a dual episode with Dr Justin Coulson and his wife, Kylie Coulson.  You may know Dr Justin from his recent TV show on Channel 9, Parental Guidance.  He has a PhD in Psychology and has written books such as 21 Days to a Happier Family. Together Dr Justin and Kylie have a podcast called Happy Families with Dr Justin Coulson and six, yes six, children.  The first part of our episode today will be with Dr Justin, and that will be followed by us chatting to Kylie about their experience with sleep in their family. So, welcome to the show Dr Justin Coulson.

Justin:
It’s nice to be with you, Carly. Thanks for having me on the podcast.

Carly:
No worries. Now, I’m really curious because you spend a lot of time talking about school aged children and older, but I know from listening to your podcast that you and Kylie do delve into some of your earlier days with your babies, with six girls. My goodness. And so, I’m actually really interested to take you back a little bit, right back to before you had your very first baby, and can you tell me how did you actually imagine you were going to be handling sleep with that first baby before she arrived?

Justin:
Yeah. We didn’t plan on anything. We just had a baby.

I mean maybe I should give some context. We were young. I was 22, Kylie was 19 when we got married. That seems really, really young to say that now but we felt so ready for this and we were all gung-ho and I think our first one came along 18 months later or thereabouts. So, I was 24, Kylie was 21. Kylie had Early Childhood qualifications. I was a radio announcer, pretty sure I knew everything that I needed to know about parenting, which was not very much at all, but I kind of thought Kylie would look after the rest of it. And no, we didn’t… we didn’t have any sleep plans. We figured we’d have a baby and Kylie would feed the baby and then the baby would go down to sleep and that would be it, that would be the way we raised our children. They’d be perfect. Not like everybody else’s children. We were going to do it right, even though we put no effort in and had never read a book about it or anything like that. And it was not like that, Carly, at all. I think it’s probably fair to say that those first few months, we were living in Rockhampton, Kylie’s family were from Brisbane, mine are down the New South Wales Central Coast, so we were a long way from home and a long way from that familial support. Like, we had people around us that were… that were kind and caring and compassionate and wanted to support this young couple who had just brought a baby into the world, but they were not the kind of people that you’d invite into your home at 2am to help with a baby that wouldn’t settle. And… and therefore we were really doing it on our own. Our firstborn had reflux and who knows what else was going on, and she really didn’t sleep for… well, she did sleep but she didn’t have what we would call sufficient sleep so that we could get some rest for probably about three to four weeks, maybe even a little longer. And I mean this… it was hard. It really, really took a deep and far reaching toll on us; on our wellbeing, on our relationship, and certainly on our ability to… to parent this newborn child.

Carly:
It’s pretty brutal. Sometimes that baptism of fire, especially a newborn who’s not sleepy like they say they should be. So, with her, so what was… So, it sounds like there were some other things going on for her. You said there was reflux. Did you end up finding out what was actually triggering that for her?

Justin:
I really wish Kylie was here. Kylie would be so much… she would be able to give you so much more information. My… as a dad my issue was why won’t the baby sleep? And if this doesn’t change I’m going to lose my job. As a radio announcer I had to show up and be happy to be on the radio and do the talky thing, and… and it wasn’t… it wasn’t going well. So, my recollection is that we visited doctors and there was a reflux issue and she couldn’t get her swallowing right and there was [5:00] obviously, the little bit in the stomach that opens up to let acid back up wasn’t closing properly so acid was coming up and she was in all sorts of pain. The only time that we could get her to sleep was if we walked around the neighbourhood pushing her in a pram or if she was asleep on Kylie’s stomach, neither of which is conducive to Kylie getting any sleep, so I would come home from work and put the baby in the pram and go for a two hour work while Kylie got a couple of hours of sleep, and then I would do my very best when I got home to pick her out of the pram and put her into her cot and just cross everything that she would stay asleep, and 9 times out of 10 she didn’t. She would wake up and then Kylie would be awake for most of the night pacing the floors. And I don’t know how… I don’t know how Kylie did it. The… the stamina that she showed, the perseverance and the patience and the ability to get through what was one of the… one of the most physically and emotionally exhausting periods of our lives, it was a really, really tough time. And I think from memory after a couple of months of this I got called into the boss’s office and he had a conversation with me about how my performance wasn’t going well and asked if there was anything he could do. Which was great because I thought I was going to get a written warning and be given my marching orders. He asked how he could help instead and we just continued to go down medical paths and eventually she just grew out of it. We… we quit my job, we went back to Brisbane so that we could be closer to family, and by the time we’d done all of that and sold the house, et cetera, she was… she was doing okay, settled into life and slept like a baby from then on. When I say slept like a baby I mean she woke up every four hours and cried instead of every 20 minutes and cried.

When sleep isn't normal

Carly:
That’s when you know you’ve got on top of the pain, hey? It’s that real like, no baby wants to be waking up that frequently. Poor bubba. So yeah, it sounds like a really, really brutal time, and the fact that it’s kind of seared into your memory in that way, that’s something that happens. But you went on to have five more babies after this time, so I’m guessing it either blurred a little bit or… like for the babies that came after this very, very tough first babe, how did sleep look for them?

Justin:
We never had those kinds of medical issues again, but… and I would say that we had a fairly normal trajectory over the subsequent years with the next three. So, I left my radio career as our third one was being born and went back to school. That’s when I started all of my psychology studies. Up until that point I was just some mostly uneducated dad who really didn’t think much about parenting and kind of had this attitude that the kids will do as they’re told because I’m their father, I’m their parent, and if I speak sternly enough and get cranky enough they’ll just do it, otherwise they’ll get a whack on the bum. And what I discovered when our threenager started to become a bit rebellious was that my parenting strategy wasn’t working. And Kylie was quite willing to point out to me that all of her early childcare experience was a much more useful way for us to, I guess develop our parenting practice and parenting journey. But I wasn’t satisfied with that either, and I felt so incompetent. It’s kind of like you go to work all day every day, really good at what you do, get paid well for it, and feel like you can fix problems and do the stuff that matters, and then you come home and you’ve got this 3 year old that absolutely defies everything you ask her to do. If you said I want you to keep breathing she’d probably stop. I mean just so oppositional. This kid was driving me up the wall. And as a result of my inability to raise her effectively I actually quit my radio career. I went back to school, spent eight-and-a-half years getting my qualifications. So, I went back to school with those… those, well, three kids and we had our fourth one while I was finishing my Honours year in my undergrad. We had our fifth one while I was doing my PhD. And it…

Carly:
Wow.

Justin:
It’s really… and our sixth one once I’d finished uni. And it’s really interesting when you look at the sleep experience that we had, those first four kids, they really didn’t get any benefit at all from me being a quote-unquote parenting expert, because I wasn’t at that point. I was just some guy doing a psychology degree. And when you do a psych degree they don’t really teach you anything at all about parenting, that’s why you’ve got to do the post-graduate stuff. And so we… we made all of the mistakes. We did everything wrong with the first four when it comes to trying to get the kids to go to sleep at night and trying to get them to sleep all the way through the night and all that sort of stuff.  We just didn’t know. And it wasn’t until baby number five and number six came along that we had kind of… and I think part of it was my studies and part of it was also we’ve done this four times previously. We’ve worked [10:00] out what doesn’t work. Let’s try something else. And we started to look a little bit more carefully into what our options were, and I started to look a bit more closely what research told us we might consider. And we had much, much better experiences. But I remember, Carly, I remember this one experience, I think it would have been our… our fourth child just wouldn’t go to sleep one night, and I remember saying to Kylie, ‘We’ve got to do the Ferber method. We’ve got to do the controlled crying. I don’t think anything else is going to work. Let’s just do it.’ And Kylie kept on saying, ‘I don’t want to do controlled crying.’ And I looked at her and said, ‘But you’re exhausted and I’m exhausted and she’s screaming the house down and the other kids are awake and this isn’t working.’ And you know, you get into that… you get into that mindset when it’s all happening where you just want the crying to stop. And you’re so exhausted – when I talk to parents I often talk about how high emotions equals low intelligence. You don’t do dumb things when you’re not emotional. Let me put that into a… that was a double negative. When you’re level and balanced you tend to behave with a lot more forethought and consideration. You can live much more intentionally. When you’re emotional…

Carly:
You go back into that front part of your brain, isn’t it?

Justin:
Right. Yeah. The prefrontal cortex is where you do all the thinking and the planning and the strategizing and the ‘I wonder what the consequences? Oh yeah, that would be a negative consequence. Let’s not go there.’ When you’re really emotional there’s not a whole lot of blood flow, there’s not a whole lot of signalling happening in that part of the brain. It’s all happening back in the emotional core, and so you’re getting really emotional because the child’s crying through the night and screaming their head off and you’re exhausted. And when you’re tired by the way, that’s an absolute trigger for reduced willpower and reduced regulation on your part anyway. And I just, I said, ‘I’ve had enough. I can’t take it. She’s just going to go into her room.’ And we’d tried the whole controlled crying thing multiple times with those first four kids and it never worked. And it always left us feeling sick to our stomach. Now, I want to be really clear. I don’t judge or shame anybody for doing what they’ve got to do when you’re frame of mind when you’re absolutely exhausted. But I know now, and I wish I had known then, that there are better ways to do this. And you don’t need to put them on a schedule and follow the… I mean that stuff is just awful. And you don’t need to do the Ferbering or the controlled crying or whatever it is. But anyway, we tried the controlled crying this particular night and the baby was screaming her head off, and I went in and I tried to pacify her and she did not calm down. You know how they’re supposed to calm down when you go in there? So, I picked her up and I tried to calm her down, and as soon as I had her calm I thought fantastic, I gave her another minute, put her on her back in the cot and off she went again before I’d even walked out of the room. And after about the third time of this I just thought it’s not working but we are going to stick with this and she is going to learn. I mean even though now I’m doing post-graduate psychology and I’m at a point where I should know better, we were just so tired and I thought she’s going to learn. And after a few minutes of that Kylie actually said to me, ‘I can’t take this anymore.’ And so she went and sat in the car and cried. So, here’s my poor wife out in the car sobbing because this child won’t sleep, and I’m in the house pacing the floor wondering… I’m watching the clock. Do I go back in? Am I supposed to pick her up again? How do we fix this? And I just remember in the end, maybe… maybe 15, 20 minutes later Kylie came in. She could hear the baby screaming while she was out in the car with the house locked up…

Carly:
Oh my gosh.

Justin:
… and the windows of the car closed, the door closed, the whole thing. She could hear it. And I just looked at her and we were… we were… we were in tears. We were weeping. We’re like, this child is so distressed and we can’t help her. And then I think, I don’t know if it was that night or maybe another night, a similar kind of experience, the penny dropped. And we looked at each other and we just sort of said our children don’t need to be distressed at sleep time. They’re… we can just stay with them. And so we worked out things like let’s put a mattress on the floor and pat them off to sleep. And if they wake up we just go and hop back into their bed. Or if they, as they got bigger is they came and got onto our bed. I would just get out of bed. Because, Carly, I hope I’m not being too rude when I say this, but every now and again as parents you want to have a little bit of together time, a little bit of sexy time. The kids, when they come into your bedroom, that’s usually well after that’s finished. You know, it’s like 1 o’clock in the morning, 2 o’clock in the morning, 3 o’clock in the morning. Whatever it is.

Carly:
Sleep time.

Justin:
Yeah, yeah, very much. And at that point if a child comes and gets into our bed, I remember one night just looking at Kylie and saying, ‘I’m not going to carry her to her bed again. I’m just going to go and sleep in her bed. She can sleep here with you. That’s what she wants anyway.’ And once we started doing that it was just… it was like the light bulb went off and the kids started sleeping happily. And what I’ve discovered since is that what’s really going on here is sleep to a lot of children means separation, and separation to a child means anxiety, and anxiety means [15:00] disconnection and all those fearful emotions and neurotransmitters buzzing around their brain that aren’t helpful for them, aren’t healthy for them. And all we’ve got to do is work out a way that we can manage the disconnection or maintain the connection in a way that works for us and helps our child sleep, and if we can do that we tend not to have nights like Kylie and I had far too many times. Those are just a couple of examples of the… just the gut wrenching, tear jerking experiences that we had.

Carly:
And you have those feelings when you’re in those experiences for good reason. I know that when, with my own sleep training story there was so much of that. Like, there was so much distress on my part where it was like my body and every part of me, every nerve in my body was telling me that my baby needed me and that distress wasn’t something that I could take or he should be taking. Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? Like, we sometimes can empathise with the adult’s feelings in that moment, but to know how that baby is also feeling in that deep distress is so important when we’re trying to understand this kind of experience. That’s really common for families because we think we’re doing the right thing. And sometimes not even necessarily that it’s totally the right thing, but because we’re so desperate that we’re willing to try any, anything in that moment…

Carly's story

Justin:
Yeah.

Carly:
Just to get some rest and sleep into that house. And so I feel like it’s almost like there’s still that little warning system going off in our brain when we can’t actually take that distress. The reason we feel like that is for good reason. We’re not meant to take that distress. So…

Justin:
And I just think about… I just think about my wife sitting in that car and sobbing as the baby screamed in the house and… and thinking that she couldn’t do anything, or she shouldn’t do anything and… and being so confused and so lost. And my heart breaks for her. My heart breaks for the baby who is feeling that… that indescribable pain, fear, anxiety, whatever it is that’s going on for the baby who’s just so distressed that she’s screaming that loudly. But oh boy, I mean I think about my wife sitting there sobbing and her heart breaking as well and I think why, why did we persist? Why did we keep on pushing and trying to make this thing happen. It was… it was wrong and we knew that it was wrong, and yet we kind of just – as you said, Carly – you do it because you think that’s what you’re supposed to do, because you pick up this message from… from the other mums or from the media or from some book that you’ve picked up by someone who doesn’t necessarily have the qualification to be writing the book. I think that it’s probably worth mentioning here as well, sometimes those methods can work for some people in some circumstances and I would never put a blanket over something that could be helpful. Sometimes it’s more important to be useful than to be right. Unfortunately I think that all too often many methods actually can be negative, maybe even harmful, and I just think if we can build connection that’s where the answers lie.

Carly:
And the fact that families are feeling they need to turn to these kind of methods, that speaks to the level, or lack of level of support families are experiencing, and the noise that’s around them that makes them feel like this is their only option. And that’s kind of the whole purpose of our show here and the podcasts and our group that we support families in, is to make sure that you don’t feel like that’s going to be the only option on your toughest nights. There are other ways you can handle those kind of situations when you’re really at the end of your string, because that’s usually when it takes people to those measures, especially people who never really wanted to do it in the first place. And it can be really spun too, like the messaging in society can make it sound like to not be able to handle your baby’s crying is a sign of weakness on your part and you just need to be stronger and push through, but really it’s false messaging. That’s not a sign of strength, and it’s certainly not a sign of weakness for you to be able to hear those cries and know in your heart that it’s not something that you find acceptable for you and your family. So, thank you for sharing that. So, you said that once you had kind of come out of this realisation that this isn’t something that you would like to do, with babies five and six did you approach it differently from the beginning with them? Like, before it even got to that point do you think things had shifted?

Justin:
Yeah, we did. We became a lot more intentional about it. So, we discussed co-sleeping. So, we figured we’d give it a go and it only took us a few nights and we were like, you know what, our queen bed is… you know what it’s like. As a couple you have this dream before you… before you have that first… So, Kylie and I were… we were married and that was the first time we actually shared a bed, and so I had this in my mind we’re going to snuggle and [20:00] fall asleep in one another’s arms every night, and after a night or two I was like, uh, I need to stop cuddling you because my arm is going dead, and I’m going to roll over to that side of the bed because every time I touch you it wakes me up. And you kind of sleep on opposite sides of the bed from that time and forever onwards. And then you bring a baby into that queen-sized bed and suddenly you’re touching each other again and you can’t get any sleep. And we tried the co-sleeping thing, like I said, for a few nights. It wasn’t… it wasn’t effective for us. We did not like it at all. And so we brought the kid’s cot into… into our bedroom. And that way the baby was always close to us and we felt like we could be instantly responsive. We could be by that baby’s bedside in three seconds once she was awake and making noise and expressing to us the difference between the gurgling or even having a little bit of a sook and actually saying I need attention. We could be there immediately and it felt really great. So, that was probably the central thing that we did, was just bringing the… the baby’s cot into the room so that we could be more responsive. And other than that we really tried to work on that bedtime routine, patting them off to sleep, staying with them, helping them to feel safe and comforted and feel our presence when they were going to sleep. And some nights that meant that, especially as they get older because the older they get the longer it can take to pat them off to sleep, once they’re about two-and-a-half or three years old and you’re kind of laying on the carpet with your head on this cushion and your arms reaching up through the bars of the cot, through the wood, and you’re kind of just going pat, pat, pat, tapping this kid on the bum, on their nappy or whatever it is. And I remember some nights I was like, ‘Oh man, she’s still awake. This is killing me.’ But… but compared to what we would have had to have gone through otherwise and what we had previously experienced a small price to pay, and they were probably the only things that we really needed to do. Be more present and have…

Carly:
I was going to say, presence, it’s such a gift.

Justin:
Yeah, yeah. It’s all about overcoming separation, so let’s… let’s not separate.

Carly:
That’s… it is really key, and finding what works for your family to be able to enable you to do that, and that’s something for people in our group and listening along to the show would know that while bedsharing is an amazing tool for some families it absolutely is not for other families. But it’s one of those things where it’s like you can try things out and see what suits or works at any given time. Like you said, when your babes got older they would climb into bed and so you would get out, and it kind of creates that space.

Learn more about Safer Sleep

Justin:
Yes.

Carly:
So, it’s keeping that flexibility in your thinking as well, knowing that sometimes, some nights there’s going to be different things needed and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean it’s all gone to pot and there’s no forever about it, it’s just what was needed on that given night, which is really valuable I think for context.

Justin:
And I love the fact that you’ve… you’ve had experience with both, as I have. And what we actually found for our family, for our relationship, for our children’s sleep, was that they all transferred just fine. The baby would wake up and it was my job to get out of bed and walk the five steps to the cot and carry the baby to Kylie who was in bed. So she didn’t have to get up and she was able to still stay rested, and then once she was finished every now and again she would be kind enough to allow me to - because I would fall asleep again instantly - so more often than not she’d actually let me stay asleep and she’d jump up and put the baby back into bed and hop back into bed herself. But just having… just having made that small adjustment, wow, what a difference it made for our family. It was just… I’m still not going to say it was perfect because there were still some really long nights where children were awake and screaming and they were going through distress for whatever reason, but it changed our experience of raising children once we figured out that really simple, little… I don’t even want to call it a hack, but that… once we made that change.

Carly:
That’s a beautiful thing, and I’m really pleased that you guys over the course of six babes were able to come to that comfortable place.

Justin:
It was well worth it.

Carly:
And I’m sure your older babes also benefited from that responsivity at night time as you learn about that as well. So, I’m going to ask you do you have a tip you’d like to share with our listeners for this week?

Justin:
Well, I think the main tip that I was going to share was if you’re struggling know that it’s normal and there are things that you can do that are kind and gentle and… and that will bring you peace as well as bring your child peace, but I kind of feel like we’ve covered that off well and truly through the conversation. So, I think instead I might get a great big crayon and write in capital letters SLEEP IS SEPARATION, because I mentioned that before and I think that that might be my… my sort of take home message from our discussion. And if we can minimise the separation by having our child as close as we can, whatever works for your family in terms of that closeness, my sense is that you’re going to have much more positive evening and night time experiences, much more positive sleep experiences for you and the child because you’re minimising that separation, you’re minimising the anxiety, and you’re helping them feel like they’re… [25:00] they’re just so very, very much safer.

Carly:
Particularly they’re so vulnerable right at that point when they’re so tired and so ready for sleep. So, I love that. I think that’s a beautiful way to think of it for people, because it also really just puts the context for their child also when they’re having any struggles to know that it’s not like they’re trying to torture you or have anything like that. They are actually genuinely struggling in that moment as well. And so it’s a shared struggle and it’s not always easy, but it doesn’t mean you’re necessarily doing anything wrong either when it’s hard.

So, that was Dr Justin Coulson’s take on their parenting journey. Next up we have my interview with the lovely Kylie Coulson to get her take on what it was like raising six children and how they managed sleep and parenting in their family.

I interviewed Justin for the podcast a few weeks ago and I really needed to get Kylie on the show because it quickly became apparent talking to Justin that we were not going to get the full story of sleep in their house and their experience with their babies unless I had the person who did most of the work around that for the family. So, thank you for coming on Kylie.

Kylie:
Oh, thank you for having me Carly.

Carly:
Now, I usually start the episodes with people just sharing how they thought they were going to have… manage sleep with their family before their first baby arrived.

Kylie:
Well, growing up my… my big I guess goal in life, all I wanted to do was be a mum. I had no desires to have a career. I just, you know, I wanted to get married and have children. And so I felt like mothering came really naturally to me. I was always babysitting and looking after other people’s children and I really felt like I had a good handle on things. And then baby number one came along and everything I thought I knew went out the window. I just was really, really I guess tested, and all of those things that I thought I would just handle with absolute ease became really, really challenging for me. Our first child had reflux and as a result feeding was hard and therefore sleeping was hard. So, my initial thoughts of what I guess sleep would look like was that, you know, I was going to have this baby who I would feed and she would go to sleep and I would vacuum her room and, you know, take a phone call if I needed to take a phone call, and just live my life and she would fall in and around that. But that was not our reality.

Carly:
As is so often the case. All these… it’s nice isn’t it? That vision of being a parent before you’ve become a parent. But then the reality hits. So, tell me with the reflux babe, was there things that actually helped relieve some of that for her and get her some rest?

Kylie:
So, we had a really, really challenging time. First of all finding I guess specialists and professionals who actually believed reflux was a thing. I had… she had a barium swallow when she was about seven months old and I was told that I had a child with behavioural issues in spite of the fact that the radiologist told me on a scale of 1 to 10 she was at an 8 as far as her reflux gag was. It was really intense. And so we’d had her on the… every time we went to the doctor they put her on a higher dose of medication until she was on both medications that were prescribed at the time and the highest doses, and nothing gave any relief. So, I didn’t have a happy chucker at all. I didn’t… she wasn’t even a vomiter, but she would scream. She would be starving, she’d want food, and as soon as my milk hit the back of her throat she would scream blue murder. It was the most excruciating experience probably of my mothering of young children.

Carly:
That poor baby. So much pain.

Kylie:
Yeah. So, you know, when she fell asleep it was a really big deal, because I had usually spent two or three hours trying to feed her. My milk supply struggled as a result of that, which obviously impacted everything, and I guess looking back now I realise that I probably should have maybe tried the bottle and tried the thicker formulas that they often suggest to help with that. But being naïve and being desperate to breastfeed my baby and do what I thought was right and what should be natural I pushed through it until at about 10 months my milk dried up, I couldn’t feed her anymore. And she finally outgrew the reflux when she was about 12 months. But that… that had a huge impact on her sleeping obviously.

Carly:
Absolutely. That’s… any baby in that much pain’s not going to sleep well. That’s really rough. And did they… like, obviously it doesn’t sound like they did, but did they ever figure out what was underlying [30:00] the reflux, because it’s often like a symptom of something else going on? No, didn’t figure it?

Kylie:
No, we never…

Carly:
See…

Kylie:
We never actually found a professional who was supportive of that situation at all.

Carly:
Well, hopefully…

Kylie:
Which is 22 years ago. So…

Carly:
Yeah, I was going to say hopefully that has changed. Yeah.

Kylie:
Yes. Hopefully it’s changed, because that was probably the hardest thing, feeling like it was all my fault.

Carly:
Well, and just not being able to get any further with it. So, that’s pretty, pretty brutal. And for anyone listening along, if you have got a babe who’s struggling with reflux, like we’re just saying, it often is actually a symptom of something else going on, something underlying – intolerance or allergies or something else for them if it’s structural. So, it’s okay to keep advocating for your babe and keep pushing to see if you can actually figure out what’s underlying it. I’m so sad that was your first experience with a baby. Can you tell me though, like how did… so, while she was not restful at all because of the reflux, did you like find during the day you were needing to keep her upright? Or how were you actually getting any rest at this time?

Kylie:
So, for the most part during the day was okay. Feeding was always challenging for her but it seemed to be exacerbated at night time. I would start her routine from about 5 o’clock in the afternoon and Justin didn’t come home until about 7. I would have been struggling to feed and settle through that two hour period. He would walk in the door. We’d worked out that she loved the outdoors, so from about 7 o’clock till 8 he would take her for a walk outside and she would be upright the whole time. And literally she had this sixth sense. As soon as he crossed the threshold of the front door she would calm right down and he would take her for a walk for an hour and they’d spend, you know, daddy daughter time, and then he would walk over the threshold to come inside and she would start up again. And so there’d be another hour or two of settling before she finally went… went down for the night. But she obviously didn’t stay asleep for very long and so we got to a certain point where people started telling us we needed to look at sleep training and sleep techniques to help, and that was traumatic. Going through that experience was very, very traumatic.

Carly:
And so with her… was she still struggling with her reflux at this point as well?

Kylie:
Yeah. Yep.

Carly:
Wow. That would have been really tough. And was it coming at you from several angles as well, suggesting it was the right thing to do.

Kylie:
Yeah. It was… it was that the… it was controlled crying was the thing at the time. It was the big… the big way to, you know, regain your sleep and wean your baby off needing you through the night. And the first… if I’m honest, Carly, we did it once. Because it was so… just went against everything that Justin and I believed. But Justin was fully behind just, you are exhausted, you can’t keep going, you can’t keep functioning. We need to help her sleep because this is having an impact on everyone. And so that night Justin actually had to hold me in bed. My whole… I was sobbing, sobbing. It was so gut wrenching to hear my baby cry and being told that she didn’t need me, that I needed to be strong and I just needed to let her work out what needed to happen kind of from there. And literally he had to pin me to the bed because I… everything in me screamed to be with her. And by the morning obviously we kind of went back and forth, did the 20 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes, and it didn’t work through the night. And… and I woke up the next morning and I just said this… this doesn’t feel right to me and it doesn’t sit well with me. And it’s interesting because having had five subsequent children that was probably the most challenging newborn experience that I had and I was the most patient and the most understanding of my child at that point, just recognising she was in pain. I used to… I used to go, you know, feed her in the public toilets at shopping centres and she would obviously react really strongly as soon as she got milk, and I would have parents look at me and literally go, ‘Wow, you’ve got a really strong-willed child. Haven’t you?’ And the anxiety that created in me in feeding her in public, because it was not a peaceful experience, it was really, really challenging working through that. And like I said, not finding anyone who could talk me through it and help me find ways that would be less traumatic for both of us. So yeah, it was [35:00] really challenging.

Carly:
And it must have hurt and stung so much too, for people to be thinking that your baby’s being strong-willed while she’s crying out in pain. Like, it’s dehumanising of that poor little soul who… and you’re pouring all of this effort and work into, to have people make those comments to you must have cut so deep.

Kylie:
Yeah, it really did.

Carly:
I’m so sorry that was your first experience with your baby. I’m glad that you were able to, after feeling how traumatic that night of controlled crying was, that you were able to pull in to that feeling of that didn’t feel right and being able to pull back from that. Because I know for me, as someone who also did sleep training, I took a lot longer to come to that realisation and I really admire that in people who can just feel that natural pull that was within you to say this is not feeling right and stopping there. So, well done you. Now, I’d love to hear, you mentioned that you then mothered five subsequent children. Can you talk to us a little bit about how sleep has varied with their different personalities and the different dynamics of your family?

Kylie:
Well… oh. I’ve… so once… once our first daughter outgrew her reflux in the first 12 months she was literally by the books a three hour sleeper a day. So, if she had two hours in the morning I could be guaranteed that she would have one hour in the afternoon. If she had one hour in the after… in the morning, I would know that I was going to get two hours in the afternoon. She was, until she turned about two-and-a-half, and all of my children have kind of hit that point at about two-and-a-half where they just refuse to have that afternoon sleep even though you know they need it. But she was like clockwork, and it was really kind of good to kind of have that routine and know what to expect. Subsequent children were not so accommodating.

Carly:
Were you lulled into a false sense of thinking that’s what would happen?

Kylie:
I think so. I think so in some ways. But we did a lot of moving as well, and we didn’t have a lot of family support, and so I got into this… I guess lots of well-meaning parents had suggested that babies need to fit into my routine, and as our lives got busier the babies would – regardless of whether they were asleep or not – they just got picked up and carried away and I did what I had to do. And I would take them to the shopping centre if I needed to do the groceries or whatever. And most of us are in that situation. We don’t really have the luxury of saying, ‘Well, no. My baby’s got to have three hours sleep and, you know, I’ll get to that later.’ Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do that.

Carly:
And school runs to do and all the rest of it. Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? Once you have subsequent kids there’s… there’s times when it’s awful having to wake a sleeping baby. Like you pick them up and it’s just like, ugh. Or once again they finally fall asleep in the car but now you’ve got to get out and get, pick someone up from kindy. It feels wrong, but it’s just life with subsequent kids, isn’t it?

Kylie:
Yeah, totally. And so that was… that was… that was something that I kind of lived into for most of my children, was just this acknowledgement that they need to fall into my routine. And as a result for a lot of my children they didn’t really have a strong routine. Baby number one got the best of it and… and then two, three, four and five really just had to kind of fit in. And as a result it had a huge impact on the way that, you know, life was because there was never any guarantees of anything as far as sleep went. And often, you know they talk about sleep begets sleep, and they wouldn’t get enough sleep during the day and so night time was really restless as well as a result. You kind of expect that, you know, they’re more tired because they haven’t had enough sleep. But because they didn’t get enough sleep during the day then their sleep patterns at night often get thrown out of whack as well.

Carly:
Sometimes they do. I think some kids are genuinely the case, and then for other kids it’s just also just part of their natural rhythm. Because I think that’s the thing, isn’t it? Babies all around the world have always just followed the rhythm and flow of family life. Like, the idea that they are meant to be in a darkened room sleeping in a cot for this many hours every day, that’s a… that’s a new cultural development. It’s not actually how most babies have ever found sleep. So, from an evolutionary standpoint, like it sort of makes sense doesn’t it? To be able to fit in with that flow. But, like you say, it definitely doesn’t guarantee any certain amount of sleep overnight after that as well. So, what were you finding? So, were all six of your babes quite wakeful overnight? Or did you have some who were more wakeful than others?

Kylie:
So, I want to say my last child was my golden child. Not because she’s my favourite. We have discussions about this all the time. I think because as a parent I have matured to the extent that by baby number six I kind of [40:00] worked it out. And the thing that I worked out more than anything was the ability to be kind to myself, and that changed everything. That changed everything. Recognising that, you know, I would have friends who’d be like, you know, talk about all the different cry languages. You know, the baby cries like this and it sounds, you know, that means they’re hungry and this. And I’d be like, I… I don’t have the headspace to work that out.

Carly:
To work that out.

Kylie:
You know, like I have got a hundred things going on right now and I can’t sit there and go, hold on a sec, that sounds like they’re… okay. You know? So…

Carly:
Are they mehing or nehing? Er?

Kylie:
And… and I’d be like how come, you know, she can work that out? Like, and then feel bad because I didn’t. I was clearly not an attentive enough mother to, you know, know those things. Or they’d have an accident. I’d be like, if I was more attentive, if I was more, you know, kind of hovering over them they would never have fallen and hurt themselves on the stairs, or whatever it was. And just kind of getting to a place where I recognised that I am a fallible human being and I am going to get it wrong and that’s okay, and that my child will love me in spite and probably because of my weaknesses, because it makes up the whole of who I am. And so, as a result I really just relaxed. I stopped feeling like I had to have all the answers. I stopped thinking like it had to look a certain way for me to be able to give myself a pat on the back and say I was a good mum. And as a result it actually was pretty much perfect. Those first two years of baby number six were the most angelic time of my mothering, and our whole family felt it because I had learnt to relax into who I am and who my baby was.

Carly:
I love that. Finding your confidence. And it’s that self-compassion element of recognising your own humanity. It’s so freeing to be able to just see that in yourself and know that whatever… whatever’s going on will be enough for that day. You’ve done enough for that day and your babes are going to be okay. I love that. That’s really, really beautiful. And baby number six was what it took to bring that on for you? I’m so glad that you had her.

Kylie:
I’m a slow learner. Slow learner. And I had to keep going until we got it right.

Carly:
Now I know from talking to Justin, he mentioned that you guys did find that, I think it was baby five and six you found that it was much easier to tend to them overnight by keeping them in the room with you. Was that your main strategy for handling the night time wakes, just to reduce your fatigue at that time?

Kylie:
Definitely. So, one of the things that all of my babies struggled with was just that, you know that letting go at the end of the night? They never wanted me to leave. And I have spent countless nights in a cot. I’ve spent countless nights on the floor of a cot, like in the floor of the nursery with my hand in the cot. I can’t tell you how many times I fell asleep on the floor while I patted my baby to sleep. And we… we tried… we tried co-sleeping but that didn’t… didn’t feel right for either of us… either of us. Justin is a particularly light sleeper when it comes to having other people in his bed. We couldn’t even face each other when we first got married. The idea of being in the same bed as somebody else and having, you know, kind of…

Carly:
Separate.

Kylie:
We had to separate. We couldn’t sleep. So, having a child that obviously doesn’t understand boundaries really impacted.

Carly:
All over you.

Kylie:
It impacted both of our sleep and it was… it was negative for everybody. So… so, co-sleeping was… was never something that we kind of really adjusted well to. And so that meant that, usually me, would end up in the bedroom with the baby until they fell asleep. And the amount of times that, you know, had to pick the right floor board so you didn’t pick the creaky one as you walked out the door, or…

Carly:
Or your knee cracks and then they’re awake again.

Kylie:
I’m trying to remember which child it was, but one of our children, we had one of those… those little heat packs that was like a teddy bear. So, it was just enough weight that it felt like my hand was on her bum. And so if I just got to the right time where she was just lolling off I could switch the teddy bear with my hand and she would think I was still there and I could slip out.

Carly:
Oh, funny.

Kylie:
Yeah. Lots of different things. But I… for me the most important thing was that my children went to sleep knowing that they were loved and that I was there with them. And that… that had a huge impact obviously on my relationship with my husband, because like I said, [45:00] as an exhausted mum at the end of the day I would often fall asleep there and I would wake up at midnight freezing cold on the floor and kind of crawl back to bed. Or he would come in and wake me up and then wake the baby up in the process.

Carly:
Oh my gosh. Ah, you wake it you bought it. That was our saying at our house. Here. Yours.

Kylie:
That’s right. But those last two babies, we did end up bringing them into my bedroom and they slept in a bassinet right next to the bed. And even that just allowed me calm, because when you let your little baby go to the next room, I was always kind of on high alert. So, I never really hit deep sleep because I couldn’t hear them and I was scared I wouldn’t hear them.

Carly:
And that’s actually, you know, since like it’s a relatively new thing that’s been around for safe sleeping, that room-sharing is highly protective over SIDS and SUDI. And it’s the biofeedback. So, I remember hearing a thing recently from Professor James McKenna talking about it, and instead of room sharing it’s actually people sharing, because your baby is borrowing your biofeedback to help keep them safe, and your body is also telling you that it feels more relaxed and secure when you know you’re within that biological circle. Like, they don’t need to be necessarily touching you, but you get that sense of your baby being nearby. So, that makes perfect sense that that actually felt really good for you as well. And so they had their own, you said a bassinet beside the bed, and that… Did that also help reduce your fatigue from actually having to get up and go to another room?

Kylie:
Yeah, totally. It just, it… I don’t know why we didn’t do it earlier, Kylie.

Carly:
I don’t know either. I’m like… I really, yeah, like I don’t… like people listening to the podcast know my story and yeah. But I also had an extreme waker. Like, there was literally no physical way you could continue that kind of getting up, because every 20 to 40 minutes was what I was doing. So, I kind of succumbed quite early, but then I was… there was no going back. There was no way I was going to have to get up and go to another room to tend to a babe. So yeah, that’s fabulous that you got there in the end. And so with your… because you’ve got some older kids too, it’s helpful for our listeners, because a lot of people are right at the very beginning of their journey, as your babes have grown and whatnot, do they still sometimes need you at night? How does that look?

Kylie:
Not anymore. We’ve had plenty of children who have definitely come in. So, our youngest is seven and she probably in the last six months has stopped coming into our room. But until, you know, six-and-a-half she definitely would regularly find… find herself in our bed. And she… she’s an absolute snugnoos… sorry, she’s an absolute snuggler. And as a result I just, knowing she’s our last it’s a lot easier to put up with a little bit less sleep just so you get those snuggles.

Carly:
Absolutely, because that all fades away. And I think that’s a really good perspective for people who are right at the very beginning of their journey because it does end, and sometimes it ends well before we’re actually really ready for it to I think is part of the story.

Kylie:
Yeah.

Carly:
Now, I’m looking at our time and I’m just wondering if you have got a tip that you would like to share with our listeners that you wish you’d been able to hear when you were back with your tiny babes?

Kylie:
I think that… I think we touched on it a little bit. Just… just be kind to yourself. I think as, especially as a new mum you want to do everything right, and you think that there is a right and a wrong, but there isn’t. There really isn’t. Because what’s right for me is not right necessarily for you, and that’s okay. And if we can just trust ourselves to know that we are the best person to give our child what they need, then everything else just kind of fades into the background. There is a… just a plethora of information out there and you can go into any bookstore and find bookshelves full of parenting advice. And there is some great advice out there and there is some mediocre advice and there’s some really bad advice. But the reality is, just like me on, you know, that night when we tried something that everybody said we should do, it’s really just honing into your gut because even when the professional is saying do this, do this, do this, if it doesn’t feel right to you then it’s not right for you. It’s never going to be right for you. And I wish that I had of known that back then. That I don’t have to do everything, and I don’t… there isn’t… there isn’t one right way to do it. However I choose to do it is right for me and my family.

Carly:
I love that. It’s such wise, wise words, and it also gives you so much room to be flexible. You can be flexible with whatever’s going on in that day, in that moment, or night. In the depths of the night. It’s okay to just do what feels right at that time and it will be fine in the end. So, thank you so much for sharing those wise [50:00] words, Kylie. It’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show.

Kylie:
Thanks Carly.

Carly:
And that’s a wrap on Season 1 of the Beyond Sleep Training Podcast. I’d love to take a moment just to say thank you to each and every one of you who has listened to the episodes that we’ve put out so far, or read along on the transcripts, or however you’ve consumed it. And for all the people who’ve participated in the conversations in our supporter group as well. It’s been a hugely rewarding project and I’m so excited to tell you that we’ve actually already started recording Season 2. That’s going to kick off in February 2022, so stay tuned for those, and over summer that gives you plenty of time to catch up on any episodes that you haven’t yet had the chance to listen to across Season 1. I’d also like to just say thank you to all of our guests for being so generous in the way that you have shared your story with us. It’s been an absolute honour and privilege to be able to bring this podcast to you. So, thank you and take care everybody. I hope you all have a wonderful festive season with your families and look forward to being back on your podcasting channels in 2022. Thank you very much.

Carly:

I really hope you enjoyed the podcast today the information we discussed was just that information only it is not specific advice if you take any action following something you've heard from our show today it is important to make sure you get professional advice about your unique situation before you proceed whether that advice is legal, financial, accounting, medical or any other advice. Please reach out to me if you do have any questions or if there's a topic you'd really like us to be covering and if you know somebody who'd really benefit from listening to our podcast please be sure to pass our name along also check out our free peer support group the beyond sleep training project and our wonderful website www.littlesparklers.org. If you'd like even more from the show you can join us as a patron on Patreon and you can find a link for that in our show notes if listening is not really your jam we also make sure we put full episode transcripts on our little sparklers website for you to also enjoy and fully captioned YouTube videos as well on our Little Sparklers channel so thanks again for listening today we really enjoy bringing this podcast to you.

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