← The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
1KHO 595: Your Baby Isn't Broken and Neither Are Your Instincts | Britt Chambers, Goodnight Moodchild
00:58:35
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- [00:01]
Podcast Host / Narrator
Living with schizophrenia isn't easy, especially when you're not getting relief from some of your symptoms. It can be hard when you're still dealing with symptoms like hearing voices or seeing things that aren't there, and negative symptoms like feeling unmotivated or avoiding social situations. If this sounds familiar, it might be time to talk to your healthcare provider and explore a different kind of schizophrenia treatment. Discover your possibilities@treatingscz.com welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast.
- [00:32]
Ginny Urch
My name is Ginny Urch. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside, and a person I admire so much is here with us today from Goodnight Moonchild, Britt Chambers. Welcome.
- [00:42]
Britt Chambers
Oh, thank you so much, Ginny. It's such an honor to be here. The admiration is mutual.
- [00:47]
Ginny Urch
Aw. You are a powerful force in the world because there are a lot of powerful forces that are trying to undermine the instincts of mothers. And it matters so much. It matters so much. I feel gutted about some of the things I didn't know or I learned too late. Sometimes you do learn things too late and the damage is done and you cannot go back and change those decisions. Can you talk about your path toward pushing toward this instinctual mothering, toward helping people remember that the baby isn't broken and neither are your instincts as a mom.
- [01:22]
Britt Chambers
Yes, the path goes all the way back to my own birth, as in the birth of me, not the birth of my children. So I was. I was born to two parents who were high school sweethearts and really, really big lovers. I was actually born in upstate New York, in Rochester, New York. And in the era that I was born, there was only so much information, and my parents did find information about infant sleep that would have been helpful late. So they were going off of the dominant paradigm. They were going off of what they knew, what their friends did, what their neighbors did, what the pediatrician recommended. And they were doing that from the intention of benefiting our whole family. That's what they thought they were doing. They didn't think they were doing anything wrong, of course, like what parent does right? We're all seeking information that's supportive for the whole family. But I was born a really sensitive being, like many babies are. All babies have the same biological needs at birth, right? Closeness, connection, et cetera. But I was a really sensitively wired baby, and that didn't parlay with this dominant paradigm. So I was, as the story goes, as the story was told, my entire childhood actually became like a trope in my house. I was sleep trained, but it didn't work. So I just kept crying throughout infancy, throughout toddlerhood, through. And the way that it's been regurgitated to me is that they would shut the door and prepare for the next couple of hours of me calling out for them. And they didn't know that there was any other way. And they were terrified of responding to me, of bringing me into their bed, of doing what my body needed because they thought it would lead to a dependent, bratty, unruly, feral child. So that's my history. That's what's in my body that I kind of grew up with and recognized as something that maybe needed to be excavated but didn't have. I didn't have the language for it. I did not grow up in a household that had a background in somatics or spirituality or anything beyond, like, the concrete materialism that was probably very dominant in the early 90s. So I developed very strange insomnia as a teenager. I was up all hours of the night. I had really, really bizarre fear of darkness and bedtime. And I never thought about it again. Jenny. And then in 2020, I found myself pregnant with my daughter. And again, I didn't think about sleep. Who does? If you're listening to this and you're pregnant, if you're not thinking about sleep, you might want to. But I actually just thought baby slept. I didn't think about it any more than that. Sure, when my baby's tired, they'll sleep, and of course I'll support their needs. Then comes my daughter into the world. A carbon copy stress system of mine, so sensitive. Sit on like the canary in the coal mine. And I aimed for a home birth. It went into a hospital setting. I find myself in this industrialized, medicalized hellscape, for lack of a better word.
- [04:25]
Sponsor / Advertisement Voice
And.
- [04:26]
Britt Chambers
And minutes after my daughter is born, I'm already seeing. What I didn't know at this time was all these attempts at separation. Let me take her. Let me hold her. You need to rest. Let me bring her to the nursery. Let me set her over here. And I'm just like, all of my alarm bells are going off, and I'm like, what is going on? This baby just left my body. So that was the inflection point where literally in the hospital, I was drawing this connection between my mother's experience giving birth without resources, without social media in 1989 when I was born, and me in 2020 giving birth to my daughter and recognizing that if I didn't have the tools that my mother had, maybe I also, out of fear, would have been like, oh, okay. Yeah, take. Sure. That's what's best for my baby. But I wasn't operating out of fear. I had gone through this whole process of deconditioning, hence why I was trying to have a home birthday. And I was like, no, my baby's gonna say, right here on my body, right here on my chest. And then I was told I needed to sign waivers. And then you probably know where this goes, right? Like, so that was my experience. And that catalyzed literally in that moment, this journey for me, out of the curiosity of, am I totally off base here? Is my intuition awry here? And wanting to keep her closer, Is there maybe some evidence to support that I feel this way? And then I went down this road of discovering Dr. Greer Kirschenbaum's work and Dr. James McKenna's work and people that have been researching mother baby sleep in academia for decades. And I ended UP training under Dr. Greer Kirschenbaum and looked at the neurobiology of the human infant and just went so deep, went head first into this work. And that's how I. That's how I landed here.
- [06:10]
Sponsor / Advertisement Voice
Wow.
- [06:11]
Ginny Urch
And you had done all sorts of other work. Like, you said, you were coaching executives for things like Shark Tank and UN Speeches. So it's just like one world to the other. It's incredible. But what's interesting, though, and I. And I wonder what you would think about this, Brit. I always wonder, like, where does it come from? I, you know, we talk about myths, like, you know, the. The myth of cry it out, the cry it out method. And, you know, but in some ways, I'm like, this is sold propaganda. That's how I feel about it to a degree. Right? You're like, and where did that come from? And I remember reading about how I might get the decade wrong. But let's say it was the 1950s, where one person, one income, usually could support a family no problem. It was like, what, the dad's a post office worker, like, he supports his family. Everyone has a home and they've got their car and their kids are doing fine. And that's how it was. And I don't know. I'm like, I go down these things sometimes. I'm like, I could be off base, but I read about how well the government then is not getting taxes from a second person. And so if you throw then the mom into the mix, if you throw the mom into the rink and now you've got a dual income situation, well, who wins out? I mean, the government does for sure, because they Got another person that.
- [07:20]
Sponsor / Advertisement Voice
Yeah.
- [07:21]
Ginny Urch
That is paying taxes. And so if you want to be the mom that contact naps and that, you know, is up at night. But then when your baby sleeps from 6 to 9 in the morning and you're just going to sleep then with them and you're up at night nursing, it like doesn't really work with this sort of industrial system that we have 100%.
- [07:41]
Britt Chambers
It's not designed to work. That is exactly the point. There's. It is intentionally designed to create a rub so that you are in a position where you have to choose productivity and profit over the needs of your baby, over the needs of yourself. So we can go down a little, we can time travel a bit if you want. Ginny. And then you can delete it if you're like, this is too heavy and. Or I don't want to include it. But because my undergraduate degree is in history, because I have sat with first hand documents and looked and seen that the things that I'm about to say are not propaganda and they are actually blatantly stated in historical documents, blatantly proclaimed. They were proclamations of conquest. Not like ideas that I'm inferring. But really, what, do you want me to go there a bit?
- [08:27]
Ginny Urch
Yeah, I think so. Because I think it's interesting to know how we got here. When there becomes these dominant cultural messages that are counterintuitive or don't align with your biology.
- [08:36]
Britt Chambers
Yeah.
- [08:36]
Ginny Urch
Like when I think about our babies, we have five and we had three of them at home. They all would sleep right here on my chest. They fit perfect, right?
- [08:44]
Sponsor / Advertisement Voice
They fit perfect.
- [08:45]
Ginny Urch
And then your heart rate helps stabilize their heart rate and they warm up and you're like, the biology shows that this is what you're supposed to do. Otherwise those things wouldn't be happening. Otherwise their heart rate wouldn't be sinking to your heart and you're helping. Then they gain weight easier. All of these things, they make sense. So you're like, at some point someone must have inserted this fake information, this wrong false information for a reason.
- [09:13]
Britt Chambers
Yeah, 100%. So the way that I frame it and this, this framing came from my own retrospective of remembering being an undergrad and studying Native American history and looking at the origins of the United States, in particular the origins of colonialism, and looking first in indigenous cultures and asking why constantly. Like I would literally just repeatedly ask why until I got back to the root. And what I discovered was very readily, publicly available, by the way. And Dr. Darshan Arves, who's at University of Notre Dame has written about this in, like, 30 plus books over the years. But indigenous wisdom centers the mother and the baby. Indigenous cultures were matriarchal or matrilineal, like that was. They were gynocracies. They were centered around the womb, centered around women and children, because women held the divine connection. Women held the tie to the heart, space. Women were the ones that remembered. And men sometimes would go astray. They would go too deep into their individual, Individual and independent energy that would throw the community off balance. So women were the holders of this wisdom, and children were raised in kin. Like it was the kinship worldview. The worldview of indigenous cultures was we take care of each other. It's rooted in empathy. It's rooted in interconnectivity, of mutual aid, and of course, grounded in nature. So children who stay close to nature stay close to themselves. And that's really dangerous if you are trying to conquer people, right? So when we look at conquests, European empires, they weren't just targeting, like, land and resources because there were people inhabiting these lands. So they specifically needed reproductive power. That was how they could then have, like, the. The root control. So they needed the ability to decide who was born, who belongs, right? Like who labors. And women's bodies and children were an exact means to that end. So if they could remove this cultural norm of kinship, of togetherness, of contact, napping, breastfeeding, co sleeping, of raising the baby with the mother, they would then literally sever the bonds so that they could produce subjects that were loyal to the empire instead of kin or land. And this was the first time that this had happened because society couldn't flourish. Indigenous cultures couldn't flourish without collectivism. So this was like a total shift over into individualism. And that was really the. Like, the root. And then, of course, we move all through the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, and then industrialization and everything that you just touched on there, right? Like, that's a whole separate conversation. But the actual origin is colonization. That's when this was targeted and identified as, like, this is a threat to our ability to conquest. Conquest. So we need to control the women and the children. And in order to do that, we have to sever and separate their ties.
- [12:21]
Ginny Urch
I mean, and if you think about in those cultures, it's like if they're hunter gatherers or. I talked to this woman, she was like, look. She's like, look. You wouldn't be like, you know, your baby falls asleep, and then you're like, okay, I'm gonna roll away as Fast as I can. And I'm gonna go to the next door cave, you know, and, and hopefully my baby's okay. I'll come back in the morning. Right?
- [12:42]
Britt Chambers
Yeah.
- [12:42]
Ginny Urch
It's like everyone's together, you're in a close proximity, close space. And so you're gonna respond to that baby's needs at night.
- [12:50]
Britt Chambers
So.
- [12:51]
Ginny Urch
Okay. It's good, I think it's good to have some of that bigger picture so that you can understand that there's different factors at play here and that there's a lot of cultural forces. And now you're throwing in money, you're throwing in, you know, there's these sleep trainers and they've got these whole jobs around sleep training. You've got these like contraptions that's like, you don't hold the baby, put your baby in it. It will bounce like a, you know, it will make womb sounds. But it, I mean it's really become a whole thing now.
- [13:17]
Britt Chambers
Billion dooll industry.
- [13:19]
Sponsor / Advertisement Voice
Yeah. So there's a lot, right.
- [13:20]
Ginny Urch
There's a lot of cultural forces and you help the mother to, and, and the family unit to make decisions that are more in line with the mother's biology, the baby's biology, as well as your instinct, like what you think you should do, what makes sense. So can you talk about how there's such. This thing about you're going to be so tired, so tired. But you say you can nurture at night and thrive in the day. Can you talk about this? Rest and sleep and the difference between. You say rest is five times deeper than sleep. So you can feel vitality even if you're up at night tending to a baby or a toddler or a young child.
- [14:02]
Britt Chambers
Yeah, you, you totally can. And this is shockingly a hot take. Like I have learned that this is a polemic thing to say and I'm like, what is it really? But here's the deal. So when we look at vitality, when we're looking at what is woven into wellness, sleep is one facet of that. And sleep is so important. There is no doubt that our brains and our bodies are doing really, really important things for our entire well being while we're sleeping. But we have this cultural construct that sleep needs to be in one consolidated chunk and it doesn't. So we can recharge through things like yoga nidra, where you can enter a deeply restorative place. That, that was the, the thing that you quoted Jenny where you said it's five times as restful than sleep. But sleep aside, like take sleep off the table and look at the other. If you, if you envision it like a pie chart and maybe there's 10 slices of the pie in the pie chart, sleep is one of those 10 slices. So my question always when I'm working with parents, when I'm working with families and I work with so many that have, you know, in the like western paradigm, you would call them like high powered jobs, right? Like I work with people that are pilots or running multiple companies or surgeons who literally need to have their brain working at full capacity in order to go do their job. And these people are thriving and nurturing at night. And it's because when we go back to the pie chart analogy, I'm looking at what are you putting in your body during the day? What are you literally consuming like food, but also what are you consuming from the world around you? Are you totally burning yourself out? How are your dopamine receptors? Are you scrolling all day? Are you taking in fear mongering media all day that's depleting your body and putting you in like a state of fear and scarcity and lack and maybe burning your adrenals out. So that's one slice of the pie. Are you consuming food that regulates your blood sugar and helps your body feel imbalanced? Are you leveraging plant allies like adaptogens, simple things like Tulsi and Maca? Are you resting when your baby rests? If you're able to, and that doesn't need to mean sleep, it could mean like lying your body on the floor. It could mean during a contact nap, your phone is down and your baby is resting on you and you're breathing. Like, can you do simple breath work? I say things like breath work and people are usually like, I don't know how to do that or I can't add one more thing to my plate. You, you can actually close your eyes or leave them open and just breathe in through your nose and exhale longer than your inhale. And that for two to five minutes has like deep evidence around shifting your physiology out of fight or flight back into parasympathetic. So like, can you do that and clear some cortisol and clear some adrenaline and help your body find balance? How's your circadian hygiene? That's an entirely separate conversation, but one that your listeners are probably acquainted with. Like, are you outside? Are you getting outside? My first question to parents is, tell me about the arc of your day and when you are in nature. When are you communing with nature? Because your body has these biorhythms that are not separate from the earth. And if we're constantly living in misalignment, we're not going to feel good. So it's, it's really challenging when we culturally are scapegoating babies and being like, oh no, it's the, it's babies not sleeping that's the problem. Problem. Like, sure, baby's not sleeping adds a layer of stress, adds a layer of complexity. We can tweak so many things to try to support a baby's biology, but how are we supporting the parents biology?
- [17:36]
Ginny Urch
Wow, that's deep. Scapegoating babies because you're like, yeah, there are so many other factors here. I read this book by a woman named Annabelle Abs and she talks about your night self. And I'd never heard that phrase ever in my life, your night self. And she talked about how throughout history women have been up at night. That actually culture would not have survived because women are the ones that are caring for the sick and the elderly in the night. Like, there wasn't always hospitals. And so she said that the majority of sleep studies have been on men.
- [18:06]
Britt Chambers
Yeah.
- [18:07]
Ginny Urch
And so a lot of the research that we see is about men. And she said, no, women actually are wired. Like women have the capacity to, to do that to, to care in the night. And I thought that that was a really interesting thing. So can you talk about just this misconception that you are going to unravel? And here's what's interesting. I had a, one of our kids that didn't sleep through the night till she was close to five and she had like some separation anxiety things. And I'm not quite sure where that comes from. But I had a friend who told me at one point that her baby, one of her babies didn't sleep through the night till age four.
- [18:46]
Britt Chambers
Yeah.
- [18:47]
Ginny Urch
And I just was. That helped me so much. Even though in some ways you're like, that seems like it's forever away. Like if you have a seven month old, you're like, that seems forever away. But by her telling me that, I was like, you know what? She did it and I can do it and I can, you know, meet my baby's needs until they really need that to be done with. And I don't know what you would think about that.
- [19:06]
Britt Chambers
Like, I would venture to guess that even you just stating that on your podcast is going to bring like immeasurable relief to people. Because nobody is talking about this. Like, what I am finding is that people are closeted co sleepers or they are just riddled with fear and guilt and anxiety about their babies not sleeping. When in reality it's totally biologically normal for babies to wake up first of all, all throughout the first three years of neurobiological infancy. That's when infancy is defined through neuroscience, is the first three years of life, but then into childhood.
- [19:41]
Sponsor / Advertisement Voice
Right.
- [19:41]
Britt Chambers
So it's completely normal for babies for children to seek proximity at night because they're living in these really ancient bodies that are expecting closeness. Like that is their safety. In the analogy you gave earlier of someone that I think it was a guest you mentioned that, that referenced like in a hunter gatherer era, if we were putting our babies down and walking away from our babies, like that just would have, that would have never happened. So it's baked into our biology to seek closeness for survival. So it's not weird at all that kids do that. It's totally normal. Totally.
- [20:13]
Ginny Urch
Yeah. It was my friend Kayla. She said, you know her, one of her kids didn't sleep till they were four. And I just, it like completely shifted everything for me because I thought, what, what I'm expecting, expecting, expecting something, you know, like it's too long, it's too long. Then I'm like, oh, well, that was for someone else. And so, you know, I don't think anybody ever regrets tending to their children at night. And you even talk about that. You have beautiful wording and you have a lot of places and I'll put them in the show notes where people can come for support. But you say mothers in their power nurture at night.
- [20:43]
Britt Chambers
Yeah.
- [20:45]
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- [23:05]
Ginny Urch
If you have.
- [23:06]
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- [24:06]
Ginny Urch
And I mean, that's really powerful wording. So can you talk about this misconception that you're somehow not going to make it?
- [24:14]
Britt Chambers
Sure. Yeah. And gosh, I remember writing that, that piece, Mothers in Their Power Nurture at Night while I was so pregnant with my son. I want to say I was like 38 weeks pregnant and I was actually in the bath before I wrote that. And I, like, got out of the bath, I jumped out of the bath, as writers do, and I was like, I gotta get this down. And it just flowed through. And it was from this recognition that I already have everything I need to know inside of me about how to care for my son. And that that's been so systemically stripped, but also weaving wisdom in community has been stripped. So I didn't have women around me being like, to your point, hey, it's really normal if your baby turns into a child and still isn't sleeping through the night. Like, they will get there eventually. With developmental unfolding, it's different for every kid. And I think thinking about the fact that we all have the wisdom within us, that it lives there and sometimes it just needs to be excavated. I think that that gives people their power back. It's like, here you go, you can. You can remember. It's within you. So in answer to your question, we have fear that we will unravel because that is what's propagated in our dominant culture. Yes, we are living in a culture that when somebody mentions being pregnant or mentions giving birth, some of the first questions are, when are you going to go back to work? Or, oh, do you have childcare lined up? Like, the locus is in the wrong spot. Like, we're looking in the wrong spot, we're highlighting the wrong things. And so when we start from, how can I be exactly as I was before I give birth? How can nothing change in my life? It's really tempting and very easy to fall prey to all of the predatory marketing that's basically saying you're not enough and you can't do this and you need someone external to you to tell you exactly how to do this or your entire life's gonna fall apart and your child will grow up to be needy and clingy and never will be independent.
- [26:18]
Ginny Urch
And it's the exact opposite. It's like the exact. Those are the attachment years. I mean, I read about this night self book and I. And I really thought about. Yes. Like, for generations, for however long, women have been caring at night, and they're fine. Like, the Human race is still here.
- [26:35]
Britt Chambers
Yes.
- [26:36]
Ginny Urch
And the. One of the things was like this lady, she said once she started to research it more, she was up at night because there was a lot of grief in her life. And I think someone had passed away. And so she's like, dealing with grief. And she was like, I was just up at night. And she started to research all of these women throughout history who were up at night and like, they would wake up and maybe they would do a little bit of like, poetry writing or it was just kind of normal. And she said one of the biggest things is like, we're just so afraid of it.
- [27:01]
Britt Chambers
We are.
- [27:01]
Ginny Urch
It's like the. The fear of not sleeping is almost worse than the not sleeping, the anticipation of, like, I'm not going to get a nice sleep. And, you know, and it's like, no, women are made. They're made for this.
- [27:13]
Britt Chambers
I'm so glad you mentioned that. For two reasons. Reason one is that I often cite Dr. Ellen Langler's research. She is a Harvard tenured professor. She's been there for a very long time. And her research is specifically on exactly that. It's on mindset. It's on the power of our minds, ability to turn on or off our physiology. So she has a really famous study. I want to say it's from the 70s, 70s or 80s, I don't remember exactly, but she took two groups of men, of course, she was studying men, unfortunately, but took two groups of men. And the control group was just to live their lives. And they were at this retreat center to control for other variables. And then the other group every morning was to wake up and basically act as though they were 10 years younger. So their mindset was, no, I don't feel achy, I don't feel tired. I'm. I'm 10 years younger. I have vitality. I can do this. And that group, I'm going to Ms. Cite. I can send you the. The study later. They had something like an actual biological biomarker reversal of their age by something like a decade, as opposed to the control group at the end of 10 days of doing this. So this is not new. There is so much research out there there on the power of our mind, on the power in the quantum field that surrounds us to be able to actually alter the way that we experience life, not only from our perspective, but from our body or lived experience. Like, how does our body mobilize differently when we are not operating from this baseline of, oh, my gosh, I'm going to be so tired and Then like, actually that's catastrophizing because what if you flipped the script and just said I might be feeling really tired, but also I am so, so capable and I've got this. And lineages of women before me did the same thing I'm doing. This is temporary, it's a season and my body was designed to do this. Yeah.
- [29:03]
Ginny Urch
And I think it can be just so beautiful, it can be so integrated. You know, it's like, well, you know, you lay down when the baby dies and yeah. You know, you sleep then and you, and you rest and even like it's actually a really beautiful thing. British, you know, we've got older kids now and I remember my midwife told me she was saying like when her youngest was, you know, three, four, she was like, you think you're going to be a lot more rested, but all of these other things start to fill your time and actually people expect different things from you. So she would say, for example, if I go to a party and I've got an 18 month old, no one expects me to help clean up, you know, like. And so in some ways, like these rhythms are there allowing, especially if you're in the right circles, but like allowing.
- [29:47]
Sponsor / Advertisement Voice
For the woman to rest.
- [29:48]
Ginny Urch
But then, you know, once your kid's six, like guess what, you're cleaning the kitchen so you're not necessarily less tired. You, you more things end up on your plate, you know, so there to have this built in allowance and grace for yourself to like slow down. It's, it's like every couple hours, right? You're, you're, you're sitting down, you're nursing, you know, and especially if you're not on your phone then and you can really relax. I mean it's just a beautiful, is a beautiful rhythm to have.
- [30:16]
Britt Chambers
Yeah. It reminds me of the nap ministries work of rest being resistance because it is. And often when I work with parents, they will like we do a lot of deconditioning because they're starting from this place of I can't rest. If I rest, then XYZ doesn't get done. And it's really normal living in the west, living in the culture that we're all swimming in, to be thinking that way, to be in, in that default mode. But what if you played a game with yourself and just saw like what really falls apart if I rest when my baby's resting, like maybe nothing does. Maybe we can stop that internal motor and allow this beautiful like oxytocin bath to wash over us and see what shifts and maybe we actually have more spaciousness for creativity and for productivity than when we need it. But like operating as women as though we are men in this very like linear way just doesn't. We're cyclical beings. Right. Like that's so rest is very supportive for however it is we want to be in the world. And I think we are just indoctrinated with this belief that we need to be on this linear trajectory. We always need to be performing and producing. Right. And so it feels very radical to just be in the flow of our baby's rhythms. And yet it's temporary. Like, you know this, Ginny, you're living this, right? Like your kids are out of infancy.
- [31:38]
Ginny Urch
Yep.
- [31:39]
Britt Chambers
Yes.
- [31:40]
Ginny Urch
But maybe it's one of those things too. It's like, it's like a several year period where you get to learn exactly what you just said, Britt. Yeah. Which is that things don't fall apart when you take a breath. You know, like the Waldorf, like the in breath and the out breath. And that we are supposed to have these rhythms like a wave, like these cyclical rhythms within the day. And I think that the baby and the toddler, like, they teach you that otherwise when you're like full steam ahead into adulthood and you're like, no, this child has helps you to learn how to slow down. And it helps you to learn that the world does not fall apart when they fall asleep on you and you can't get anything else done. And there you are. And it's a beautiful thing. It's such a beautiful thing. Like the way that it's meant to work is so beautiful for everyone.
- [32:21]
Britt Chambers
Yes.
- [32:21]
Ginny Urch
It works for the baby, it works for the mother, it works for the family unit. Everybody slows down together and you're just doing those rhythms as a family. So can you talk about, like you talk about, we are desperate for sleep solutions. We're in this dominant culture of separation, of productivity, of comparison. And so we're desperate for solutions. And we look around and it seems like there's only two options, you know, cry it out or wait it out. But I think it's really important to talk about the cry out situation because you say you have all this research on your website. People can go and they can download or they can take. You have courses and you have, you do coaching and you even have a cuddle crew, like mom's, like, let's get.
- [33:00]
Sponsor / Advertisement Voice
Together and support each other.
- [33:02]
Ginny Urch
So lots of options there. You, you sell a shirt that says actually like, this is the cutest shirt ever. Naps in the wild. I mean, our kids fell asleep in the most gorgeous places. British nurse. And then they'd fall asleep and I'd be like sitting on some rock by like a babbling brook and the sun is coming through and then the older kids are like playing in the shallow creek. I was like, this is living like there is nothing better than the moment right now. But this cry it out method, you say babies brains don't have the architecture to rig to regulate on their own until they're three to five years old. Sleep training doesn't actually teach sleep.
- [33:41]
Britt Chambers
Yes.
- [33:42]
Ginny Urch
What does it do?
- [33:44]
Britt Chambers
Well, what does it do? I just released something yesterday. I was talking to a colleague of mine and the tragic reality and just if you just stop and try to metabolize this and think about this and let it live in your body for a minute, I think the conversation could end here. But I want to answer it in a couple parts. We can't. We as in like the cultural we academia. No institutional review board is going to allow a properly designed study on sleep training to move through ethics review because you cannot ethically put videos in a room, a baby's crying alone and study that because it literally is unethical. But we're doing this to babies every single night around the world. We are, in essence, one could argue, we are neglecting their needs at night. Like when during the day would we put a baby in a room and deliberately for 10 or 12 hours not respond to their needs? So this industry was never predicated on anything evidence based. It was garnered from one person's opinion, the late 1800s. And all of the, all of the books, all of the literature on cried out sleep training that you see is copy paste. This one guy, his name was Dr. Emmett Holt's original idea around leaving babies to cry, to essentially break their spirit, which is horrifying. So as science has caught up, what we see is that the needs of the human infant, like if we look at who babies actually are and the fact that they're born with 25% of their brain volume, they have this long period of external gestation, they don't have the architecture available to them. They don't have the wiring from their prefrontal cortex to their amygdala to say using logical reasoning in the prefrontal cortex, they don't have the ability to say, oh, okay, my parents are in the other room, so all is well and I can just rest now and I'll be okay. So what the hypothesis from the neurobiologic community, what the Hypothesis is that's happening to babies when they're left to cry it out is that they're moving from the, this survival state of fight, orf flight, where they're crying. They're, you know, whatever it is. I won't be graphic of whatever the babies are doing alone when they're in this severe state of dysregulation, right? Like their stress curve is going up and up and up and up and up. And then eventually the human brain, the developing brain, without logical reasoning on online its survival brain is going, okay, clearly nobody's coming. I need to conserve my energy. So it moves out of fight or flight and then into dorsal vagal shutdown, it's moving into freeze. And that's to conserve energy. So that's what's happening. We're extinguishing our baby's communication. So the baby's being conditioned to realize, okay, when I'm in the setting and it's this time of day, nobody's coming, so I'm just going to default to that freeze mode and go to sleep. So we've, we've just got this all wrong. And I think the most tragic part is that when we look at infant mental health like we are introducing risk to the developing brain. If we're doing these things, like the wiring that's building in the first three years of life, like, this is the time when the infant brain builds more connections than it ever will. Like you're the external nervous system as a caregiver, so you're teaching the infant's body, like, how to regulate stress, how to feel safe, how to organize. And it's this emotional experience that's building safety for the rest of a baby's life. And it doesn't mean you can't repair, doesn't mean you can't go to therapy later in life and utilize neuroplasticity to repair. But the foundational wellness, the hormones, even like the downstream, the immune function, all of this, the template for lifelong emotional, physical, social health is built in these first three years of life. So when we're doing this repeatedly to babies, we're introducing risk. And unfortunately, parents just aren't given this informed consent.
- [37:44]
Ginny Urch
It's a good way to put it. They don't know. They know.
- [37:49]
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Ginny Urch
And that made it feel like a.
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Ginny Urch
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- [39:41]
Ginny Urch
And in fact, they're sold the opposite. I mean, I, we had attended a church at one point and they were trying, they brought in, they tried to bring in a sleep trainer. I was like, excuse me? You know, like, I, I don't, I don't think that that's appropriate. You know, they're, they're being, I know it's wild. My midwife was like, you need to step in. Like, say it's stand up for the babies. Because, you know, it is shocking. It's shocking.
- [40:06]
Britt Chambers
I hear often of therapists that speak on sleep too. And interestingly, therapist colleagues that I've worked with that have studied perinatal Psychology have actually said that that's outside of scope. Like, it's unethical for therapists to comment on sleep, too. So we're just in a bit of a mess culturally. And pediatricians, who most folks are getting their sleep information from, that's usually like the first place they're going if they have a concern about sleep or need sleep support. Pediatricians have on average, 20 minutes, 20 minutes of education on normal biological infant sleep in their curriculum.
- [40:44]
Ginny Urch
Wow. It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable.
- [40:47]
Britt Chambers
And this is like, there's so much evidence out there supporting what babies need at night. Like, this is not.
- [40:53]
Ginny Urch
Yeah. And what's interesting, to your point earlier, where you were like, look, I was the baby that didn't sleep. We don't have that generational wisdom anymore because. Right. It might even go back to your grandma. Your grandma didn't even know. So there's no one there that says, look, honey, and, or then there's no one that's like, look, I'll come help. I'll come help. I'll come hold the baby. I've always said, like, when I, hopefully someday I get to be a grandma. I was like, I want to come. I'm going to help from like 5 in the morning till 9 in the morning. Like, or, you know, like that, that little bit of window there. Can you get a little bit of rest? I mean, that's, I used to feel like that's all I need, that little bit of rest in that window. And, you know, just someone that says, look, you're going to make it through. You're going to be so glad that you made these decisions. You're going to thrive. You're going to learn a lot about yourself. I, I, those messages are just, they're coming from you. You know, that's why people need to follow along and you're consistently seeing them. And I think it's a really beautiful thing. I talked to this man recently, his name's Dr. Bruce Perry, and he's done some, like, forerunner work, tip of this beer, about childhood trauma. And you know, like, people are like, well, kids are resilient. He's like, no, actually, you know, they can really be harmed. And I thought it was so interesting, Brit, when you talked about, like, we would never leave a baby for 10 to 12 hours during the day. That was even in his book where he was talking about these situations where this one mom, you know, she was really struggling and she raised her first kid and there were a lot of family members around, and so they really helped and Then she had to move when she had the second kid because of work and she didn't have the family support. And so she would leave the baby in the home and take the older one on walks for hours at a time.
- [42:34]
Sponsor / Advertisement Voice
Wow.
- [42:34]
Ginny Urch
And they got to the bottom of this story of why is the one brother pretty stable and the other one is very unstable. Well, that's why, you know, and then there was another story where a mom was getting child care for her baby and she was using a cousin, a family member, and the cousin didn't know anything about babies. And so she would take care of the baby like a dog. She would come and change the diaper and, and feed the baby with a bottle and then leave and go to another job and then come back in three or four hours. And it caused so many problems. So it's so interesting. Like anyone would look at that and be like, okay, yeah, that you're abandoning the child.
- [43:10]
Britt Chambers
Yes.
- [43:10]
Ginny Urch
And yet they don't use the same reasoning for the night.
- [43:13]
Britt Chambers
No, no. And in fact, I think it strikes a deep chord of defensiveness because there's, there's this seemingly impossible binary of you either work and sleep train or you sell your soul to your child. That's the way it's put right. Like you, you, you give up everything, right? Like you give it all away and then you're just with your baby and nursing on demand and co sleeping and all of that. And like there's so many threads we could pull on Jenny, like the medicalization of birth and the formula industry, like the formula industry does not want you to co sleep because if you are co sleeping, you're likely breastfeeding because it's simply just way easier. Like it's just, you're in a natural flow, your baby's right there, you're not rousing to make a bottle. And like, sure, there's so much here. You can also responsively parent and bottle feed. I know so many parents that do, but it's not advantageous for capitalism. So that's where we get really stuck. And when you just made that anecdote about the baby, the two separate sons, and the one being so markedly different, there's a lot of research looking at how western babies are touch deprived. And of course they're touch deprived because if they are alone in a separate room, without physical proximity, without touch, not only are they missing out on all of this, like brain building oxytocin in the biobehavioral synchrony that they're in with their mother or their caregiver all night, but they literally are not being touched in like our limbic system. Our bodies need touch. We are a mammal. Like we're, we're a primate and we need to be. We, like, we're a carry species. We're meant to be on our mom's bodies. So that often, like there's, there's a researcher that calls this undercare that often can result in an empathy circuitry that isn't wired the same as a baby that does have that care like it. There's a lot that's happening that's imprinted outside of just safety and foundational love that is missing if we're not giving this to our babies.
- [45:12]
Ginny Urch
It's a lot.
- [45:13]
Britt Chambers
Yeah, it's a lot.
- [45:14]
Ginny Urch
So it's so important. It's so important because often you're just not exposed to the other ideas.
- [45:19]
Britt Chambers
Yeah.
- [45:20]
Ginny Urch
And, or the dominant culture ideas are so strong and so you just feel like you can't push against it. And if you have more information, it gives you strength and it gives you hope and it gives you confidence in yourself that because other women have done it, I can do it too. You know, you join your cuddle crew and you get on there and, and people will encourage you because no one regrets getting up with their baby at night. In fact, in that Dr. Proust Bruce Perry book talking about the same things about touch, he told a story about a little girl that was four years old and her mom had been through foster care and in a spot where it was like bounce from family to family to family, so she didn't really get those maternal mothering experiences. And so then she has this daughter and the daughter won't gain weight. She's four years old. So. So they say she has infant anorexia. That's what they're trying to diagnose her with. And Dr. Bruce Perry is like, I've never heard of infant anorexia. Like, I, I don't, I don't think that's really a thing. So he goes to check out the situation and what it turned out was that the mom, you know, because of her traumatic upbringing, didn't know to touch her child. She didn't know to rub her back and to hold her and to rock with her. So this little girl's not gaining weight. She's maybe, I think she's four and she's like 35 pounds. Is it, you know, or 25 pounds? I don't know what a four year old's supposed to weigh, but she's like not failure to thrive yeah. So she ends up going to live with his foster mom who has all these kids that come through kind of like what you're talking about earlier, where there's things that are missing. And so the foster mom is rocking with the six year old. Like they're going to sit in the rocker and they're going to rock. The seven year old wakes up at night and is going to come in the bed and the mom's going to rub the back. They missed those things as a baby and so she's helping, you know, to try and fill in those gaps. It's what the kids need anyway. So this mom goes to live with a foster mom and she starts to learn for her own baby, like, oh, I need to be interacting more. And the baby gained 10. The four year old, she gains 10 pounds in one month.
- [47:16]
Britt Chambers
Unbelievable. Yeah.
- [47:18]
Ginny Urch
To your point, the touch deprived. It, it matters so much.
- [47:22]
Britt Chambers
It matters more than I think we know how to measure. Because science is so, it's so quantitative and it's so material, like I said at the beginning. So like, and, and also so dependent on who is getting funding. Like, does, does the machine, for lack of a better term, really care to fund a study that's talking about maternal touch? Like, not really. Honestly, not really. Where's the industry that can profit off of that? It reminds me of like the, the, the general, you know, the entry point with so many parents I work with, they're like, well, I need to go back to work. There's this like, but what do I do? Type of thing. And it's, it's like if we shift our paradigm entirely, like, of course the capitalist economy that we're in is going to reward parents that go back to work. And I'm, I'm kind of thinking as my work evolves, like how do we shift our value system in our families and then in our communities so that we're rewarding, for lack of a better term. I don't even really like the term reward. But so that we're celebrating, so we're honoring, so that we're spotlighting women, mothers, parents that are like, wait a minute, no, actually the most important thing I could be doing right now is being with my baby. Like that is what needs to be celebrated. Yeah, we don't have a framework for that. You know, like there's no LinkedIn badge of I just co. Slept for 5,000 hours. Or like it just doesn't exist.
- [48:43]
Ginny Urch
Right. I, and I agree. I, I thought I had a business idea a long time ago. I was like, there should be like, you could. You should be able to pop on and send a mom, like a reward certificate and a gift basket. Because I was like, my husband's getting all these accolades at work. And I was like, well, I get nothing. Yeah, you copa for you nursed for two and a half years. You, you know, you woke up at night, you help with potty training. I mean, all these things like, z, I want a certificate.
- [49:10]
Britt Chambers
That is so funny, Jenny. Yeah, but I did a. I did a calculation once. I don't remember the exact number. I think my daughter was three. I think she had just hit the end of neurobiological infancy. And I was like, how many hours was this? And it was something like 5200 hours. And then that sent me down a rabbit hole of like a. What I just talked about. So that means she got 5200 hours of touch that a baby that was not co. Sleeping or was not sleeping in close proximity missed out on. So that's like. You know, that took me a moment to feel into the sadness for little me and all of the other kids out there who don't have that. But then also I was thinking about how if we look at just the first three years of life, just neurobiological infancy, when we know the brain is wiring more connections than any other period in life, if we just start, there isn't sleep. When you include naps and nighttime, isn't that like 60% of a baby's life? So it's just like, how are we not thinking about the magnitude of this? And of course, on the flip side of that, how are we not bowing to mothers that are in. In the throes of this every single day, day in and day out, like, how is that not what we're worshiping culturally?
- [50:21]
Ginny Urch
Yeah. Well, that's an astronomical number. 5, 200 hours in three years of life.
- [50:26]
Britt Chambers
I know, I know.
- [50:27]
Ginny Urch
Years. Yeah. It's just sending the message over and over again that this is biologically normal.
- [50:33]
Britt Chambers
It is.
- [50:33]
Ginny Urch
And that your instincts to. To pick up your baby because they're crying and to. And to co. Sleep. I mean, we co. Slept with three of our five. Like I said, we didn't have all the information and. And a little bit at the beginning, but, you know, you're really pushed to not. The baby could fall. I mean, all of that stuff, co Slept, nursed for a very long time with our kids, and you don't regret it, and you do survive, and you thrive. I mean, if you're looking at it like there's from A spiritual perspective. There's like we have a God who never slumbers. And so you really just get such a good view of that. And you, there's this power in yourself that you can do that and you can care for your baby. So can you just if there's a mom listening and there probably are a lot that are really tired and I loved your wording. You say I understand the exhaustion and this is layered, I get it because it's like a cultural thing. But you say I understand the exhaustion, the depletion and the anxiety of early motherhood. What's your message of hope?
- [51:30]
Britt Chambers
My message of hope is it's that when you are up at night, you are not alone. You are in communion with millions of other women up with you. You can't see them, but they're there. And many of them are closeted co sleepers like I said. And they're doing this sacred, sacred work of sharing their bodies with their babies and of co regulating and of attuning with warmth and sensitivity to what their baby's needs are. And then they wake up and they go out in the world and it looks as though it's all for nothing, right? Maybe their baby's crying a lot, maybe their baby is really needing proximity. And they, they have a baby that our society would label as clingy. And then you, the mother and these other mothers that are doing this with you that you can't see, you're just doing it night after night after night, you're in the toil and then you hit around three years, or maybe it's four years and all of a sudden you look at this baby in front of you who now is a toddler or they're in full in childhood and they have blossomed in a way that I can't, I can't even really describe it into words, but the foundational safety and security in the attachment relationship that a baby has, that a toddler has, that a kid has, that was nurtured at night, is unlike anything I've ever seen. It is such a solid, safe, secure relationship and they are fully in their own sovereignty as a kid. They understand that their needs are going to be met. They understand that they can move through the world with safety, with confidence and with love. And paradoxically, to all the messages that were sent, those kids end up wildly independent and in their own power because they have this foundation that all is well. So they feel free to roam free, knowing that their secure base is all is always there. So what you're actually doing Is like, front loading the work. Funny enough, you're investing. It's like, if you're a farmer, you're like, instead of mono cropping, you are tilling this incredible regenerative organic soil for your babies to bloom from.
- [53:43]
Ginny Urch
It's really powerful, I think.
- [53:46]
Sponsor / Advertisement Voice
Like, I.
- [53:47]
Ginny Urch
When I hear you talk and I read what you write and the things that you put out into the world, I'm like, I just wish I would have known you when I had my first babies. You might have not even been alive. I don't know. Like, you know, whatever. So. But, you know, because I just didn't have the information and I, you know, it's like, you come over in the hospital. That's what I did with my first. And I remember when he was like, two or three weeks calling a friend and just being like, I. I am unraveling. And she was like, it'll get better by six weeks, a little bit better. And I was like, I'm not even going to make it till six weeks. Like, you know, I can't even fathom, like, how, you know, how tired and at the end of my rope I am, let alone four years or three years. But I was doing it wrong. Like, I was like, the baby's in another room and I'm getting up and I'm walking down the stairs when I hear the, you know, the jarring, the little baby monitor thing. And then I go down and then I pick the baby up, then I change. Then I'm trying to stay asleep in this rocker chair while I nurse and then try and put them back.
- [54:47]
Britt Chambers
What a mess.
- [54:48]
Sponsor / Advertisement Voice
What a mess.
- [54:49]
Britt Chambers
We're setting mothers up to fail, and it's heartbreaking. And I also think it's so important. Maybe I don't say this enough. I try. I really do try. But I think it's so important to take the onus off the individual. Because if you literally don't have the information, how can you make a different decision? And so many mothers, Jenny, don't have the information. Like, the dominant messaging is, don't do this. It's unsafe. You need to give your baby the gift of sleep. You need to teach your baby sleep. Like, there are Instagram accounts with 3 million followers and there are organizations that are infiltrating what parents are hearing. And their messaging is the same. It's. You need to teach your baby to sleep. Your baby needs to be alone on their back in a crib. And that's just the way it is. So I feel like it's. We can't Fault parents. And we need to actually ask really hard questions about the systems and about why this information is being propagated. Even though we have solid decades of interdisciplinary research, including safe sleep research that is contradicting their recommendations. Like when the world's leading researcher on SIDS is promoting bed sharing and co sleeping as safe infant sleep. But the governing bodies in the United States, for example, are constantly producing materials about a loan back in a crib. Like, what's going on there? So we can't fault parents. I think we need to meet parents with radical compassion and also give them informed consent. Yeah.
- [56:19]
Ginny Urch
Yeah. Because that's why I was so exhausted. I'm so exhausted because I'm getting up, I'm walking down a step set of stairs. Like I'm complete. It's so jarring. So of course I'm exhausted. And of course in that specific situation, you're like, I'm not gonna be able to do this for three years. But if the bay.
- [56:33]
Britt Chambers
Yeah.
- [56:34]
Ginny Urch
Baby's in your bed and they're right there and you, you know, they're just nursing and you're kind of quasi awake and, and, and you, like, there is something about that. It must be oxytocin. You would know what it is. But there is. I can feel it even, even right now, that baby in the crux of your arm.
- [56:51]
Britt Chambers
Like how it's oxytocin, it's serotonin, it's dopamine, it's nature's brilliant design that's actually protective for maternal mental health.
- [56:59]
Ginny Urch
That's it. Yeah. Because you feel like this is the right thing to be doing. Like, my baby is safe. I know where my baby is. And then I think you sleep deeper.
- [57:09]
Britt Chambers
Well, totally. I mean, Dr. James McKenna has tons of tons of research showing that breastfeeding dyads get better sleep than any other sleeping setup. And that when you are rousing, when a baby's like on your breast and nursing and you've got a baby in the cuddle curl position and they're next to you, that it's this basically subconscious rousing that's happening in perfect synchrony within.02, I think it would be called 2 milliseconds. So that's how in sync you are with your baby. So that's so different for your brain and for your sleep cycles as an adult than getting up, coming to full consciousness, turning on a light, walking down the hallway. Like you're literally telling your body, okay, we got to get up. This is time to secrete cortisol. Whereas if you're bed sharing. You've just got melatonin flowing all night the way that you should, so you're not rising and peaking with these cortisol spikes. So you do feel more rested.
- [58:02]
Sponsor / Advertisement Voice
Wow.
- [58:03]
Ginny Urch
It's really powerful. People can find more on your website and there's a lot there. There's a lot of support. It's called Good night, Moon Child. A whole lot of support, actually. I want. I went on and I sent it to my midwife. I was like, look at how much support she offers. Like, there's so many options from a newsletter to coaching to, to even just having, like, I printed off this position paper that's right there and easy to get from the Children's Sleep foundation, so you can grab that there about the potential risks of sleep training. I mean, there's a lot here and you want to know. Sleep training is potentially damaging to lifelong sleep health. Sleep training potentially changes the relationship between infants and their caregivers. This relationship forms mental health and is a template for all future relationships. During sleep training, infants experience stress and stop signaling for a care. I mean, caregiver. If you don't know, you're going to be sad that you didn't know it down the road. So I just think what you're doing is so wonderful and I so appreciate your time, Brit, for coming on and sharing all this. And I'll make sure I'll put all the links in the show notes so people can find more.
- [59:01]
Britt Chambers
Thank you so much for having me. What a pleasure and an honor to be able to have this conversation. I think it's really brave of you to too, so thank you.
- [59:08]
Ginny Urch
Thanks. Okay, real quick. I know we're like at the last minute, but we always end our show with the same question. So I've got to ask because otherwise people will be like, wait, you didn't ask. What's a favorite memory from your childhood?
- [59:17]
Sponsor / Advertisement Voice
That was outside.
- [59:18]
Britt Chambers
Oh, my gosh. Favorite memory from my childhood, outside. All of my favorite memories are outside. So I grew up in upstate New York, like I mentioned. And I remember being young enough. I remember back to being young enough that I was in my dad's backpack, like in this old aluminum backpack. And I remember hiking in the winter and watching the wind move through the trees and the snow fall around me and being in total reverent awe for the miracle of life. That's what I like. I remember that as a three or four year old, just the awe, the wonder and that carried me through, like there's nothing in this world that I enjoy More than getting my feet in the earth and hiking and just being, being one with nature, those are really formative memories for me. Just being in the backpack, being along for the ride before I could walk myself.
- [60:04]
Ginny Urch
Wow. Is that powerful? It's so powerful. Because if you're listening and you're like, well, first of all, if you have your baby in the backpack till they're three or four or five, that's going to be really good for your bone structure. It actually helps you to lose weight. It signals to your body to lose weight. When you have that extra weight on your bones. I'm like, this is just such a perfect system. But how incredible to think, think my baby back there is looking around my 3 year old and 4 year old and just taking in the awe and wonder as we walk through the woods. It's so powerful.
- [60:32]
Britt Chambers
It's like the ultimate sensory enrichment.
- [60:35]
Ginny Urch
Yeah, it is, it is. Brit, I'm honored to know you and so thankful for what you're putting out in the world. Like, I'm at the spot where I'm thinking, like, this will be what my daughters, you know, in the next five to 10 years if they have children, like, this is the information that will be there for them. And so it is wonderful. And I really, really appreciate your time.
- [60:53]
Britt Chambers
Your work is so important. It's actually been really formative for me, Jenny. I've been, I've been. I found your work where you had to have been doing this 10 years ago.
- [61:00]
Ginny Urch
Yeah. 10 years.
- [61:02]
Britt Chambers
Yeah. I must have found you right at the beginning.
- [61:04]
Ginny Urch
Yeah. Oh, it's so great. I make these natural ways. They're easier and they're better for everyone. So you're doing messages? Yeah, together we're doing it.
- [61:12]
Britt Chambers
Thank you so much, Ginny.