Response-based sleep intervention: Helping infants sleep without making them cry.

It is common for parents to raise questions about infant sleep patterns when attending infant well-visits during the first year of life [1, 2]. In seeking answers to their questions from health practitioners, parents have access to a myriad of resources, including family, friends, web-based sites, social media, as well as parenting books. However, these sources of information often present contradictory best practice recommendations [3]. These contradictions are particularly notable in the areas of Infant Total Sleep time (TST) and parental response and presence when infants transition to sleep [4,5]. With the frequency of parents' questions about infant sleep, helping parents to establish healthy sleep patterns during an infant's first year of life is an important concern for researchers and practitioners. At present, between 25% and 40% of families report childhood sleep problems defined by latency to sleep, number of infant night wakings, and inability to return to sleep without parental attention [6,7,8]. Infant night wakings accompanied by infant signaling for attention (e.g., crying) are identified as problematic for parents due to disruptions in sleep, parental fatigue [9] and an association between wakings and maternal depression [10,11]. Given an association between parent presence and infant signaling during nighttime care, recommendations often caution parents against responding to infants during their transition to sleep or when waking