Newborn Sleep 101
If you follow my blog at all, you will know that I have a newborn. He doesn’t like to sleep, which leads to him being overtired, which makes it harder to get him to sleep, which makes him more overtired… the cycle continues and it’s a bit of a rough go. I’m trying to enjoy this stage of his life, but when there are very few breaks, it makes it really difficult to do so. No one wants to spend 5 hours trying to get a screaming baby to sleep. To be frank, I am desperate. Between the constant spit up (which also wakes him up) and the lack of sleep, I am slowly going crazy.
Enter Woodlands Collective and their ad targeting me on Instagram.
I’m struggling with my newborn, so I must be missing something, right? I’m not confident, and I can’t trust my gut. All my research has failed me, there must be something I’m missing. Could this workshop be the answer?
I would love to laugh off the “you’ll never sleep again” because I know I will (sleep again). Sign me up! This woman calls herself the newborn whisperer. She must have a secret worth the $75 that I can buy! She’s also local to my area, and I like to support local businesses! Take my money woman!
Was it worth $75?
Review
Hell no.
She wasn’t kidding when she says it’s newborn sleep 101. If you’ve done ZERO research and knowing nothing about newborns, then it would probably be helpful. She lays out all the basic information in a variety of formats (video of a powerpoint presentation with audio, audio only, and written) so that you can digest it in whatever way suits you best. The video is only 41 minutes long, which includes a 3 minute introduction of herself, and almost 3 minutes on birth trauma at the end. The introduction happens as its own clip, and then is repeated in the full video for some reason. The birth trauma part I found weird. It was kind of like “birth can be traumatic, make sure you get support.” Ok…? It was very short and ended abruptly without any real substance. So there’s only really about 30 minutes of useful content, and even less of that is about newborns.
I’m not saying that this “workshop” is completely without value. I think the reference materials especially can be useful to look at and look back on, however is it worth $75? Absolutely not. I’d put a value of maybe $10 on it. The amount of content is so small I would expect it in a handout from the government’s health organization. In fact, my provincial government does go into a lot of depth of dealing with a baby with its Baby’s Best Chance and numerous articles intending to help from pregnancy to parenting young adults. Our government likes to tell us what to do. To be fair to Woodlands Collective, her content is almost exclusively about newborn sleep and has the information consolidated into one place. However, all of that information can easily be found for free online.
She also recommends that the white noise machine be used at 60db at the infant’s head, which is bad advice. It should be quieter then 60db according to this ENT associate and various other sources that advocate preventing damage to infants’ hearing. Where did she get her information from?
I also found it funny that she calls La Leche League “La [Lesh] League”. I know she’s from Australia, but leche is Spanish for milk, and it certainly isn’t pronounced [lesh]. Can I blame her for not knowing how to pronounce it? No, but it does make her seem less credible when she doesn’t know how to pronounce the name of an organization she’s referencing.
In summary, for the price of $75, I do not recommend the newborn sleep workshop from Woodlands Collective. If she were to lower her price to something more reasonable, then it might be worth dropping some money on. If you need to pinch your pennies, and who doesn’t in this economy, then a quick Google search will tell you all you need to know about newborn sleep.
This is just another example of someone trying to make a lot of money by providing an overpriced course that doesn’t actually have that much value. Welcome to the 2020s.
wanderingfawn 