By the time her baby was four months old, Zara, a psychologist and executive coach from Surrey, was able to open a bottle of wine and have “a bit of an evening”. He was sleeping in four-hour stints, waking twice in the night. Then, at four and half months, his sleep pattern changed: “It was five wakes, then six, then eight,” Zara says. She was so exhausted she ended up Googling “can you die from sleep deprivation?”.
“I was broken, emotional, confused, sleep-deprived and catastrophising,” she says. “He wouldn’t be down for longer than 20 minutes, and I was losing my mind. Using a sleep consultant was the best money I’ve ever spent; £250 to give me the confidence to trust my child to get himself to sleep without me.”
Another mother from Surrey, Heike, who works for a beauty brand, enlisted the help of the same sleep consultant, but couldn’t have had a more different experience: “I was so disappointed – shocked, really. I was left feeling a complete failure, but also very angry and lost,” she says.
When you dig into the world of sleep consultants, it’s a familiar story. Some, like Zara, see them as “guardian angels”. Others are left feeling judged, criticised, and as if they’ve wasted their money.
The industry is burgeoning, though, thanks to word-of-mouth recommendations at antenatal groups, and via the social media accounts of “experts”, filled with images of angelic babies sleeping soundly – understandably tempting to any…
