What Does an Infant Sleep Consultant Actually Do? (And Ten Questions to Ask Before You Hire One)

Sleep consulting is an unregulated field. There is no licence, no single recognised certification, and no guideline from the American Academy of Pediatrics or the American Academy of Sleep Medicine that assigns a sleep consultant any role at all. That is not a reason to avoid them. It is a reason to know exactly what a good one does, so you can tell the difference.

A good infant sleep consultant does four things: asks, screens, plans, and supports. Here is what each should look like.

1. The intake: the questions they should ask

The first call or form is where most of the value lives, because these are questions few parents have been asked before. Expect, at minimum:

• Your baby’s age, and their due date if they came early (expectations should be set against corrected age).
• Where they sleep for nights and for naps, and what is in the sleep space.
• How they fall asleep at bedtime now, and what happens at each waking.
• Bedtime, wake time, naps and night wakings on a typical night, and on a bad one.
• How feeding is going, and whether your pediatrician is happy with weight gain.
• Any snoring, noisy breathing, unusual movements, reflux, eczema, or medication.
• Who else does bedtime, and what childcare looks like.
• How you are holding up, honestly.
• What you want to be different in two weeks, what you are not willing to do, and how you feel about crying.

A consultant who proposes a method before asking the last three questions is selling a method, not a plan.

2. The screen: what they must send to your pediatrician

This is the part that separates a careful consultant from a careless one. Certain things are not sleep problems, and a coach’s only correct move is to route them:

• Same day: clusters of brief jerks, head nods or arm-throws, especially on waking, especially between three and twelve months. Any twitching that does not stop instantly on waking. A blue or grey colour, a frightening pause in breathing, a baby who will not wake: 911.
• Within days: snoring three or more nights a week, mouth breathing in sleep, gasping or pauses, working hard to breathe; poor weight gain; fever or a baby who seems unwell; a lost skill; inconsolable crying that is a change from the pattern; a parent who is persistently low, hopeless or very anxious.
• At the next visit: restless, thrashing sleep with no obvious cause, eczema that wakes the child to scratch, uncontrolled reflux, anything given for sleep.

A consultant should ask screening questions and hand positives to a clinician. They should never declare a movement benign, suggest a supplement, or advise starting or stopping anything.

3. The plan: what a real one contains

A plan is not a method with your baby’s name pasted in. A real one is specific to the answers you gave, and it covers:

• Strategy first. The handful of things that are actually going to change, and why each one fits your family. If you cannot see the strategy on the first page, it is a template.
• What is normal at this age, and what you are deliberately going to stop fighting.
• Safe sleep for your set-up, not a generic list: the specific changes for your crib, your room, your feeding-at-night arrangement. Back to sleep, firm flat surface, own surface in your room, nothing in the space, every sleep, by every caregiver. Any consultant who softens this is disqualified.
• A bedtime routine with clock times, four or five steps in order, the same words at lights-out.
• Days and naps: a realistic rhythm, with the honesty that wake-window charts are a heuristic, not research.
• The settling approach as a step-by-step protocol you can follow at 2am without re-reading, chosen to fit your baby’s temperament and your tolerance for crying. Never any settling method under six months. Never dropping night feeds if there is any concern about growth.
• A night-by-night guide for the first two weeks, including the honest warning that nights two and three are often worse before it gets better.
• A section for you: a protected block of sleep, and how this household could actually arrange it.
• Troubleshooting and when to change course. Illness, travel, a tooth, a milestone, and the signs the approach is the wrong fit.

4. The support window

Read the fine print. “Two weeks of support” can mean a daily phone call or one email a day within business hours. Ask how many messages, in which hours, for how many days, and what happens on day fifteen. The two things a support window is really for: talking you through a bad night three, and adjusting the plan when life intervenes.

What the evidence says they can and cannot do

Any honest consultant will tell you this, so it is worth knowing before you hire one. Behavioural approaches from six months reliably improve settling, how much of the night a parent is up, parent-rated severity, and parental sleep. They do not add meaningfully to a baby’s total sleep (about nine minutes a night, pooled across trials), they do not reduce how often a baby wakes (they reduce signalling), and no method has been shown to be better than another. Most of the benefit of the bedtime routine appears within three nights. Nothing has been shown to produce a lasting advantage beyond a year or two.

Ten questions to ask before you hire one

• Do you follow the AAP 2022 safe-sleep policy without exception, including for bed-sharing families?
• Do you work with babies under six months, and if so, what do you do with them? (The right answer: foundations only, no settling method.)
• Will you ask about feeding and weight gain before you suggest any change to night feeds?
• How do you decide which settling approach to use for a given family?
• What do you do if my baby snores, or if I mention an unusual movement?
• What exactly is in the written plan, and can I see an example with the family’s details removed?
• What does support include, in messages, hours and days?
• What is the total cost including anything I might need after the package ends?
• What is your training, and what does it not cover?
• What is your refund policy if the plan does not fit us?

Where Lamplight fits

Lamplight is the intake, the screen, the plan and the support, done online and automatically: a ten-minute questionnaire that asks the questions above, a plan built from your answers and delivered in minutes, and a coach that has read it, available any hour for 90 days. It costs $79 for the plan or $129 with the coach, paid once. There is no person on a call, which is the honest trade-off, and for families who want one we say so plainly. How it compares to hiring a consultant →