Sleep is My Waking Passion
Hosted by Dr. Alison Kole—a triple-boarded pulmonary critical care and sleep medicine physician, reformed chronic insomniac, devoted mom, and unapologetic sleep health creator—this hit podcast takes you on the real, unfiltered journey inside the science and soul of sleep. Each week, with wisdom forged from the trenches of night shifts and the chaos of motherhood, Alison sits down with top-tier experts and ordinary people with extraordinary sleep stories, unraveling how sleep shapes happiness, health, and destiny. If you want the 360° truth—the wins, the setbacks, the breakthroughs—about why every hour of sleep could be the most important hour of your life, this is the show that will change how you see your pillow forever. Sleep isn’t just her passion—it’s the key to waking up to your potential. Hit subscribe and transform your nights, days, and dreams.
Sleep is My Waking Passion
Back To School Sleep Reset featuring Dr. Sujay Kansagra
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The Back-to-School Sleep Reset Every Family Needs Right Now
Summer let everyone drift. Later bedtimes, slower mornings, no alarms. Then the school calendar shows up and suddenly you're asking a kid whose body clock is set to midnight to be alert at 7 a.m.
You are not alone, and you are not a bad parent. This is biology.
This week Dr. Alison Kole sits down with Dr. Sujay Kansagra — pediatric neurologist and sleep medicine specialist at Duke, the voice behind @thatsleepdoc, and the inventor of Lullabee, a smart crib mattress built on actual infant sleep science. He is one of the clearest communicators in sleep medicine, and this conversation is packed with things you can start doing tonight.
In this episode:
How much sleep kids actually need at every age, so you can measure how far off you really are
Why summer drift isn't automatically harmful, and the two things that matter more than a perfect schedule
Toddlers are larks. Teenagers are owls. Why fighting either one is a losing strategy
The "robotic return to bed" technique for bedtime battles, and why Dr. Kansagra once used it 213 times in a single night
How to tell the difference between a child pushing limits and a child who is anxious, especially when they can't name the feeling themselves
The 10 to 15 minute rule for shifting a teenager's clock back before day one of school, plus the light, dim, and meal-timing levers that make it stick
Where melatonin actually has evidence behind it as a clock-shifting agent, why the dose is far smaller and the timing far earlier than most people assume, and why this is a conversation for your provider and not the gummy aisle
Why a consistent wake time matters more than a consistent bedtime
The counterintuitive weekend fix: don't sleep in, take a strategic midday nap instead. Twenty to thirty minutes or a full ninety, and why the middle is the worst place to land
Why this nap advice is not for chronic insomniacs
Permanent standard time vs. permanent daylight saving time: the morning-light argument, the school-bus safety argument, and what happened the last time this country tried it in the 1970s
How school start times and daylight saving stack the deck against developing teenage brains
The story behind Lullabee: how it soothes, how it weans itself as a baby's sleep matures, and why it re-engages during regressions
Sleep is not a luxury. It's a vital sign. And for your kids, it's the foundation the whole school year is built on.
About the guest Dr. Sujay Kansagra is a pediatric neurologist and sleep medicine specialist at Duke University Medical Center, the creator behind @thatsleepdoc, and the inventor of Lullabee.
Find him: @thatsleepdoc on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and Threads Lullabee: lullabee.com
Connect with Dr. Alison Kole Website: askthesleepmd.com Instagram: @askthesleepmd
If this episode helped you build your back-to-school sleep plan, follow the show, share it with one parent who needs it, and leave a review so more families can find it.
Great days start the night before. Sleep well.
This podcast is for educational purposes and is not medical advice. Talk with your own clinician about your family's situation.
Hello and welcome to Sleep is My Waking Passion, the podcast where we get real about sleep and how it shapes your life. I'm Dr. Allison Cole, a triple-boarded pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine physician who's learned to thrive despite having chronic insomnia. And now I'm here to help you do the same. Hello, everyone, and welcome back. I have a super fun guest today. I have Dr. Sujay Consagra. He is a doctor at a Duke. If you live under a rock, maybe you haven't heard of him. His handle is at that sleep doc on Instagram, and he has a huge following there. Sujay, I met at Sleep2026, and I had been fangirling over his content for a long time. If you haven't seen his educational videos on Instagram, please go check him out. And today we are taping in summer and we are getting prepared for the school season. So because school is almost here, if your kids have been kind of on summertime time, some of us allow our kids a little bit of that latitude, meaning that they may be staying up later, they may be sleeping in. I want you to know that you are not alone. And today is all about getting our children sleep on track, back on track before they start school. Before we continue, be sure to like, comment, follow, and share this with someone who you know needs to hear it. Dr. Consagra is a pediatric neurologist and sleep medicine specialist. He is at Duke. He's also an inventor. So I'm gonna ask him about his invention. He created Lullaby, a smart crib mattress that learns in infant sleep patterns and helps babies learn to sleep on their own. We'll hear about that later in the show. But first, the back to school sleep reset every family needs right now. All right. Thank you so much for joining me today, Sujay. It is really a pleasure.
SPEAKER_02Oh, it's wonderful to be here. Thanks for the invite.
SPEAKER_01So, kids have been up late all summer, some of them. I've even given my kids a grace period of about 30 minutes, not too long for me because of my sleep background. But, you know, how big a deal is that when we drift over the summer? In other words, we just kind of lose some of the scheduling priorities because the kids don't have as many activities and what have you. What happens to a child's sleep over summer? That's my overarching theme that I want to talk with you about today. But before we do that, let's level set with grounding everyone in how much sleep kids actually do need for their age. Sure. So parents kind of know how far off they might be from what their good baseline is.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. These are all great questions, and these are fundamentally important things to answer. Sleep is kind of the foundation which all of good health is based, is what I like to say. You know, it's not just one of the pillars of good health, it's the foundation on which, you know, health is really kind of built on top of. And I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but you know, just something to kind of emphasize. When it comes to overall sleep need, we do it based on age. The younger you are, the more sleep you need. By the time you hit around one year of age, the average is about 14 hours over a 24-hour period. And there's a wide range here, but 14 hours is a good ballpark to think about at one year of age. For preschool children, about three to five years of age, we're thinking anywhere between 10 and 13 hours. For our young kind of school age, six to twelve years of age, I think nine to twelve is a reasonable ballpark range. And then for our teenagers, usually we're thinking eight, eight and a half, all the way up to perhaps ten hours. So that's the typical range. By the time we hit adulthood, you know, seven to nine hours.
SPEAKER_01So kids in the summer sometimes really kind of want to do their own thing. They're staying up late and they're sleeping in. Is that really bad for them?
SPEAKER_02Well, it's interestingly, depending on the age, for teenagers, we tend to be natural night owls, right? So teenagers, their body clock or the circadian rhythm, is naturally pushed late. And so when they end up going to bed late and sleeping in, they're doing what feels right for their body clock. Toddlers, it's usually opposite. They tend to be morning people. And so sticking with a good early bedtime is ideal because they're going to likely wake up very early in the morning. At the end of the day, the primary focus is on the quantity of sleep and then the quality of sleep. And if you're sleeping at the right times according to your body clock and allowed to get the amount of hours that your body needs, you're in pretty good shape. So it's okay that you drift a bit in the summer, so long as you get good quality and quantity of sleep.
SPEAKER_01If let's say you're dealing with a younger child, that's my guess, but maybe it's an older kid too. There are kids that really like to try to fight bedtime.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_01What actually works for them and what kind of makes things worse as a parent? Like, yeah.
SPEAKER_02So that early age, you know, toddlers are these amazing experimenters. They're looking to see, you know, what they can do to perhaps delay bedtime. They have some FOMO as well, don't want to miss out on what's going on in the world around them. And so they really are testing their limits. Now, there are two main issues that occur with kids. One is certainly limit testing, but toddlers can also have some level of anxiety. And so we have to kind of determine which direction we're going here. But if it's pure just pushing limits at nighttime and it's turning into a battle, there are some tried and true techniques that don't involve a lot of, you know, raising the emotions for parents and a lot of back and forth. And I'm happy to go through those techniques, but the goal is that it's not a battle, that everybody goes to sleep happy, comfortable, and confident. That's the eventual goal, even for toddlers.
SPEAKER_01What are some of the recommendations you think you might give people?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So the foundation always is in good sleep hygiene, right? So we talk about the things in your environment, the things that you're doing behaviorally that can set you up for a good night of sleep. So that's having a nice nighttime routine, keeping the environment comfortable and calm and dark, making sure you're avoiding excessive amounts of caffeine during the day, even for our young children, you know, even for toddlers, believe it or not, they can start getting into some caffeine, drinking a little bit of the parents' coffee, right? So we have to be careful there. And trying to have a consistent wake-up time. That's setting you up for success. Once you're in bed, you're there at a reasonable time frame. The child is already feeling sleepy. So, you know, you're not putting them in there an hour before they actually feel sleepy, because then you're of course going to have a battle on your hands. If you're getting them in there at a reasonable time, then it's a matter of enforcing some of those limits. So if you think they continuously leave the room only because they are forcing, they're trying to push their limits, then it's having a line in the sand to say, hey, at this point, once our routine is done, once you're in your bed and time for sleep, my response to you is going to be completely consistent and persistent, which is typically bringing them back to their bed, reassuring them that they're safe, and then leaving the room again. So long as we're not dealing with an anxious child. So that caveat is always there. It's just a child that's pushing their limits. Sometimes we call this the robotic return to bed. There's no emotion, there's no coaxing, there's no kind of negotiation. We're not going to increase our level of emotion here. We're going to stay neutral and we're going to say, Hey, Timmy, the routine is done. It's past your bedtime. We have to put you back in bed. And then you leave the room again. And then Timmy follows you back out. You do the same thing. You repeat the process. I had to bring my toddler back to his bed 213 times one night. Wow. So, you know, you have to have a level of persistence that's beyond anything that you're typically accustomed to. So, yeah, that's one technique.
SPEAKER_01How do you really distinguish between the anxious child and not? I mean, sometimes there's going to be very obvious signs, but sometimes maybe they may have difficulty expressing what they're feeling.
SPEAKER_02100%. 100%. And this can be challenging. If there are concerns, let's say anxiety does run in the family, if you're seeing any anxious tendencies, which usually is a larger amount of separation anxiety than would be comfortable. That's usually how it presents at this age. So let's say you're doing a daycare drop-off, and it every drop-off tends to be really, really hard. You know, the uh adherence to routines where they don't like things like out of their typical routine, frequent asking of questions, even though you've provided reassurance. These are going to all be subtle signs. Some children don't manifest any of the typical characteristics. And sometimes their anxiety comes out as irritability, uh, and it comes out as you know, behavioral challenges when really the core issue is anxiety. So, you know, I tell parents just to be wide open to that possibility and talk to your physician, talk to your pediatrician or your healthcare provider if there's any concerns.
SPEAKER_01I get this a lot. So I'm going to switch gears and we're going to go to that delayed sleep phase teenager.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_01We know that there's an epidemic of chronic sleep deprivation across all age groups, especially our teenagers and our tweens, middle school age kids. How do we start to get them back on track from where they're banking all their sleep and doing whatever they want with their circadian biology? But now we need to fit in all the issues with school times.
SPEAKER_02Yes, yes. For teenagers, this is an ultimate challenge. You know, by nature, they are night owls. You know, there is a natural shift in their circadian rhythm to naturally want to wake up late and go to bed late. And parents get very frustrated, like, why are you staying up so late and on your phone? And they're screaming back, Well, I can't sleep. And the parents like, well, you can't sleep because you're on your phone. Well, there's a little bit of truth to both sides, which is, you know, teenagers naturally oftentimes cannot feel sleepy until it's much later. It's like asking your typical adult, hey, go to bed at 7 p.m. It's really hard to do that. It's not where your body clock lies. So, how do you shift it? Well, we know there are a couple of levers that we can push on to get sleep moving in the right direction. Start early. This is not something you can do overnight if they have shifted their schedule by numerous hours, which they usually have, right? And so if you have a teenager that's going to bed at midnight and waking up at 10 o'clock in the morning, and now suddenly they have to start waking up at six in the morning. That's a four-hour shift earlier. It's in the direction that's opposite to where their body clock naturally wants to go. So it's going to take time. I plan for about 10 or 15 minutes a day of adjustment. Now, what do you do? Well, you move it slowly. So you start waking up 10, 15 minutes earlier every day, getting lots of bright light when you wake up, trying to move your bedtime earlier by 10, 15 minutes as well, keeping things dim for the 20, 30 minutes leading up to bed, and then trying to move up the timing of your meals as well, because we know that food intake can play a role in the timing of circadian physiology. This is one scenario, and I'm not telling anybody to go out there and take melatonin, but this is one scenario in the sleep medicine world where we actually have data to support melatonin's use, which is as a clock shifting agent. But it turns out it's you know usually really low doses taken much earlier than most people realize, two to six hours prior to the current bedtime, which can also help advance your natural body clock. Again, I'm not saying go out and do that. I'm saying that's if your healthcare provider thinks it might be an important part to helping you, this is where there is data to support it.
SPEAKER_01So light in the morning for sure. Lights, yes. And don't wait until the day before school to try to make this shift.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_01You gotta start thinking about it in advance.
SPEAKER_02100%.
SPEAKER_01Those are really huge. And talk to your healthcare provider before you go reaching for the gummies. You do not need, you know, monster doses of melatonin. And it can be kind of tricky to try to figure out when the right timing is for melatonin. So it can sound counterintuitive, but you know, even think about you could try something at dinner even like it's gotta be way earlier than you think. It's not like 30 minutes before bed and you're hoping that magic is going to happen. It's not quite gonna happen that way. But of course, this is not meant for the individual person listening. This is just general chatter. You gotta talk to your provider first, right? Because we want to be responsible. Such great advice. All right. So now we've started school. What do you tell folks when people want to sleep in on the weekends to catch up? What do we do about that?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. From all of a sleep scheduling standpoint, perhaps the best thing that we can do is have a consistent wake-up time or keeping it as consistent as possible. It's more important than a consistent bedtime. You know, sleepiness can fluctuate from night to night, but the wake-up time is incredibly important because it's that morning light that keeps our circadian body clock lined up and really kind of locked in. Because naturally, if we, you know, we've done these experiments in the sleep medicine world, and I'm we've put folks in caves for months at a time, and lo and behold, our circadian rhythm is slightly longer than 24 hours. And so we'd want to sleep in a little bit more every single day, and it's that morning light that really drives us to stick with a 24-hour pattern. So morning light is important, having that consistent wake up time is important. Now, teenagers oftentimes do need to catch up on some sleep because the time that they actually have to wake up, we let's say they have school at like 7 o'clock, and high schools start way too early, and we can do a whole podcast on school start times. But let's say I have to wake up at 6 o'clock, and I'm telling them they need 10 hours of sleep. That's an 8 p.m. bedtime. I don't know any teenager that's like, yep, all right, 8 p.m. It's time to wrap it up and go to bed, right?
SPEAKER_01I'm not even ready for that.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. So they're gonna have some sleep deprivation, likely during the course of the week. What's the best way to make up for it? Well, we want that morning light. So the best way is actually taking like a midday nap and trying to stick with the same wake-up time so your body sees that early morning light. All right. So instead of sleeping in, getting your day started within an hour of the wake-up time on the school morning, and then thinking about taking a nap midday. Not a popular option because teenagers naturally just they just want to lay in bed and sleep in to catch up, but that's the best one for your body clock and adjusting to your body clock.
SPEAKER_01How long of a nap?
SPEAKER_02The ideal nap is 20 to 30 minutes or a full 90 minutes, is what I tell folks. So 20 to 30 minutes so you don't get into like the deepest stages of sleep, because then you're gonna wake up and you're gonna feel terrible, you're gonna have a headache and you're gonna think that your nap actually made things worse when in fact all you're doing is experiencing that phenomenon of sleep inertia. You know, that's that's the phenomenon right when you're trying to get up and going. So that will avoid it if you take a shorter nap or a full 90 minutes to get through a full sleep cycle. Now, again, really the answer is really depending on how sleep-deprived you truly are. If you're really skimping on the sleep during the weekdays, you may need to sleep longer for your nap. But ideal state, 90 minutes at the most. That way you wake up in time to build up that sleep drive again, which is important to helping you fall back asleep at a reasonable time at night.
SPEAKER_01Interesting. I've never actually recommended someone. I mean, it makes logical sense to go through an entire sleep cycle. I always worry, though, that then it becomes the habit of, hey, I'm now fragmenting my sleep. I just get a monster sleep in the middle of the day, and then, you know.
SPEAKER_02100%. That's right. Yep. Not great for insomniacs, right? So for chronic insomnia, we're saying, you know, please don't nap. But you know, most of our teenagers are really good sleepers. And so if they are sleep deprived, usually they can take a nap and still hopefully fall asleep at a reasonable time at nighttime.
SPEAKER_01I love that because you are distinguishing, we're not talking about people who struggle to sleep, such as myself, where that would be the worst case scenario. I'd end up with like two sleep cycles, probably would be a disaster. But again, for the chronically sleep-deprived, but you actually don't have trouble sleeping, you just don't have the time, and your circadian timing is not really matching up with life, essentially. Speaking of which, I had some other like types of questions, and I want to talk about Lullaby for a second, but you've done such great posts. One of the things that's really kind of gotten all of the sleep community up in arms. I just did this with Dr. Beth Ann Mallow. Her episode is out this week, and I don't care. I'm gonna do it again. I have been to Hill Day three times. I actually am meeting with Senator Kim, or maybe it's not directly with him, but with somebody on his team next week. And I did have an opportunity to meet him in person on our last Hill Day. How can I be better at the messaging for why we need to not move to permanent daylight saving time? We really need permanent standard time, and we even have a new bill for it that would really allow some flexibility, meaning if you really wanted to opt in to change your schedule, what have you, you could. But in reality, why aren't we open in this country to actually trying something we haven't done, which is permanent standard time? How do I make that argument more salient to the general public? Because I kind of feel like you're doing great discussions on science and everything, but I just I worry that it's not getting through and I don't know how to do that better.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, it's funny, you know, I was just on ABC News talking about this very thing, trying to get this message out, you know, with Diane Masedo, who is also a sleep expert and has written a book on sleep. An author, right? Yes, that's right. I'm thankful that she gives us sleep folks the platform to share this message. Morning light is important. Morning light is one of those foundationally important things when it comes to our sleep timing and our scheduling. The risk of permanent daylight saving time is that in the winter months, you just don't have a lot of morning light. Really, the sun rises for most of the country very late, much later than the time that you are naturally gonna wake up. So, what does that end up doing? Well, if we don't get that light signal in the morning, we talked about how our body clock is naturally a little bit longer than 24 hours. And so you turn into, everybody turns into a little bit more of a night owl. And so, no light in the morning, too much light in the evening, our bedtimes are pushed a little bit later. And society's clock says you gotta be at work at eight o'clock, right? There's no real shifting that, unfortunately. So what we end up having is a little bit of a restriction in our overall sleep opportunity time. We all become a little bit more sleep deprived and a little less healthy. This is a population nationwide experiment where we're pushing everybody to be to get a little bit less sleep. Now, you know, the argument here is well, we have more hours of daylight in the evening, more time for recreation, and you know, maybe less crime, et cetera, in the afternoon and evening if we have more light. And I get those arguments. My main concern is about safety for our school children in the morning when they're going to school in the dark. This was the main issue that came up in the 70s when we tried this. You know, people are just miserable. You know, you're waking up an hour earlier. So all the issues with weather-related stuff when it comes to snow and ice and things that are potentially dangerous on the roads, those are out there before the sun comes out. You don't have a chance to deal with any of that or thaw any of that. That's a safety issue. It's colder, it's a one-hour colder, right? I mean, you're deeper into the night when you're getting up and doing things. So for all of those reasons, you know, from a morning safety, from overall health standpoint, for your circadian timing, all those reasons it's important to have the morning light. Then the main issue with permanent daylight saving is that during those winter months, much of the country has sunrise much, much too late.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for that. It is so necessary. And one of the things that is a separate agenda item, but is actually really interrelated, and you alluded to it, is the fact that school start times, particularly as our biology changes as we're evolving as humans, we just don't quite have the timing right. And I know that I did not go to high school at seven in the morning. I think I had to be there at around eight o'clock. I'm not remembering being there at seven. It was many moons ago, but I there was a shift there. That is really horrible for our teenagers, right? And then if you layer in permanent daylight saving, which again, to reiterate what you're saying, means we're kind of like delaying ourselves even further, which puts our very vulnerable teenage developing brains at a disadvantage already. And then we're asking them to go to school even sooner in the dark. This is a setup for sleep-deprived kids that are not functioning on all cylinders, they can't learn as well. They get more injuries when they play sports and they make bad decisions because we make bad decisions when we're not sleeping well, right? It affects how we interact with our world. And so it's really important to consider that if you would agree that we need to kind of shift time for that reason. But really, ideally, what we'd be doing is doing standard time and changing school start times.
SPEAKER_02That would be ideal world, Allison. This is like the sleep docs, you know, dream come true, right? I mean, let's get people the sleep that they need and adjust a little bit of our societal expectations to ensure people are getting sleep that they need. Yeah. That would be great. Maybe our teenagers would be a little less cranky, you know, if we actually allowed them the time and opportunity to sleep, you know.
SPEAKER_01But I'm really going to think about that nap on the weekends for my teenagers that are really struggling and sleep deprived. That's such great advice. Thank you for that. I just didn't look at it that way. And I I love learning from smart people. Speaking of smart, you invented a crib, like, where did this crib mattress thing come from? Like, what's up with that?
SPEAKER_02Uh let me tell you, this is a long story, which is, you know, I'm I am a clinician and, you know, just a researcher and academician by trade. And and I had this idea many years ago, uh, which essentially directly applies to sleep science we know so well when it comes to infant sleep, which is you want to support them when they need, but eventually make them an independent sleeper. I was like, we could do that using a device. It's a really straightforward solution. But then I knew nothing about engineering or business, and I was just waiting for somebody to invent it. I was like, somebody's gonna invent this. Certainly, Allison. This is such a simple and easy, straightforward idea, right? Support the kid they need, then wean them off the support. You know, this is what technology should do, try to wean us off of the technology. And so then I waited and waited, and nobody was inventing it. I don't want to go to too many dark places here, but you know, child neurology is my kind of core specialty. We cover the hospital, and when we cover, we see some really sad and scary things that happen to children if they're either not in their safe sleep location or because parents have been very sleep deprived at the end of their rope or the driving in unsafe situations due to sleep deprivation. So I saw enough bad things happen that I said, gosh, I'm gonna have to make this. I'm gonna have to make it because nobody's making it. The products are coming out of the market actually run opposite to what we know is true of the sleep science, mostly because they're not made by sleep doctors. They're made by people that are, you know, good at marketing. And I said, I'm going to make it myself. That's when this started.
SPEAKER_01How does it work?
SPEAKER_02Lullaby looks like an ordinary crib mattress. It has sensors inside that to know when the child is awake and crying. And when the child is awake and crying, it produces gentle sound and vibration from within the mattress to help lull the child back to sleep. If the child is still awake, it increases the level of intensity until the child falls asleep. So level one through 10, 10 is still gentle, it's nothing crazy, right? So and then when the child falls back asleep, it ramps slowly back down to no output. So at baseline, there's nothing coming out of the mattress at all. It's just they're waiting to support your child when they need to be gently soothed. But the unique thing about Lullaby is that it tracks the child historical sleep patterns. It knows when your child is sleeping well, not needing too much support and then it starts to wean the amount of help it'll give the child with any given awakening. So it starts to automatically wean itself off if the child's sleep patterns dictate that the child is ready. And then if the child's sleep regresses in the future teeth come in or they start sitting up then it'll kick back in again and help, you know, help support the child again. So it's meant to be a technology that weans when necessary but supports when needed. But a temporary technology solution for a long-lasting behavioral change. That's the goal.
SPEAKER_01And then it also allows the parent to actually get some rest because they're not running in there every time the kid wakes up.
SPEAKER_02That's the hope, right? So you know Lullaby is never going to replace parenting. So of course if her child is hungry, if her child needs to be changed, you know, Lullaby can't do that yet. No, no lullaby can't do that. It can't feed your child.
SPEAKER_01Smells like a dirty diaper in here. Alert alert.
SPEAKER_02That's right yeah maybe we'll have that notification you'll have like smell sensors. Technology who knows what the future is going to hold. But for now it's there to soothe your child when your child just needs a little bit of soothing, right? So when they're really young, sometimes they need that. They need a little bit of extra help to get back to sleep. And then as they get older when they don't need the feeds when they don't need to constantly be held and shushed to sleep it's there to help wean them off of the that support. That's the ultimate goal. But keeping them in their safe sleep space while we do it right so they are in their crib. Otherwise you know safe sleep guidelines would dictate a really you know the crib can be a tough place to sleep. It's bare, it's firm you're on your back as a really young infant these things can make sleep naturally a little bit harder. But we want to prioritize their safety might as well give them a way to help them sleep in that safest sleep location.
SPEAKER_01Speaking of which what is the ideal age for something like this? Because you we're talking about how little kids kind of really need a lot of attention initially.
SPEAKER_02The earlier the better. Based on our clinical trial we suspect that the younger you are the better it will end up being for you. Once you're let's say a year old and you're like oh my kid can't sleep there are usually some really ingrained behavioral challenges at play that Lullaby yes could probably help get them accustomed to sleep in the crib. Our oldest child is I think 18 months that used it from yeah that the very start at 18 months and helped them with the transition from bed sharing into the crib because that was the parent's preference. So it likely can help but we suspect that the younger you are the more effective it's going to be long term.
SPEAKER_01And when was this released? How how am I just hearing about this?
SPEAKER_02Oh it's been like months it's it's only been a few months. Okay. I announced it through social media in like in March. Yeah. So it's very new.
SPEAKER_01That makes sense because I was like where was this when my kids were little because I could have used this.
SPEAKER_02Yes sorry we're a little bit late. We missed a lot of potential you know parents but let's hope to make the next generation of parenting a little bit easier. That's the goal.
SPEAKER_01Well Sujay, you are just an absolute delight and an outstanding guest. I so appreciate your time. Of course. I'm going to have you do a shameless plug here. Where can people find Lullaby and where can they follow you for more sleep advice?
SPEAKER_02Well thank you. So Lullaby is at lullaby.com L-U-L-L-A-B-E-E lullaby.com sounds like lullaby but it's lullaby and then I am anywhere that social media is consumed by the masses. So that sleep doc, you know, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, threads, I'm there. Trying to dispel misinformation and give you science-based advice to help you and your family sleep.
SPEAKER_01And you are a superb communicator. Really, this is super cool and such a pleasure to have you. If this episode helped you build a back to school sleep plan, follow the show, share it with one parent who needs to hear it and leave a review so more families can find it. The show notes have links to Lullaby and Dr. Consagra's Instagram at that sleepdock. And remember that great days start the night before. So sleep well and I'll see you next time.
SPEAKER_00If you would like to work directly with Dr. Cole to uncover the root cause of your sleep issues visit askthsleepmd.com slash work with me. She now offers virtual visits for insured patients in New Jersey, New York, California, and Georgia through OCNOMISleep, an in-person insurance-based care for New Jersey residents through Patient First MD in Middletown, New Jersey. Space is limited so sign up today. If you prefer immediate comprehensive evaluation, Dr. Cole also provides concierge virtual sleep consultations through Oak Health Center. You can find out more at Oak dot sleep. Your best nights start with a plan. Let Dr. Cole help you build your personalized blueprint to better sleep and better health.
SPEAKER_01Please be advised that the Sleep is my waking passion podcast is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It does not constitute medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider for personalized guidance. For my full disclaimer please visit askthesleepmd.com and while you're there don't forget to sign up for my free newsletter. Sweet dreams and happy listening
