About Us
Hi, we’re Julie and Heather — psychotherapists, authors, and sleep experts.
Based in NYC / LA, we help people of all ages (babies, little kids, teens and adults) improve their sleep. We work with people all over the world, by phone or video consult. To learn about our sleep consultations, read here.
Heather and Julie regularly give engaging and highly practical sleep workshops at companies and schools. They have delivered employee seminars at tech companies and have spoken at universities such as Yale and Cornell, as well as public and private K-8 and high schools. To contact Heather and Julie for a speaking engagement, or for an interview or other inquiry, please email us (contact@thehappysleeper.com).
Why we wrote The Happy Sleeper (our first book)
Years ago in our work with families, we started noticing that parents felt conflicted about sleep training methods that seemed too extreme — either “cry it out”, on the one hand, or attachment parenting on the other — and this made no sense to us. Sleep is natural. Attachment is natural. Why would they be at odds? We applied our training in clinical psychology and our practical knowledge about what works and, sure enough, we found the right middle ground in which all needs are satisfied. Everyone sleeps, and everyone feels good about it. Over the years we’ve worked with thousands of families and heard from our over 100,000 readers and counting, class attendees, and clients. Over and over, the message we get is that parents can’t believe how well our approach works. It’s life-changing, but it makes perfect sense to us — because sleep is natural!
Since The Happy Sleeper became a popular parenting book, we’ve expanded to develop tools that help all ages. Adolescents are now the most sleep deprived group in human history. This is what compelled us to write our third book, Generation Sleepless. We expanded our tools to help the whole family (including adults), and to bring our science-backed teaching and extremely effective tools to company employees and schools!
Our approach
Sleep is foundational to our mental and physical health. At every age, sleeping well improves our brain health, boosts the immune system and supports growth, elevates our mood, relationships and more.
Sleep is natural. Our tools for every age involve working with the body’s natural (and very smart) systems to optimize sleep and wellbeing.
Sleep training and attachment
You've probably heard the term "sleep training" before—the idea that you'll need to teach your baby to sleep properly through the night. But we think about this a different way:
Your baby already knows how to sleep.
It may not seem so simple in your house, but sleep is a basic ability that all babies are naturally born to develop. As they grow, their bodies crave healthy sleep, and their brains are wired for it. Of course, newborns need our help to soothe, calm, and organize their tiny developing nervous systems, but by five or six months of age, almost all babies are capable of sleeping well (even if they are still feeding at night) without much assistance from mom and dad. After this age, you just need the right patterns, associations, and environment in place so that healthy, natural sleep can unfold.
If you've reached out for sleep help before, you've noticed the polarized sleep camps of the "cry-it-out sleep training" vs. the "attachment style parenting" methods. These approaches seem to contradict each other: one valuing sleeping through the night, and the other, support and emotional responsiveness.
But this is a false, unhelpful divide. It makes parents unduly upset and confused, because a loving, secure attachment and good, independent sleep are pitted against each other—as if they are at odds.
Thankfully, they are not. Our approach is designed so that you do not have to sacrifice your family's happiness or sleep. A happy, well-loved child and 11-12 hours of nightly slumber are not only possible, using our techniques, they actually work together beautifully.
Crying
Is there crying involved when using our techniques? It depends on the baby and the situation, but very often babies do protest (cry) at first, when you're changing a well-entrenched sleep pattern. Babies are smart little scientists and they don't like it when you change things up! Our methods allow for babies to protest, while not ever feeling worried or fearful — always knowing that you are nearby and responding in a predictable and consistent way.
