James' World 2

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A mom gives her 8-month-old baby a warm bath, towels him dry, and wriggles him into soft pajamas. As instructed, she reads him a story, lays him down in his crib, steps into the hall, and pulls the door closed. She heads downstairs, where her husband and their sleep consultant wait. The strange woman’s presence at this hour, and the fact that she was paid $2,600 to be there, might be jarring to previous generations, who learned all they knew about babies and sleep from their families.

For three days, the sleep consultant observes the family, each time for up to 12 hours. She watches how they handle meals with the baby — solids, and breastfeeding — and calmly guides the couple through nap times and a soothing bedtime routine. After her sit-ins, she makes herself available to the parents via text at all hours. Whenever her baby wakes up screaming, the mom taps a frantic message to the coach asking what to do, feeling like whatever she chooses, it will be wrong. (Trust me.)

Baby sleep, or the lack of it, has spawned a desperate market of parents who spend $325 million per year on products that claim to help infants sleep better, deeper, or longer. With that kind of money on the table, and a healthcare industry that is stretched thin, it’s no surprise a new type of wellness entrepreneur — the sleep consultant — has popped up to fill in the gap. Sleep consultants are now part of many new parents’ experiences (and expenses). But who exactly are the people we’re letting into our babies’ circadian rhythms, and what are they really qualified to be doing there?

Dr. Craig Canapari, M.D., board-certified pediatric sleep specialist and director of the Yale Pediatric Sleep Center, finished his training in 2007 and says sleep consultants weren’t on anyone’s radar then. He attributes their recent rise into the collective consciousness of parents to two things: social media, and a very real, unmet need for exhausted new parents. Sleep has always been a necessity, of course, but the isolated way we parent today, with both parents working and fewer grandparents nearby, makes it harder to come by.

“Nationwide, there just aren’t enough pediatric sleep doctors,” Canapari says. “Pediatricians do not get a lot of training in sleep medicine. I probably had one hour, in my four years of medical school, on sleep medicine. I’m not even exaggerating here. As parents who don’t have a village anymore, and we’re all working, and we have all of life’s challenges on our shoulders in addition to parenting, we need sleep.”

Sleep providers’ wait lists are long — Canapari says his new patients usually wait four to five months before being seen. For parents desperate enough to turn to a sleep psychologist for help, that’s a lifetime (and for the infant, it is their lifetime). “That’s not acceptable, right, if your life is falling apart?” he says.

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Jose Luis Pelaez Inc/Getty Images

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