No! Please follow the exact opposite.

The “Eat – Activity – Sleep – You” routine is a pet concept of sleep trainers. It is heavily marketed as a quick-fix mantra for baby sleep but is, in fact, such a bizarre concept that it is really no wonder that millions of flummoxed parents try to follow it but find themselves either failing miserably or entering a never-ending cycle of training and disconnected parenting.

The EASY routine is based on the idea that babies should eat (nurse/bottle feed), then play or engage in some activity and then sleep. Basically, they should not “feed to sleep”. The logic being that a baby who feeds to sleep will develop a “bad sleep association” and will need feeding after every sleep cycle to sleep again.

This is totally senseless for so many reasons, starting with:

1. Babies are biologically programmed to feed to sleep. The suckling motion promotes sleep. Breastmilk contains sleepy hormones that help baby sleep. In fact, feeding to sleep is nature’s perfectly designed solution to baby sleep.

2. Babies may in fact even get hungry while they sleep.

3. Babies WANT to feed to sleep and will inevitably cry or resist sleep if denied the breast or bottle. This will lead to a cycle of sleep training.

4. Babies do wake at the end of sleep cycles and feeding is one of the easiest ways to help them enter the next sleep cycle. The idea that they will “self-soothe” if they do not have a sleep association is unscientific as babies are incapable of self-soothing.

Oh, and please do not miss the YOU at the end. Apparently, once the baby is asleep, it’s free time for YOU. And somehow, I doubt sleep trainers mean enjoying an audiobook while holding your sleeping baby or taking a nap for yourself next to said baby! Nothing as comforting to the baby as that.