It would probably be impossible to design a scientific study that could isolate the psychological consequences of a short burst of sleep training in a lifetime of parenting mishaps. And people would be unlikely to accept the findings, either way. In 2011, Wendy Middlemiss, a psychologist at the University of North Texas, led a study of twenty-five babies who underwent a five-day course of extinction sleep training at a clinic in New Zealand. At the start of the course, the levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, in the babies and their mothers were in synch. By the end, cortisol levels had fallen in the mothers but remained “elevated” among the infants, even though they were no longer crying in the night. The Middlemiss paper helped fuel an already vigorous online movement against sleep training, and prompted a backlash from other psychologists in the field, who questioned its methodology. In 2016, Michael Gradisar, an expert in child sleep disorders at Flinders University, in Adelaide, Australia, carried out a similar study on forty-three infants and found that their cortisol levels went down as their sleep improved. Gradisar’s findings were presented in the Australian media in late May. Less than two hours later, he logged on to Facebook to gauge the reaction and received a death threat. “When that’s in your home town, and you’ve got a very identifiable surname... ,” Gradisar recalled. “You know, it’s something I didn’t want my kids to be aware of.”
“I don’t know the lyrics, either, so I just hum along.” Cartoon by Tom Toro Link copied
Ockwell-Smith’s “The Gentle Sleep Book” was first published in 2015. She substantially rewrote the second edition, which was published last year, because many parents found it too tough. “I didn’t want to make them feel guilty,” she said. “But, equally, I feel an awful lot of sleep training is very unethical and very misleading as well.” She takes on a few families with sleep problems, but finds the work exhausting. “I listen to people, and we talk about their feelings and we talk about their upbringings and we talk about their relationships,” Ockwell-Smith said. “It’s really deep.” She steers clear of twins.
Keely Layfield found Brenda Hart by chance one night, while she was holding her baby with one arm and Googling for sleep advice with the other. When Layfield’s daughter, Ada, was six weeks old, she had been diagnosed as having a hip condition and put in a brace. Now almost three months old, she had only ever slept in her parents’ arms. Layfield filled out the contact form on Hart’s Web site at around 4 A.M. Hart replied by 7:30 A.M. When she arrived at Layfield’s house, in Kent, two mornings later, Layfield was upstairs, changing Ada’s nappy. Hart did not wait for directions from Layfield’s husband, who had opened the door. “I’ll find them,” she said.
Hart picked Ada up from the changing mat. “I remember being a bit taken aback, thinking, I don’t really know you,” Layfield said. “This is my baby, my most precious little being.” By the end of the morning, Ada was asleep in her cot for the first time in her life. “My husband and I just looked at each other, like, What has happened?” Layfield said.
Hart worked with four hundred and ten families last year. She estimates her success rate at ninety-two per cent. She charges four hundred and thirty-five pounds for her standard service and more for overnight stays. She doesn’t like to take on more than about twenty clients at a time, because she prefers to make visits in person. When my wife contacted Hart, last year, she was in Glasgow for the night. She had driven up from London to sleep-train a baby, and drove back to her house, in Kew Gardens, the following day. “Distance will not stop me,” she said. The pandemic has been good for business, because parents have been cooped up with their children. “The dads are the ones I don’t have to work on,” Hart said. “Occasionally, I will have a soft dad, but that’s not that often.” When I asked Hart to explain the growth of the sleep-training industry, she said the main reason was the pressure on mothers to return to work. But competition among parents was a factor, too. “They want their little Johnny to be doing better than Freddy down the road,” she said. “I think a lot of it is about image.”
Hart understands that, for many parents, she is there to play the role of an authority figure, and she dramatizes her performance accordingly: “The families tell me this. They say, ‘Brenda, we know what to do. But we need you to tell us.’ That’s what they say because they’re mixed up with it, with the emotion.” She added, “They like the idea of having somebody who has nothing to do with their family coming in and telling them what to do. Because then everybody will listen, even the granny.” In 1928, Watson sought to prepare children for conquering the world. Hart promises more or less the same. “Sleep training is the basis for being independent later in life, from going to nursery to school to having a job. It’s the groundwork for that,” she said. “It’s like a language. The earlier they do it, the better they’re going to be at it, the better they are going to be as human beings.”
One mother who used Hart put it more succinctly: “You basically pay someone to tell you that it’s O.K. to let your child cry it out. Because it’s such a horrible thing, you sort of always want to blame it on someone.” Hart’s persona, her enthusiasm for the task, makes her an ideal foil. “She can take it,” the mother said. “She’s hard-core.”
Hart’s favorite word is “practical.” When I asked if her twin sister, Louise, was identical, she replied, “Not identical. But very practical.” (Hart also has a younger sister; all three have worked as nannies.) Hart grew up in Prestatyn, on the north coast of Wales, where her father was the food-and-drink manager at a holiday camp. She left home at seventeen to train in a nursery in Liverpool. In the eighties, Hart worked as a nanny in Chelsea, in a high-end day-care center in the City, and in the kindergarten of a private school in Putney. She spent a few years at a nursery school in Riyadh. She loved Saudi Arabia, but there was nothing to do. Later, she took a job at a maternity hospital in Abu Dhabi. For three years, she worked nights in a neonatal intensive-care ward. She carried out observations, assisted doctors, and held babies that weighed one or two pounds.
In 1999, Hart gave birth to a son, Jack. Her husband, Adrian, was an oil engineer. He was often overseas and Hart looked after the baby alone. She breast-fed Jack until he was thirteen months old. He would wake in the night and end up in her bed. “I had fifteen months of wakings. I had a sleep problem,” she said. “And if I look back now, this is just me, there was no way I needed to put up with that.” Hart would leave Jack to cry one night and then relent a few days later. “I just got all sloppy,” she said. “Because I didn’t have a sleep trainer to help me.”
When Jack was four, Hart answered an ad to work for Night Nannies, an agency for night nurses based in Fulham, in West London. Anastasia Baker, a former BBC journalist, founded the agency after the birth of her son, when she was struggling with her job and her broken sleep. Baker currently employs some six hundred night nurses in southern England, of whom fifteen are “élite” sleep trainers. In 2003, when Hart began working for the agency, the designation did not exist. She had no formal training in infant sleep. “Taught myself,” she said. “End of the day, it’s common sense.” Hart quickly developed an appetite for what were known as trouble-shooting jobs, where a baby’s sleep had gone haywire, for which she earned an extra ten pounds a night. After four years, Hart left to go solo. Baker remembered her well. “Brenda is hugely talented. She has to be—just look at her record,” she said. “But, of course, some people are going to love it and some people are going to find it, you know, not for them.”
