Hi there it's Matt here and welcome back to this second episode all about

sleep infants children teenagers and I am once again joined by my dear friend and guest,

Dr. Craig Canapari, who as you may remember is the director of the Pediatric Sleep Center at

Yale Medical School and he's also the author of the outstanding book for parents.

It's never too late to sleep train.

Today we're going to be speaking again about sleep and infants and we're going to focus on the

lightning rod topic of sleep training so let's dive straight in Craig. Let me be thick-headed with the most

idiotically blunt of all questions to train or not to train? When is it appropriate to sleep train an infant and why?

And perhaps when is it not appropriate to sleep train? And indeed maybe we could even start with an overview of definitions

so that nobody gets confused as to what sleep training is from a definitional perspective before we answer those questions.

Triville you answer those questions and I avoid any of the blowback.

Sleep training simply means making some behavioral changes to the way you interact with your baby or child

with the goal of improving their sleep at night. I would say that it is

analogous to cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia and adults and the parallels are really interesting sometimes between the two interventions.

It's controversial in some circles for a couple of different reasons.

First of all, sleep training to me encompasses a whole range of behavioral things that you can do. It could include something as simple as

picking an appropriate time for your child to go to bed and having a bedtime routine. To me, that's a change that falls under the umbrella of sleep training.

Sleep training often gets lumped together with a sleep training technique called extinction,

which in the popular mind is also referred to as CIO

or Cry It Out sleep training.

We can talk a little bit.

That is a technique that may be correct for some children and it's not dangerous

...