Duda

There’s a lot of useful suggestions already on what you can do to be helpful. Asking them what they need and offering to help. I just want to reiterate that you shouldn’t push them to sleep train. It’s easy to read the research one step removed and conclude that’s the obvious best solution for them. But sleep training is one of the most emotionally charged topics for parents. I know all the research behind it, I fully understand why some parents pick this path but I personally could never do it for my children. I did a lot of other things to get them on a schedule and eventually to sleep, all while feeling immense pressure to “fix” my kids sleep. Not only have they likely heard of sleep training, they probably feel pressured to do it and aren’t for a reason. Unless they tell you they don’t know the options and ask for help, what would have been way more helpful for me would be an acknowledgment that this is a really tough stage and that I’m doing the right thing and an offer to help (not advice to do something I strongly believed against). Like all things in parenting the research can be very helpful but can ideally only take you so far so it’s important to respect their personal parenting decisions.