There is a particular kind of loneliness that lives at two in the morning. Rachael Shepard-Ohta knows it well. Not the tiredness, though there is plenty of that. The other thing. The quiet arithmetic a mother does in the dark, counting the hours, counting the wakes, counting the ways she might be the reason.
“There’s a loneliness that comes when you’re awake at 2 am, wondering if everyone else knows something you don’t,” she says.
She had every reason to believe she would be spared it. A master’s degree in education. Child development coursework. A lifetime of babysitting. She loved babies, and she thought that love plus preparation would be enough.
Then her first baby arrived, colicky and sensitive, with a temperament that refused to sit still inside any chapter of any book she had read.
“No one told us” is such a powerful premise. What’s the one thing about motherhood that genuinely blindsided you, even after all your research and expertise?
“I have a master’s degree in education, I had taken child development courses, and I had babysat my whole life. I loved babies and thought I was prepared. And then I had a colicky, sensitive baby whose temperament didn’t fit neatly into what the books described and I immediately felt like I was failing.
What really blindsided me was how different babies can be from one another and how much those differences matter. I wish someone had encouraged me to trust what I was seeing in my own child instead of making me feel like I just hadn’t found the right method yet.”
That last line is the whole thesis, really. The right method. The phrase carries an entire industry inside it, and a quiet accusation too, which is that the method exists and you have simply failed to locate it.
The emotional weight of a logistics problem
Sleep gets sold to new parents as a systems failure. Wake windows are miscalibrated. The room is too bright. Bedtime drifted by twenty minutes. Fix the inputs, fix the output. It is a comforting frame, right up until it stops working, and then it curdles into something much heavier.
Because nobody asks a mother about her baby’s sleep the way they ask about the weather. They ask the way an auditor asks.
Rachael learned this the hard way, not academically. “When my first baby wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t just tired, I was anxious, ashamed, concerned, and constantly trying to ‘fix’ it,” she says. People kept asking whether he was sleeping through the night, and the question never landed neutrally. “Every time they asked, it felt like a judgment of me. There’s a loneliness that comes when you’re awake at 2 am, wondering if everyone else knows something you don’t.”
That is the piece the industry leaves out of the equation, and the reason she has come to see certain kinds of advice as actively dangerous. “That emotional piece, the deep instinct to protect your child and do right by them, is why fear-based sleep advice can be so harmful.”
Fear-based is the operative phrase. Fear that you are building bad habits. Fear that responsiveness is indulgence. Fear that a baby who needs you at midnight will still need you at fifteen. Rachael has spent years now dismantling that architecture, mostly by pointing at the thing underneath it. “Babies are designed to need us,” she says. “Night waking is normal, feeding to sleep is normal and wanting rest and space is also normal.”
What she changed her mind about
Anyone who has followed Hey, Sleepy Baby from the early days will notice the shift. The mechanics came first, because the mechanics are teachable and shareable and they fit neatly inside a carousel. Wake windows. Bedtime routines. Room setup. Useful, all of it. Incomplete, all of it.
She says it plainly now. “I’ve definitely become much more cautious about presenting sleep as something you can ‘solve’ with the right routine, timing, or environment.” Not abandoned, exactly. Reframed. “Those things can matter! But they are not the whole story.”
The missing piece, she says, is temperament, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. Some babies are more sensitive, intense, alert, persistent, or easily overstimulated. Some need more support to wind down. Some need more sensory input and some need considerably less. Some sleep better with sound. Some, she notes, actually hate the sound machine.
“Your baby may not respond to the same strategy your friend’s baby did because they are a completely different person,” she says. “If we ignore that individuality, parents end up thinking they’re doing something wrong when really they just have a child whose nervous system needs a different approach.”
It is the kind of correction that costs something to make publicly. Mechanics perform well. Nuance does not. But temperament is where the real story lives, and it is the spine of the book she is currently writing.
“Infant sleep is so often treated as a behavior problem to fix, when really it’s shaped by biology, development, temperament, culture, family systems, and the amount of support parents do or don’t have,” she says. “The more I’ve learned, the more interested I am in helping them understand the child in front of them versus trying to find the perfect ‘method.’”
The thing even devoted followers get wrong
Ask her what her own community still misunderstands and she does not hesitate. It is the belief that sleep, once fixed, stays fixed.
“It can be easy to fall into the trap of believing there’s one ‘right’ way to solve a sleep challenge or that once you ‘fix’ sleep, it should stay fixed,” she says. “But baby sleep changes constantly. It shifts with development, growth, regressions, separation anxiety, illness, travel, feeding changes, new skills, and just the normal unfolding of a child’s nervous system.”
Which is to say it moves, the way children move. “Babies aren’t robots,” she says. Sleep is biological, relational, developmental and deeply individual, shaped by temperament, sensory needs, feeding, medical issues, family culture, parental mental health and the presence or absence of support. All of it matters. All of it is in play at once.
I always say there are more options than ‘sleep train’ or ‘suffer forever.’
The binary is a marketing invention. The middle is where almost every family actually lives.
For parents currently drowning in schedule apps and colour-coded charts, her practical guidance is looser than you might expect from a sleep specialist. “For young babies especially, I’d focus less on rigid schedules and more on rhythms,” she says. Morning light. Daytime feeds. Watching sleepy cues. Protecting naps however they happen. Keeping nights boring and dark.
And when sleep feels genuinely, immovably hard, she looks underneath it, for feeding issues, allergies, reflux, airway concerns or sensory needs. “A schedule can be helpful but it should support the family, not become another thing parents feel like they’re failing.”
Parenting like you have a village, alone
The noise is not incidental. It is the business model. And Rachael is increasingly interested in naming who profits from it.
The heaviest pressure, as she sees it, comes from a combination that would break anyone. “Isolation, information overload, and systemic failures that leave parents without the support they actually need,” she says. “Parents today have less structural support than ever: limited parental leave, expensive or inaccessible childcare, fragmented healthcare, and communities that are less connected. At the same time, we have more advice than ever.”
She puts the contradiction in one sentence. “We’re expected to parent like we have a village while living completely on our own.”
Then comes the phone. Thousands of voices telling you that you are creating bad habits, ruining attachment, not doing enough, doing too much, being too soft, being too rigid. “The pressure is cultural, but social media amplifies it,” she says. “And when systems fail to support families in meaningful ways, all of that pressure lands squarely on individual parents, making everything feel heavier and more personal than it should.”
Her answer to the noise is not another framework. It is a set of better questions, which is a harder sell and a far more durable tool. “The internet loves extremes because extremes get attention but most families live in the nuance,” she says. “I try to bring parents back to three things: their baby, their values, and the evidence.” Instead of prescribing, she hands them the questions. Is this developmentally appropriate? Is there a root cause we’re missing? Does this align with how I want to parent? Is this working for my actual baby and my actual life?
“So much parenting advice is presented as universal, when really it’s just one cultural story about what independence, productivity, and ‘good’ parenting are supposed to look like,” she says. “When parents have context, they don’t need to outsource every decision to a stranger on the internet.”
Good enough, defined
She has thought carefully about what a successful day of mothering actually contains, and it is striking how little of it is measurable.
“There is no one perfect way to be a parent, and in fact we shouldn’t strive for perfection,” she says. “Our kids need us to be a little imperfect. We’re supposed to be in relationship with our kids, and relationships can be messy!”
So she sets the bar somewhere other than where the culture keeps putting it. Good enough, for her, means a family culture that feels fun, supportive and safe. Not a perfectly tidy home. Not the “best” schools. Not a perfectly regulated, calm mother twenty-four hours a day. “That is really not the stuff that matters,” she says.
The research, she points out, agrees. What matters most to children is that you show up for them, show them you are interested in them, and accept them for who they are. Which makes the daily scorecard mercifully short.
“At the end of the day, even if it wasn’t all perfect, if I’ve connected with each of my kids in a true, non-distracted way, if I’ve shown interest in what they’ve built or drawn or said, and if they’ve gotten into bed after a big hug and an ‘I love you,’ then that is a win.”
Her own phase of motherhood has moved past the physical survival era into something she describes as emotional presence, and she is quick to note that it is no less exhausting. What surprises her is the content of it: helping her children understand themselves as individuals, their feelings, their needs, their relationships, their bodies, their boundaries. “It’s so much fun to have real conversations with my kids and to hear their opinions on things,” she says. “Baby sleep and care felt all-consuming when I was in it but it was also the doorway into a much bigger conversation about what children need from us and what parents need in order to show up well.”
Identity outside of motherhood, she insists, does not require reinvention. Her work carries a great deal of it. “It gives me a place to think, create, research, connect, and use my voice,” she says. But she protects the parts of herself that exist outside productivity and caregiving too. Reading. Moving her body. The podcast, which she describes as a place to talk and be silly. Getting more politically involved. Travelling. Watching reality television without apology. “It can be as simple as layering back on things you enjoy,” she says, “the things that can feel impossible to make time for when you’re in the thick of raising little kids.”
What she wants you to know at 2 a.m.
There is a version of this reader we kept picturing throughout the conversation. A mother with a baby on her chest and a phone in her free hand, three weeks or three months or eleven months into it, quietly certain she has done something wrong. Rachael addresses her directly.
“You are not failing because your baby wakes up,” she says. “You’re a human caring for another human and this feels hard because it is hard, not because you’re doing something wrong. There are ways to improve sleep that still feel aligned with your instincts and values. You can make changes gently, at your own pace (if you want to!). And there is support out there that won’t make you feel ashamed for needing help.”
Motherhood, she says, made her see herself as part of something much bigger, a collective of caregivers trying to raise children inside systems that were never built to hold them. She started Hey, Sleepy Baby because she could not find the support she needed and suspected she was not alone in that. It has since become considerably larger than sleep. The platform, she says, has given her a way “to push back on the narratives and industries that profit off of parental exhaustion and insecurity.”
“Before motherhood, I think I was more willing to accept the ‘expert’ answer,” she says. “Now I’m much more willing to ask: who benefits from this advice? Is it actually evidence-based? Does it honor the child and the parent? And what would it look like if we centered care, community, and collective well-being instead?”
We gave her the last word, and she used it on the thing she wants parents to hear above everything else. That they have options.
“So much of the baby sleep industry is built on fear,” she says. “Fear you’re creating bad habits, fear your baby will never sleep, fear that responding too much will ruin them. But babies are designed to need us. Night waking is normal, feeding to sleep is normal and wanting rest and space is also normal. The goal is to understand your baby and make informed, values-aligned choices that feel sustainable for your family.”
And then, gently, the part that is easiest to forget at two in the morning: “This is just a season. I promise it won’t always be this hard.”
Follow Rachael Shepard-Ohta at @heysleepybaby and listen to the No One Told Us podcast and You’re So Right wherever you get your podcasts.
