Dr Pamela Douglas smiling

About The Possums Sleep Program

Hello and welcome!

It’s hard for others to understand just how desperate we might feel as parents when we have baby or toddler sleep problems. The exhaustion or sleep deprivation can be beyond belief.

Then there’s all the conflicting advice you receive - only because people care about you and want to help. How stressful conflicting advice can be, though! What can you believe, when you're simply wanting to do what's best for your little child?

Caring for a tiny person can be such a wonderful time for you and your family, full of joy and delight – and it can also be outrightly miserable. My aim is to help you grow the joy side of things, as well as to help you manage when the going is tough.

The Possums Sleep Program

Helps with normal night waking
Resolves excessive night waking
Helps make daytime sleep and bedtimes easy and no-fuss.

It doesn't recommend that you

Put off responding to your baby or toddler when she is fussing or crying
Leave your little one alone when he is upset.

The Possums Sleep Program works on different principles altogether. But it does share with you new ways, step by step, to make sleep as easy (or as manageable) as possible for your family.

The Possums Sleep Program is intended for all parents, carers, and their babies and toddlers across our many human diversities and abilities. You are the expert on your own little one, so I’ll just be inviting you to try out some new ideas, to see what works for you and your unique child, in your own unique family. Experimenting is the key.

How to find your way around

There are a few ways you can move around The Possums Sleep Program. Just choose the way that suits you and your family best.

You might enter in by answering the questions on the home page. Coming in this way, you're served up a seletion of the most important topics, to fit your situation. After that, for the best results in your family's life, you'd go on to work through the whole of The Possums Sleep Program.

You might decide to look through the Possums sleep 101 (brief & simple) articles first, to get oriented. Then you'd go on to the comprehensive Possums Sleep Program after that.

Or you decide to go straight into one of these three sections

It's an emergency
Newborn sleep
When baby cries a lot

depending on your or your family's needs. Again, these are introductory pages, designed to get you oriented and underway when you're exhausted and under pressure. To benefit the most, you'd then work through the comprehensive The Possums Sleep Program.

Other parents just start at the beginning of The essentials (in either Baby sleep or Toddler sleep, depending the age of your child), and work your way through the whole thing!

My small family team and I have tried very hard to give you flexible, easy access to the program, so that you are served up options which fit you and your little one's needs at this moment in time. The Possums Sleep Program has been a labour of love, a culmination of decades of work. My hope is that The Possums Sleep Program helps you and your family grow joy in the days – and nights – as you care for your little one!

Taking care of you

In addition to practical strategies to improve your little one's sleep, The Possums Sleep Program aims to help you care for your emotional and mental well-being through this demanding time of life.

Do you find your mind seems to be in perpetual overdrive now that you have a small child? Having a lot of painful thoughts and feelings is normal when we’re facing big life changes, and especially when we’re sleep deprived. Often our exhausted, worried brain starts telling us lots of unhelpful and upsetting things, like

Our sleep problems must be damaging my small child's developing brain! (Actually, they're not.)
I’m obviously doing something wrong. (Actually, you’re not. You’re experimenting.)
How can I possibly face another day or night like this? (It definitely feels sometimes like you can’t!)

In the Caring for you section of The Possums Sleep Program, I offer mental health strategies, to help you get through. I think you'll find them useful throughout the rest of your life, too!

Research studies show what we know from the clinic: that The Possums Sleep Program works

At a time when the description 'evidence-based' has become a marketing tool, The Possums Sleep Program is authentically evidence-based. It's developed according to best practice implementation science, including from my 30 or so research publications in international journals. I've been teaching The Possums Sleep Program to health professionals since 2011 in a range of contexts. That's the same year I also started offering it to parents in the clinic.

These days, I teach health professionals how to deliver The Possums Sleep Program through The NDC Institute. Most of the families I and my NDC Accredited colleagues have worked with over the years using The Possums Sleep Program find everything settles down fairly quickly. In addition to the research publications which established the evidence-base, there are now four preliminary studies to show that The Possums Sleep Program (adapted as Sleep Baby and You in the UK) works.

If you've been experimenting for a couple of weeks or more, and find that your baby or toddler sleep challenges haven't improved, I recommend that you consult with an NDC Accredited Practitioner.

Acknowledgements

Quite a few of the images I've used throughout The Possums Sleep Program are purchased stock, and a few I took myself. A majority come from Unsplash and I am very grateful to the talented Unsplash creatives for their generosity in donating these images to the commons.

why responding matters when your baby cries (even when it doesn't seem to help)

a short welcome from dr pam