About Batelle
Sleep School is a two-week program that repairs your child’s relationship with sleep, resulting in your child sleeping through the night and falling asleep independently. As for bedtime, you will be able to settle them to bed in under five minutes, without drama.
Batelle takes a gentle, non-cry-it-out approach that’s fundamentally based on building trust in relation to sleep. We look at your child’s sleep holistically, highlighting the importance of naps, feeding, and sleep schedules and how they can affect the quality of one’s sleep.
Batelle teaches parents to overcome problems with sleep in a gentle, supportive, and enriching manner. There are many misconceptions about sleep, starting with how sleep problems are considered by many as unsolvable. Children need to sleep, and yet they often wake up multiple times during the night or resist going to sleep in the first place. This is not an inevitable factor of childhood; rather, it stems from a fundamental misalignment of when a child feels safe in relation to sleep.
Our primary goal is to repair and reframe your child’s relationship with sleep, teaching them to feel safe and foster a sense of trust in the sleep process. When a child feels safe and has clear expectations around sleep, they will stop fighting sleep and will naturally begin to sleep through the night.
We guarantee that we will achieve two milestones within a two-week period: 1) your child will be sleeping through the night; and 2) you’ll be able to settle your child to bed in five minutes or less, if you so choose. If we haven’t been able to achieve these milestones, we’ll give you the option to receive a full refund or extend the coaching and support until your child is reaching these goals. The choice is yours.
Your commitment
We take our responsibility to you seriously. This is why we have the guarantees we do, as well as our long-term commitment to you and your child. However, for us to be able to do right by you, we need your full support and commitment.
As a simple condition to the refund, we ask you to commit to attend or watch each of our calls over the course of the two weeks.
Sometimes life gets in the way of Sleep School: you get sick, your child gets sick or you miss a call. We understand and we are here to support you. We will send you recordings of the call if you are unable to attend. We will also provide you with the ability to pause and rejoin Sleep School at your convenience.
We know that this process works, but it requires your effort and participation in order to succeed.
If you stick to the timeline, the process will take 14 days. However, we understand that life gets in the way, so we will happily reschedule or try to accommodate you in any way we can until you reach the milestones. You can always hold off starting/pause for as long as you need and rejoin at a later date.
To qualify for the guarantee, you will need to complete all 10 steps. This applies whether you do it at the recommended pace or opt for a slower one. Please note that you can request a refund until 60 days after graduating Sleep School.
If you need help with anything sleep related after you have graduated from Sleep School, such as sleep regressions or disruptions, you can reach out to the team free of charge until your child is six years old. We see this as a sleep “insurance” of sorts offered as part of the service.
As our goal is to repair your child’s sleep for the long-term, our method is a resilient and sustainable solution that is able to weather inevitable life changes. When sleep is approached with the consideration of a child’s underlying need to feel safe, the understanding and trust they build up is something they hold onto for the rest of their lives.
Because our goal is to repair your child’s sleep for the long-term, our method is a resilient and sustainable solution that is able to weather inevitable life changes. When sleep is approached with the consideration of a child’s underlying need to feel safe, the understanding and trust they build up is something they hold onto for the rest of their lives.
Sleep is a crucial building block for childhood development. Without restful sleep, a child cannot thrive. Nobel Laureate, Professor James J. Heckman has proven that the most impactful time to invest in your child is early on, as this will have compounding effects as they grow. Quality early childhood development has significant knock-on effects to health, economic, and social outcomes for individuals, families, and societies.
No - Batelle operates internationally. However, it can cause issues with shipping, so you may need to purchase some equipment yourselves. We are happy to work through this with you to find the easiest solution.
The Batelle team will communicate with you using multiple touch points, including coaching calls over Zoom and real-time guidance and coaching using our live-stream camera. Families will have the opportunity to access 24-hour support during the two weeks, as well as private coaching calls.
You’ll be given access to a library of content that consolidates the information you’ll need in both written and visual formats, and we’ll also send you a Sleep School Starter Pack that includes a number of items that will help to ease the transition for you and your child.
After graduating from Sleep School, you’ll have the option to reach out to us for sleep-related support until your child is five years old.
We’ve carefully curated our Sleep Box to ensure you have all the tools you need to support your child and help set expectations around sleep. The Box includes:
- Sleep Sack/The Hug: We’ve developed our own Sleep Sack that helps children feel they’re being supported, even if they’re not being held by you.
- Batelle Light: This helps children better understand expectations around sleep and bedtime.
- Camera: This enables us to give real-time guidance and coaching when you’re putting your child to bed.
Like any school, you will need a few supplies to set your family up for success in Sleep School.
- Two-way baby monitor
- Sleep light (e.g. HatchLight)
- Bluetooth speaker
- Ring Camera
If your child is 0-5 months, then you will only need a sleep light with sound (e.g. Hatchlight) and a Bluetooth speaker.
Batelle’s method is both co-sleeping and contact napping friendly. A lot of methods state that you cannot co-sleep or contact nap; however, this is only because results will always be fragile if you do not focus on helping a child to feel safe. If you teach a child a habit, such as in the cry-it-out method, the child will learn that they need to figure things out for themselves and won’t be comforted when they cry. If that child were to go back to co-sleeping, they would feel a sense of safety again. If you then tried to put them back in their own bed, you would need to re-train them in order to “re-teach” the expectation that they will not receive comfort in relation to sleep.
Conversely, the Batelle method teaches children to fundamentally trust that sleep is a safe place. When a child co-sleeps or contact naps, they feel comforted, but they won’t feel the need to resist going into their own bed the next night, as both spaces will be “safe” places for them. This will provide you with a lot more flexibility.
In Batelle’s current program structure, children can enrol in Sleep School up until the age of six; however, bear in mind that the earlier a child starts Sleep School, the easier the adjustment will be for both the child and parent.
Contrary to other sleep methods, Batelle focuses on helping to reframe and repair a child’s relationship with sleep, rather than teaching them a habit or one-time solution. Instead of attempting to make a child sleep regardless of the potential consequences, we looked a level deeper and asked questions such as: “why do children struggle with sleep in the first place? Why do they fight and resist sleep even if they’re exhausted?”. This allowed us to develop an approach that is both effective in the long-term, and gentle in its nature.
The process addresses the root cause — a sense of safety. By approaching sleep in this way, Batelle's approach is inherently flexible and resilient to life changes meaning you can still co-sleep, contact-nap, and travel with minimised disruption. The method is trust-based and it reshapes a child’s relationship to their caregiver, their bed and, ultimately, to sleep.
"Cry-It-Out" is the act of leaving a child crying alone in a room without responding to them in some capacity. Under this definition, even Ferber methods and phase-in methods include varying elements of "Cry-It-Out".
Conversely, our method provides you with techniques and strategies that ensure you’re always able to respond to your child in some meaningful capacity, thereby reinforcing to your child that you’re always there for them if and when they need.
This is entirely up to you. If all caregivers are able to join the training, you won’t need to introduce them to the method after Sleep School is complete, and it’s always nice to have some additional support. However, it’s not a problem if this is not possible, and the Batelle team can support you to integrate another caregiver at a future point.
We give support and advice on both naps and night-time sleep. Once a child has mended their relationship with sleep, both nap time and bedtime will be significantly easier and more predictable.
Yes. Our method works particularly well for children who benefit from proprioceptive inputs, including sensations from joints, muscles and connective tissues. Our sleep sack (The Hug) gives children a sense of grounding that allows them to feel calm and self-regulate more easily.
Absolutely. We are breastfeeding and attachment-parenting friendly. We’ll work with you to ensure you’re still able to breastfeed in any capacity you seek, and we’ll help you wean your child at night if appropriate/desired. If your child still requires a night feed, we’ll structure your program to make allowances for this.
It does! However, we do advise you to either have two caregivers carrying out Sleep School, or to put one child through the program after the other.
Our program doesn’t completely stop sleep regressions; however, we proactively equip parents with the strategies and tools needed to deal with sleep regressions in a gentle, proactive, and constructive manner. Therefore sleep regressions will be easier for the child to handle, as they will be better equipped to self-regulate.
However, don’t forget that we’ll provide you with additional support free of charge until your child is five years old. With our tools and processes in place, you’ll find that sleep regressions are milder and shorter in duration.
It is important that the Hug is appropriately sized for your child. If and when they grow out of it, you can purchase an additional Hug. Always reach out in the app if you have any uncertainty.
Please reference this sizing guide to ensure the Hug is appropriately sized.
