In many ways, it’s the perfect market: people at their most sleep-deprived and broken, who are willing to pay almost any sum to fix the problem at hand. Sleep consultants have become a go-to for parents struggling to adapt to the fractured nights and long days that babies bring, with some charging over £500 for a virtual consultation alone.
But within this unregulated industry, dangerous advice is being doled out. A recent BBC investigation found self-professed experts are putting babies at risk of serious harm, and even death, as a result of advice that clearly goes against NHS guidelines.
These consultants, who had thousands of followers online and have appeared on daytime TV slots in an “expert” capacity, were found to be encouraging putting babies on their front to sleep – a practice known to significantly increase the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). One also recommended putting towels in a cot, another potential cause of SIDS and “accidental death”.
For parents pushed to the edge by exhaustion, however, outsourcing to an “expert” can feel irresistible. Olivia Hart, 34, spent months looking for support when her four-month-old was struggling to sleep. But she says one ended up giving “a holistic consultation” that came with “lots of recommendations that seemed a bit odd, including going to see a chiropractor”. The woman “definitely pushed a very specific ideology of parenting which just wasn’t really aligned to me, and I only really realised afterwards that that was just her opinion, and not a scientific or medical fact.”
Their session resulted in “lots of misinformation about sleep training [encouraging a baby to self-soothe, often involving leaving them to cry for periods of time] and the harm it does, telling me never to sleep train my child, and that if I was having trouble with my son’s sleep, I should be co-sleeping with him” (this is generally not encouraged, as the safest place for a baby to sleep is in their own cot). “I felt a bit stuck,” Hart remembers, “that I’d gone to her, paid quite a lot of money – I think it was £150 for an hour – for that advice.”
She then tried another self-described consultant – who didn’t ask a single question about her son’s sleeping patterns, and instead asked her to keep a food diary. That “put me off any kind of sleep consultancy for a really long time,” Hart, an advertising strategist, reflects. “When sleep is a problem, it can drive you pretty crazy, and I definitely was suffering with pretty bad postpartum anxiety, probably prolonged by the fact that I had these bad experiences.”
Today, with a $600bn (£448bn) sleep industry primed to capitalise on our shut-eye obsession and mothers having to return to work far sooner than before, seeking out additional help has become de rigueur for many. Endless Instagram and TikTok accounts purporting to have “hacked” baby sleep appear to be a lifeline to parents navigating postpartum fog. Historically, compared to foraging cultures, people now have children closer together, and procreate at a more advanced age, making it harder to contend with the disruption (a large German study showed that, six years after birth, parents had not fully recovered their sleep). With more people living away from their “village” – the family members who once would have been on hand to assist with childcare from birth – paying strangers vast sums for help has become normalised.
Yet conflicting ideologies can leave many spending hundreds on advice. One mother I speak to says they are like personal trainers: all with completely different methods, many of which simply don’t work for some. Sanjay Aggarwal hired a consultant when his six-month-old daughter was having sleep issues, and “she just wasn’t very empathetic – she was very, very hard-nosed. My wife didn’t feel listened to at all,” Aggarwal, 43, recalls.
The woman insisted they buy her book and follow a cry-it-out method (when they had told her they didn’t want to resort to these measures). “She was very much not listening and just saying, ‘Listen, I’m the expert – you’re the silly parent.'”
Aggarwal, founder and CEO of the Spice Kitchen, says that while her advice “just didn’t feel right,” he and his wife “also felt massively conflicted because we were at breaking point and we felt like we didn’t know any better. It was a tricky situation.”
For those who do find appropriate help, the support can be game-changing. Chloe Cates* was “at breaking point” with her seven-month-old twin boys – one of whom was waking every 20 minutes; the other every hour – when she got in touch with a sleep consultant. “She saved us,” says Cates, 37. “The woman we used was honestly amazing.” The key was “having someone hold our hands and make a plan for us – that was so helpful. We just wanted to be told exactly what to do. When you are sleep deprived, you don’t even know which way is up, so just to have someone tell you with the utmost confidence that this will work, and you will sleep again, was such a help.”
Cates, a teacher, paid £180 for three weeks of unlimited WhatsApp contact, video messages and FaceTimes – and “I remember thinking we would have paid five times the amount,” she says.
Still, she is aware that she is lucky to have found someone who gave her safe advice, when so many don’t. “I know there are a load of cranky ‘experts’ out there, and maybe it needs to be regulated somehow,” she says of the industry. The BBC’s findings are “grim”, she thinks. “Sleep-deprived parents are ripe for exploitation; it’s a shame that some are obviously taking advantage of this.”
Wes Streeting, the former health secretary, said in response to the findings that the government plans to restrict individuals in maternity care from calling themselves a “nurse” unless they have appropriate qualifications, and that “dangerous misinformation dressed up as expert advice is putting babies’ lives at risk – and it must stop.” Until there are consequences for individuals who do so, however, it is hard to see how it will.
*Name and details have been changed
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