Lead
"It took an hour to get the baby down." "Just as I thought she was asleep, the moment my back touched the mattress she woke up." "I was pretending to sleep next to him and ended up falling asleep myself — and the dishes never got done."
Settling an infant to sleep is among the loneliest passages in early parenting. The sound of the television coming through the living room wall, an older sibling wandering in from the next room, a siren passing outside. Every sound feels like an offense.
And then you open an app or a parenting book and find the dispatches from the other side: "Sleep training worked in three days," "Self-settling achieved." On the nights when your own child is still awake at eleven, those reports are easy to misread as evidence that something in your house is wrong.
There is one thing this article wants to say first, before anything else: thirty minutes to settle a baby is, by the data, within the normal range.