What self-soothing actually means and why the advice built around it is often wrong.

If you have spent any time in the baby sleep space, you have almost certainly been told that your baby needs to learn how to self-soothe. That it is your job to teach them. That if you do not, sleep will suffer. It is one of the most repeated pieces of advice in the newborn and infant sleep world.

But here is something that does not get said nearly enough. The term self-soothing has been so widely misused that it now means something completely different to what it was ever intended to mean. And that gap between what it originally described and how it is used today is causing a significant amount of unnecessary stress for parents.

Where the term actually came from

In the 1970s, a researcher named Thomas Anders began studying infant sleep in a way nobody had really done before. He put cameras in family homes and watched what babies actually did overnight. What he found was fascinating.

Babies woke up between sleep cycles far more than their parents realised. Many woke quietly, looked around, found their own way back to sleep, and their parents never knew it had happened. He called these babies self-soothers. Others woke and cried, signaling to their parents that they needed something. He called these babies signalers.

Importantly, this had nothing to do with emotional regulation or independence. It was simply an observation about whether a baby woke quietly or with a cry between sleep cycles. The self-soother label was describing behaviour between sleep cycles, nothing more.

And here is something else worth knowing from that same research: babies who were self-soothers at three to four months often became signalers again at nine to twelve months. Which is a good reminder that sleep can change over time, in both directions, and that what looks like a settled pattern at one stage is not necessarily permanent.

How self-soothing became confused with emotional regulation

Somewhere along the way, the term self-soothing moved from describing a sleep behaviour to describing an emotional capability. It came to mean the ability to regulate emotions, to go from upset or distressed to calm, without any support.

The problem is that babies cannot do this. Not because something is wrong with them. Because the developmental capacity for this kind of emotional regulation has not matured yet. The parts of the brain involved in calming strong emotions take years to develop. Research suggests meaningful self-regulation of emotions does not become reliably possible until around age three, and continues developing well into the teenage years.

So when guidance tells you that your baby needs to learn to self-soothe, in the sense of calming their own distress, it is asking for something developmentally impossible. It is worth knowing that. And it is also worth knowing that if a baby moves from being upset to calm, self-regulation is not what has happened. Something else entirely may have occurred.

What self-settling actually is

Self-settling is something else entirely and far more specific. It refers to a baby falling asleep without direct parental involvement. Without feeding, rocking, holding or other support from you.

This is the goal that virtually all sleep training approaches are working toward, regardless of whether they are gentle or not. The methods differ, but the destination is the same: a baby who falls asleep independently.

Some babies move toward this naturally and early, often because of temperament. Others need more support for longer. And many babies who seem to be settling independently at three months need more support again at nine months, just as Anders observed decades ago.

Self-settling is real. Some babies do it readily. Some will adapt to changes easily. But it is not an emotional skill and it is not something you are responsible for teaching on a particular timeline. Supporting your baby toward settling with less involvement over time is not off the table, and for some families it makes a meaningful difference. What is worth questioning is the way it is sold as the single most important foundation of infant sleep, and the implication that if your baby cannot do it and right now, something has gone wrong. Sleep is so much more than how your child falls asleep.

Why the distinction matters for you

If someone is telling you that the goal is to teach your infant to self-regulate, that framing is simply wrong. Not unhelpful, not overstated. Wrong. Emotional self-regulation is not a skill an infant can learn, because the brain structures involved have not developed yet. Setting it as a goal does not make sense, and chasing it can lead to problems.

What actually builds self-regulation over time is co-regulation. Every time you respond to your baby, help them come back to calm, and meet them in a moment of distress, you are doing the thing that matters. Independence grows, gradually and unevenly, from a foundation of dependence that was reliably met.

Self-settling is a separate question. For some children, how they fall asleep genuinely does affect how they sleep. For others, it is simply not what is going on, and pushing toward independent settling can make things worse, not better. I work with families where we never touch settling at all and sleep improves dramatically. I also work with families whose child already self-settles and sleep is still a real problem. How a child falls asleep is one piece of a much wider picture.

I wrote about this in more detail here and the six things that shifted how I think about self-settling altogether.

Even when changes to how a child falls asleep are worth exploring, that exploration needs to sit within a much broader context. Other factors often matter far more. And if changes are made, the how and the pace can look very different from family to family. There is no single method, no fixed destination. Less involvement does not have to mean full independence, and the right approach for one family may be completely wrong for another.

This is why the distinction between self-soothing and self-settling matters. Not just as a terminology correction, but because the confusion behind it shapes what parents believe they should be doing, and what they believe they are doing wrong. Getting this clearer can change everything about how you approach the hard nights.

What helps is an approach that holds all of this together. The biology, the development, the individual child, the family. That is what I bring to every family I work with, and it is why the answers look different every time.

Further reading: I used to believe self-settling was the main foundation to good sleep — 6 truths that changed my mind

References

Anders, T. F. (2023). From ontogenesis to clinical practice: Waking up to infant sleep. SLEEP Advances, 4(1), zpad017. https://doi.org/10.1093/sleepadvances/zpad017

McClelland, M. M., Geldhof, G. J., Cameron, C. E., & Wanless, S. B. (2015). Development and self-regulation. In W. F. Overton, P. C. M. Molenaar, & R. M. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology and developmental science: Theory and method (pp. 523–565). John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118963418.childpsy114

Montroy, J. J., Bowles, R. P., Skibbe, L. E., McClelland, M. M., & Morrison, F. J. (2016). The development of self-regulation across early childhood. Developmental Psychology, 52(11), 1744–1762. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000159

Ziv, Y., Benita, M., & Sofri, I. (2017). Self-regulation in childhood: A developmental perspective. In J. L. Matson (Ed.), Handbook of social behavior and skills in children (pp. 149–173). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64592-6_10