In this presentation, Helen Ball explains how the official infant sleep safety guidance in the UK has been revised to accommodate the needs of culturally diverse families and acknowledge the benefits to mothers and babies of sleeping together while providing information about hazards to avoid. She explores how UK and international organisations have used the latest bed-sharing research to develop new policies for staff and guidance for parents epitomised by the national guidance on infant sleep safety issued in 2019 by Public Health England, and a new international protocol in 2020 by the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine. Responses of parents and practitioners to these new guidelines will be discussed.
Neurodiversity, particularly autism and ADHD, have been underdiagnosed in women for many years. With increased awareness and conversation in social media, many women are recognising their neurodivergence in adulthood. Pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding can be a challenging time, particularly with the enormous sensory changes, emotional upheaval and disruption to normal routine and self-care. This session will explore the strengths and challenges of being a neurodivergent mother, and how healthcare professionals can better recognise, support and celebrate neurodiversity.
Parenting choices in relation to night-time infant care are varied. This presentation covers motivations and barriers for mothers and fathers to engage in proximal sleep arrangement (co-sleeping and bed-sharing), research on the risks and protective factors involved with proximal sleep, and basic tools to assess for safety when parents choose to engage in proximal sleep.
Using a co-designed parent resource, this presentation covers how to facilitate conversations between professionals and families across the perinatal period to enhance realistic expectations for infant and toddler sleep and sleep safety.
After this presentation, participants will be able to:
In this presentation, Thomas Harms will demonstrate how to overcome postnatal crisis of parents and their baby after overwhelming birth and bonding experiences. It will be shown how parents can establish a state of inner security and emotional stability while they are dealing with excessive crying of their babies. His body-oriented Emotional First Aid approach uses breathing and self-perception as tools to get back into a safe relational field with the baby. Using video material, he will present some concepts and short practical demonstrations showing parental self-attachment as a central way to improve the emotional situation of the caregivers in acute crisis after birth.
Children who are unwell or have complex health needs often have difficulty with sleep, due to pain, discomfort, stress and fear. Additionally, hospitalisation presents challenges such as disruption to family life, invasive procedures, additional monitoring and lack of privacy – all of which can make night time parenting more stressful and sleep more difficult. Recent research with breastfeeding mothers of sick children aged 2-36 months found that a lack of acceptance of bedsharing in paediatric wards caused considerable stress and difficulty, and led to more challenging breastfeeding, disrupted sleep, and distress. Bedsharing on paediatric wards is unstudied, and there are no standard guidelines as each child’s unique health needs makes blanket recommendations or prohibitions clinically inappropriate. However, there is much we can do to improve the way in which bedsharing is approached in hospital, as well as how we can support and facilitate sleep in a family centred, compassionate and respectful way.
Children who are unwell or have complex health needs often have difficulty with sleep, due
to pain, discomfort, stress and fear. Additionally, hospitalisation presents challenges such as
disruption to family life, invasive procedures, additional monitoring and lack of privacy – all
of which can make nighttime parenting more stressful and sleep more difficult.
Recent research with breastfeeding mothers of sick children aged 2-36 months found that a
lack of acceptance of bedsharing in paediatric wards caused considerable stress and
difficulty, and led to more challenging breastfeeding, disrupted sleep, and distress.
Bedsharing on paediatric wards is unstudied, and there are no standard guidelines as each
child’s unique health needs makes blanket recommendations or prohibitions clinically
inappropriate. However, there is much we can do to improve the way in which bedsharing is
approached in hospital, as well as how we can support and facilitate sleep in a family
centred, compassionate and respectful way.
This presentation is based on the new book, Breastfeeding Doesn’t Need to Suck, that covers topics not typically included in breastfeeding education: such breastfeeding’s changes to mothers’ sleep, and the impact of trauma (birth trauma, adverse childhood experiences, partner violence, and sexual assault). This session also describes how the normal changes of new motherhood (the five “I”s: idleness, isolation, incompetence, identity, and intensity) can make formula-feeding seem attractive—even when breastfeeding is going well. Finally, this session tackles the complex topic of support. Recent studies show that certain types of “support” completely undermines breastfeeding. This session describes effective support from partners, grandmothers, and healthcare providers. The goal is to help mothers and babies navigate postpartum and be happy, healthy, and securely attached.
In this presentation, McKenna discusses the research behind one of humankind’s most needed and important adaptations - mothers sleeping alongside their infants to breastfeed and regulate their infant’s highly dependent physiology, through the night. He looks closely at the principles of Evidence Based Medicine and how it relates to bedsharing and current public health recommendations, while highlighting the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine’s protocol – Bedsharing and Breastfeeding (revision 2019). He also covers research on fathers and bedsharing.
In this presentation, Mishel shares her study of Australian First Nations voices from our relational worldviews, relating to the lifehood stages of spirit self, social self and Ancestral self. With a focus on a child’s journey to social self, as the child transitions through pregnancy and infancy; becoming members of their communities. This study raised the status of First Nations principles of childrearing, as different but equal to Western childhood theories. The potential of this study is to improve understanding of First Nations childrearing, so it is recognised as an expert field of knowledge, with possible benefits for all children. Considering Australian First Nations children’s overrepresentation within the Child Protection system, improved mutual understandings within policy and practice could deliver beneficial outcomes for First Nations communities. A Relational Discourse Analysis (RDA) informed by relational ontological values was formulated for this study. Four key concepts of childhood are presented: lifespan relatedness, relational parenting, strong kids and relational attachments. These findings are now being translated to tertiary curriculum and clinical practice. Through this knowledge translation it has become evident; when programs are informed by First Nations ways of knowing there are higher levels of engagement and improved outcomes for First Nations communities. This study proudly positions itself as sovereign First Nations Australian research.
Despite the fact that night-waking of infants and toddlers is proven to be biologically normal, medical professionals, paediatricians, and sleep researchers do not agree on how parents should react to waking. Toddlers who need parental presence during the process of falling asleep and need their presence during the night are often labelled as problematic. In this presentation, Lenka introduces the concept of Uspávání, where Czech families use a special word to explain parental presence while the child is falling asleep. The term Uspávání means different activities which are helping/guide children to fall asleep and sleep calmly. In most cases, this includes physical presence, touch, emotional support, and physical contact. She shares her ethnographical research to show how family sleep may benefit from it and how we as professionals may support parents in their journey to calm evenings with their children.
The wellness-informed pathway focuses on meeting basic needs. Our species’ nest evolved to meet the basic needs of children. Evolved Nest components include soothing perinatal experience, extensive on-request breastfeeding and affectionate touch, allo-mothers who provide responsive care and a welcoming climate, self-directed social play in the natural world which develops nature connection, and routine healing practices. Breastfeeding meets multiple nest components. Evolved Nest components are particularly important in the first few years of life when a child’s neurobiology is being shaped towards a wellness-promoting trajectory of health and sociality, or trauma-inducing trajectory of ill health and self-absorption. Evolved Nest provision is an ethical imperative.
Parents commonly experience difficulties adjusting to life as a new parent, especially when it comes to sleep. But what if you had two, or more same-aged sleepless littles? Supporting families with multiple children brings a unique set of challenges that many parents (and professionals!) struggle to comprehend. This presentation will review some of the biological, psychological, and social differences to consider when assessing a family’s sleep situation. How does the early development of multiples differ from singletons? What are some of the psychological blocks, logistical challenges and societal pressures that parents of multiples face? And what impact does this have on sleep? This session will explore some of the common day-to-day challenges faced by families with multiples, and will review a variety of holistic strategies that you can use to gently support families to get more sleep without sleep training.
Clinicians were once the number one trusted source of information for new parents, however, with the advent of social media comes an entirely new landscape for knowledge dissemination for new parents. Forthcoming research has started to find that new parents are more likely to trust uncredentialed voices on social media over their own healthcare providers for medical information for their children. New parents particularly are being bombarded with unvalidated, non-empirical and blatantly incorrect information with every scroll of their social media feed. By the time a client approaches you, they will already be months deep into failed attempts at resolving the problem with an online “expert”. They will have a huge body of knowledge on the problem, some correct and some incorrect and they will be looking to you to disentangle the mess social media has created.
After this presentation, participants will be able to:
This presentation will draw on the recently launched Lancet 2023 Breastfeeding Series and additional literature to describe how the commercial milk formula (CMF) industry exploits baby behaviours to increase their profits. The talk will highlight how industry reframes typical human infant behaviours as problems that require the ‘solution’ of replacing breastfeeding with their products, with sleep as a key target. The talk will showcase that these tactics are simultaneously directed both at parents and health professionals, taking advantage of cultural concerns and lack of knowledge about normal human infant behaviour as well as insufficient high-quality lactation training and support. This creates a feedback loop that ultimately leads to inappropriate recommendations for the use of CMF and poor breastfeeding outcomes. The presentation will also make recommendations for addressing these misleading marketing practices and outline necessary steps to increase structural and sociocultural support for parents for breastfeeding and responsive infant care.
James J McKenna
McKenna pioneered the first behavioral and electrophysiological studies documenting differences between mothers and infants sleeping together and apart and has become known worldwide for his work in promoting studies of breast feeding and mother-infant co-sleeping.
A biological anthropologist, and director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory McKenna began his career studying the social behavior and development of monkeys and apes with an emphasis on parenting behavior and ecology. He has published over 150 articles and six books including a popular parenting book Sleeping With Your baby: A Parents Guide To Co-sleeping. He has co-edited Ancestral Landscapes In Human Evolution, Evolutionary Medicine, and a more recent co-edited volume Evolution and Health: New Perspectives.
He won the prestigious Shannon Award (with Dr. Sarah Mosko) from the National Institutes of Child Health and Development for his SIDS research and is the nation’s foremost authority and spokesperson to the national press on issues pertaining to infant and childhood sleep problems, sleep development, and breastfeeding.
Kathleen Kendall-Tackett
Dr. Kendall-Tackett is a health psychologist, IBCLC and the owner and editor-in-chief of Praeclarus Press, a small press specializing in women's health. Dr. Kendall-Tackett is editor-in-chief of the journal, Psychological Trauma and was founding editor-in-chief of Clinical Lactation, a position she held for 11 years. She is Fellow of the American Psychological Association in Health and Trauma Psychology, past president of the APA Division of Trauma Psychology, and a member of APA’s Publications and Communications Board.
Helen Ball
Helen Ball is professor of anthropology and director of the Infancy & Sleep Centre (DISC) at Durham University. She founded Basis, the Baby Sleep Information Source in 2012 as an outreach project of DISC, and was awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Further & Higher Education in 2018. Her research examines the sleep ecology of infants and their parents including attitudes and practices regarding infant sleep, behavioural and physiological interactions of infants and their parents during sleep, infant sleep development, and the discordance between cultural and biological sleep needs. She conducts research in hospitals, the community, and her lab, and she contributes to national and international policy and practice guidelines on infant care. She is a board member of the International Society for the Study and Prevention of Infant Deaths (ISPID), chair of the Scientific Committee for the Lullaby Trust, and qualifications board member for Unicef UK Baby Friendly Initiative, and associate editor for the journal, Sleep Health.
Cecilia Tomori
Cecília Tomori is associate professor and director of global public health at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing with a joint appointment at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is an anthropologist and public health scholar whose work investigates the structural and sociocultural drivers that shape health, illness, and health inequities. Recently, she has also been pursuing how science and health policy are influenced by financial and political interests. Tomori has collaborated with colleagues at Johns Hopkins and beyond on breastfeeding, infant sleep, infectious disease prevention, drug use and health policy, among other topics. She is an author of the 2023 Lancet Breastfeeding Series, three books on breastfeeding and reproduction, and numerous publications on a range of public health issues.
Carly Grubb
Carly is the founder of the Australian registered charity, Little Sparklers which furthers the work she began through the free peer support group she created in 2017, The Beyond Sleep Training Project. Carly is a passionate advocate for babies and families, and helping new parents find their way through an often overwhelming and deeply vulnerable time. She believes in the power of lived experience and peer support in improving parental confidence and well-being. Carly has big plans for improving the support available to families by bringing the realities and challenges of early parenting to light so support structures can meet people where they need them in practical, effective and timely ways. Carly lives in Mount Isa, outback Queensland with her husband and three wonderful young children.
Lyndsey Hookway
Lyndsey is an experienced paediatric nurse, children’s public health nurse, IBCLC, researcher, responsive sleep/parenting advocate, and the author of 6 books. She has worked with children and families for more than 20 years within in-patient paediatrics, paediatric ambulatory care, NICU, and the community. Lyndsey is a PhD researcher at Swansea University, exploring the needs and challenges of medically complex breastfed infants and children, due to complete in Spring 2023. In 2019 she founded the Breastfeeding the Brave project to raise awareness of the unique lactation needs of sick children in the paediatric setting. Lyndsey is the co-founder and clinical director of the Holistic Sleep Coaching program and Thought Rebellion. She is a respected international speaker and also provides regular training, advocacy and consultancy to both NHS and private organisations.
Levita D’Souza
Levita is a registered Counselling Psychologist and Lecturer within the Faculty of Education at Monash University. Her research interests are in the area of perinatal psychology, adverse childhood experiences and its impact on attachment patterns and subsequent parenting practices. Within this space, her current research projects are looking at fathers transition to fatherhood, father’s engagement in night-time infant care, and factors influencing parenting choices in relation to night-time infant care and uptake of safe sleep messages.
Maisie Ruttan
Maisie Ruttan is a family sleep specialist and parenting coach. She runs an international practice offering individualized support to families and is the founder of Hello Bedtime, an online sleep program for children. She specializes in working with bigger kids (2+), families with multiples, and children with neurodevelopmental disabilities, using a heart-centered and holistic, parenting to sleep framework. She has a B.A. in psychology, and spent many years working as a psychiatric nurse before turning to private practice. She is multi-certified as a holistic sleep coach, infant sleep educator, and peaceful parenting educator, with additional training in cognitive behavioural therapy, and developmental theory. She lives on Vancouver Island, in Canada with her husband and twin boys.
Lenka Medvecová Tinková
Lenka is a PhD candidate in medical anthropology at Durham University and a researcher at the Durham Infancy and Sleep Center headed by Prof. Helen L. Ball. She obtained her master's degree in ethology and sociocultural anthropology at Charles University in the Czech Republic. She is also the founder of the Czech sleep project ProsimSpinkej which helps to explain the nature and differences in children's sleep and supports parental self-confidence regarding family sleep. She educates professionals and students of anthropology about the different sleep approaches, anthropology, and the history of sleep. She is currently working on her research about the Czech concept of USPÁVÁNÍ - the emotional and physical support of the child during his journey to and through sleep. Her findings about Uspávání were also published in the Sleep Health Journal. Lenka is the author of two books for parents and four children’s books.
Kristyn Sommer
Kristyn Sommer has a PhD in developmental psychology from the University of Queensland and is currently a Griffith University Postdoctoral Research Fellowship awardee at Griffith University on the Gold Coast. Dr Sommer explores how infants and young children learn from screens and social robots in her current academic research. Outside of her research work, Dr Sommer is an avid science communicator and translates the science of children and parenting to almost half a million followers across multiple social media platforms. Dr Sommer is an advocate for evidence-based child rearing which considers the variability of family units including both parents and children.
Darcia Narvaez
Darcia Narvaez is professor emerita of psychology at the University of Notre Dame, fellow of the American Psychological Association, American Educational Research Association and American Association for the Advancement of Science. Born in Minnesota, she grew up living around the world as a bilingual/bicultural Puerto Rican-German American but calls the earth her home. Her earlier careers include professional musician, business owner, classroom music teacher, classroom Spanish teacher, and seminarian, among other things. In her academic career, she employs a lifespan, interdisciplinary approach to studying evolved morality, child development and human flourishing, integrating anthropology, neuroscience, clinical, developmental and educational sciences. She was a blogger for Psychology Today (“Moral Landscapes”), hosts the webpage EvolvedNest.org and is president of KindredWorld.org. See her 6-minute movie: http://www.BreakingTheCycleFilm.org.
Deborah Carrington
Dr Deborah Carrington is Perinatal GP and IBCLC working in Portland, Victoria. At her mothers and babies clinic, she specialises in breastfeeding medicine, sleep difficulties, perinatal mental health, tongue tie assessments and unsettled babies. She also has a special interest in neurodiversity-affirming care and supporting neurodivergent mums and children. Deborah works as a training supervisor and Senior Medical Educator for the RACGP, with a passion for improving access to primary care in rural areas, and improving education on breastfeeding in general practice.
Thomas Harms
Thomas Harms has worked in the field of attachment-oriented body psychotherapy for the past 30 years. His Emotional First Aid approach is a systematic crisis intervention technique to be used in parent-baby-therapy after birth. He is president of the European Institute of Emotional First Aid and he trains professionals in the fields of counselling and psychotherapy all over Europe.
Mishel McMahon
Mishel McMahon is a Yorta Yorta woman, she grew up in rural Victoria. Mishel completed her undergraduate degree of Bachelor of Social Work with honours in 2012 at La Trobe. Mishel has worked at various First Nations organisations, and as co-ordinator of the Victorian Aboriginal Research Accord. Mishel’s PhD revealed principles of First Nations childrearing, using methodology informed from relational worldviews, and Yorta Yorta language. Mishel won Premier's Research Awards for Aboriginal Research 2019, Fellowship for Indigenous Leadership 2019, worked as Social Work lecturer and is now Aboriginal Rural Health Coordinator at La Trobe Rural Health School.