Remove the term Bad Habits from your vocabulary

Donna Miller
Feb 1
3 min read

When it comes to baby and child sleep, the phrase 'bad habits' or 'creating a rod for your back' cause so much anxiety and overwhelm around sleep. I'm here to ease that for you. Here's the truth; most of what gets labelled as a bad habit is simply a normal, developmentally appropriate sleep association, and if it works for you as a family, then there's nothing 'wrong' with it.

Sleep associations are the ways your baby connects going to sleep with the world around them. Feeding to sleep, rocking, holding, contact naps; these are all biologically normal patterns across cultures and throughout history.

The problem isn’t the association itself. The problem is whether it’s working for your family or if it's becoming something you can't maintain.

What Sleep Associations Really Are

Babies are born expecting closeness, movement, warmth, and caregiver regulation. Their nervous systems are immature, and their ability to self‑settle is something that develops gradually - not something you teach in a single night or as a newborn.

So when your child wants feeding, holding, rocking or a parent close by, it doesn’t mean you’ve created a “bad habit.” It means your baby found a reliable regulating tool that's working for them.

When Sleep Associations Get Hard

Where things start to unravel is when the association becomes unsustainable for the parent/s. Maybe your baby wakes every sleep cycle and needs the exact same thing to resettle, which is to be expected.

Maybe you can’t transfer them anymore as they're older and more mobile.

Maybe no one is sleeping and the deprivation in the household is affecting its function, often held together by the mum.

That still doesn’t mean the association is bad, it means the load is too heavy, and now not working for you as a family. This is when we can start to look at associations into 2 groups based on parent sustainability and assistance, or not:

Positive Associations: include a dark room, white noise, comforters (7m+) and sleeping bags. These things are part of the bedtime routine that don't require parental assistance every sleep cycle.

Negative Associations: ones that can't be maintained by the parent due to burnout - feeding, rocking, holding, co-sleeping, contact naps, dummies (if needing to be constantly replaced).

Is it time to ask yourself these questions:

Is what we're doing still working for us?
Is this sustainable for our family?
Does my child need support to learn a new pattern of behaviour?
Is my child showing signs that they want to change associations?

Signs that you are ready to make change

Consider adjusting the associations when you notice the following things:

a decline in your mental health
your child is waking excessively and can't link sleep cycles
early mornings are getting earlier
bedtime are getting later with resistance to sleep
nap settling and resettling is taking longer than the nap itself
you feel exhaustion, resentment, sadness or frustration creep in

How to Change these Associations

You can change your child's sleep associations in a gentle, responsive way that aligns with your parenting style and your child's temperament. This will help your child feel safe, supported by changing things slowly with new sleep patterns and behaviours.