I thought a good place to begin would to be introduce myself, so hello! I’m Laura, a paediatric nurse and I qualified over twenty years ago now (!) During that time, I’ve worked in hospital settings, in the community and as a health visitor. Currently, I spend my time as a nurse on the local children’s ward and also as a school immuniser. I am a mum to three children, 13 years, 9 years and 3 years. And to be honest, I never even knew sleep consultant’s existed. Up until I really needed one.
My youngest son spent most of his early life crying. He had a tongue-tie, which meant breast-feeding was pretty hard in the first few weeks, he also had severe reflux, and on top of that he had allergies to dairy, soya and wheat (the aisle of Tesco free-from became my second home). Nights were usually spent with my husband holding him upright up until around midnight. At midnight we’d swap, and my night shift would begin. I’d sit up in bed with him for the majority of the night, as he groaned, mumbled and cried, and fed, and then cried again. I know there can be a lot of exaggeration around babies and sleep, but when I tell you I had three hours sleep on a good night-that is the very sad truth.
Of course, we tried various things to try and get him to sleep in the lovely expensive and never used next-to-me crib, and I can even remember bringing the giant pram to the end of my bed in the hope he would sleep in there. He didn’t. And so this continued. Until it couldn’t continue anymore.
At almost one year, my little boy, whilst thriving, could not sleep on his own. He didn’t know how. And we didn’t know how to help him anymore. I was embarrassed. I was a nurse! I used to be a health visitor! How could I not get my own child to sleep! At almost one year, I was going to bed at 7pm every night so I could catch up on sleep, ready for my daily night shift. At almost one year, I’d never gone out in the evenings, hadn’t watched the new series of Stranger Things and was a shell of my former self. The thought of returning to work was daunting, there was no way I could care for patients, I struggled with daily tasks due to exhaustion. And that’s when everything changed, and we knew it had to.
We met a lovely sleep consultant who listened, took the time to learn about our son’s allergies, his reflux, what we had been doing and she said she could help. We were sceptical. Unless she was going to come and live with us, I really didn’t think she could fix this. But she did! Within two weeks, we had a little boy who slept through the night, in his own cot, and also had two daytime naps-on his own!!! What magic is this I hear you ask? What was the secret to finally getting some sleep? And this is the key, she understood our problems, and then from that gave us a detailed plan, night by night of what to do. This wasn’t cry it out, it wasn’t shut the door and leave him. The plan was responsive to his needs and also to ours. And that’s when I knew I’d love to help other families like ours.
All of my career has been spent working with infants, children and parents, and really sleep consulting is a natural extension of this. Since January 2025, I’ve started my sleep consultancy training, and I hope to be qualified by Summer 2025. I truly hope I can help any family with sleep problems, whether they be similar to mine or different with an older child or children. And it’s more than having qualifications on paper, I work with parents knowing I have been there too. I have sat up at 4am, whilst the world is asleep, feeling like me and my child must be the only two people in the world awake. I have looked in the mirror and not recognised the sleep deprived person staring back at me. I’ve Googled and Googled the answer to why my child just can’t seem to sleep (Google didn’t have a clue) and I’ve also Googled what the limit for sleep exhaustion is (Google again didn’t know, but I’m pretty sure I was one of the record-holders). I will never judge another’s parents path of how they came to need a sleep consultant. I will listen. I will never judge. I will be a families own personal cheer-leader. And I will work together with nay family to end the sleep-less nights.
