A caregiver and children’s sleep specialist shares her advice

Mandy Hose has spent the past 25 years helping families put their babies and kids to sleep. Starting her career in childcare and early parenting services before launching her own sleep consultancy business, Mandy Hose She Knows, she’s seen various approaches – from strict controlled crying to softer attachment parenting – come in and out of fashion.

She also welcomed her own three daughters, including her prematurely born twins, who both have cerebral palsy. Mandy’s name may well be familiar. As the co-host of the wildly popular Too Peas in a Podcast, Mandy recently wrapped up five years of sharing stories from the caregiver community with a world-wide audience of millions.

Her work in sleep, however, continues – and she’s carved out a niche by helping parents raising children with disabilities.

“I absolutely love working with families like my own,” says Mandy from Melbourne, Australia where she consults in homes and at her local NAPA Centre. Mandy also offers sleep and settling support online, working with families from the US to South Korea and Japan.

“Our community tends to approach sleep with low expectations,” says Mandy. “This counteracts the anxiety a lot of families like ours have around sleep. And so sometimes, I’m having to lift us up into having higher expectations. We are just so afraid to even think that life could be a little bit better – we’re too scared to ask.”

Here, Mandy shares a few things she’s learned from working with fellow caregivers and some of her go-to sleep strategies.

We often hold shame around how we’re getting our children to sleep. Which is ridiculous because there's no right or wrong way to do it, right? And for families like ours, there’s enough going on in our children’s lives. We don’t want to put them through any stress around sleep. When I’m working with families I always say that if they want to keep doing it the way they’re doing it, that’s okay.

Babies, toddlers and kids love a routine. They love knowing this happens after this happens after this. So I’ll support parents to work out, what does that routine look like for your family? Some people need to have dinner, then a bath. Some people do bath first and then dinner. Some kids don’t like showers or baths – that’s okay, we’re just going to wipe you down. You don’t have to do all those things that the world says is how we do bedtime.

I get parents to think, what is my job? It’s our job to make sure that our children are fed and clean. That they’re not sick and they haven’t done a poo and their hands aren’t stuck in the bars of the cot. It’s our job to check all of these things. The child’s job is to then go to sleep and, if they wake up, go back to sleep. We can go into our children as often as they need and check all those things, but it’s not our job to get them to sleep. That’s their job.

I like the method of being responsive while our children are settling. There are ways that we can stay close by and not have to stay with them for hours. You can give lots of praise and encouragement – “You’re doing a good job staying in your bed!” And sometimes I use the word rest instead of sleep, just to take a bit of pressure off. I recommend staying close and listening out, but not having to lie right next to them. I like to call this ‘kind ignoring’.

When your child is ready, they can move into a big kid’s bed. It doesn’t matter what their disability is, they can do this. You can celebrate your child transitioning into a big kid bed and you can buy all the beautiful bed linen and decorate the room beautifully – it doesn’t have to feel medical. I went berserk with my own kids’ bedrooms. I just thought, this is something I can do that I don’t have to compromise on.

Mandy is available to help families learn the skills they need to better care for their babies, young kids and their sanity. Visit her website for more information and to book a zoom consult or home visit.