Listen on Apple | Spotify | YouTube

Every child is born with a unique sleep puzzle—and understanding that concept can completely change how you approach sleep challenges.

In this episode, Allison breaks down why some children seem to sleep effortlessly while others struggle no matter how closely parents follow the “rules.” If you’ve read the books, followed the schedules, tried multiple methods, and still feel stuck, this episode is for you.

Allison explains the idea of natural sleep talent and why sensitive sleepers often need a much more precise approach. Through personal stories from her own family—and a powerful real-life coaching example—she shows how even one missing puzzle piece can keep sleep from clicking… and how finding it can change everything almost overnight.

This conversation is a reminder that sleep struggles are not a reflection of parenting failure. Some children simply have bigger, more delicate sleep puzzles—and with the right pieces in place, restful nights are absolutely possible.

In this episode, we cover:
— What the “sleep puzzle” really means
— Why following advice perfectly still doesn’t work for some kids
— Natural sleep talent vs. sensitive sleepers
— Why regressions, travel, and routine changes hit some children harder
— How one small shift can lead to major sleep breakthroughs
— Why you’re not doing anything wrong—and never were

If this episode resonates, consider sharing it with another parent who may need to hear this message. You’re not alone, and your child isn’t broken—just beautifully unique.

Give your child the gift of better sleep. Allison’s free, age-specific guides show you exactly how many hours of rest kids need to grow, learn, and thrive—no matter their age. Get your free copy now: 0-2 Years Old or 3 to 10 years old

From baby sleep to toddler sleep, daycare naps to sleep training—How Long ’Til Bedtime? is the podcast for parents who want practical, guilt-free sleep tips they can actually use.

Hosted by pediatric sleep coach Allison Egidi, each episode delivers real solutions for every stage—from navigating newborn sleep struggles and weaning night feedings to helping your 3-year-old fall asleep independently (and stay asleep!). Whether you’re trying to make sense of daycare sleep patterns, craving your evenings back, or simply need a working mom podcast to keep you grounded, you’re in the right place.

Want more from Allison? Sign up here to get her weekly email with podcast updates and other helpful parenting topics.

Enjoying How Long ‘Til Bedtime?
Your rating and review help Allison reach and support more parents.
— On Apple Podcasts: Click here, scroll to the bottom, rate the show, and tap “Write a Review.”
— On Spotify: Click here to leave a rating or review.

Don’t miss an episode—subscribe so you’re always up to date!

Connect with Allison:
Instagram | Facebook | Website | YouTube

Scroll down for a full transcript of this episode.

224. Your Child’s Sleep Puzzle: Why Some Kids Sleep Easily (and Others Don’t)
Allison Egidi: Before we dive in today, I want to talk about the difference between motivation and sticking to the plan. So I begin every new year and really every quarter, I’ve talked about this for, it’s probably worth talking about again at some point, but I actually try not to take on a whole year at a time, but each new quarter. But New Year’s is unique. So I start every new quarter and really new years feeling really motivated to think about my goals and start working towards my goals. And while I’m pretty good at doing that, motivation wears off. And I recently heard someone talk about the importance of sticking to the plan and not always relying on motivation. And I can’t remember exactly how they said it, but it really, really resonated with me. And this was the week that I had to realize that my New Year’s motivation was wearing off. And I was losing traction on taking the big steps towards both my personal and professional goals.

And I’m recording this, it is Friday when I’m recording this. It was this Tuesday. I’m recording this on Friday, January 16th, in case you want to know how quickly my motivation started to wear off this year. On Tuesday, at the end of Tuesday, I realized I have not accomplished on Monday and Tuesday what I wrote down in my planner that I wanted to accomplish. And in my mind, I was going to accomplish some of these things on each of these days in the open areas I had in the day. So I would have, you know, a 30 minute chunk here or 20 minute chunk here between clients. And it didn’t get done. The other thing that didn’t get done because I had so much I wanted to accomplish is I didn’t get my workout in because I thought I have too much to do. I don’t have time for the workout. So on Tuesday night, I said screw motivation, come up with a plan. And your job, Allison is to stick to the plan for the rest of the week.

And I kid you not. I mapped out to the minute what I would be doing from the time I woke up until the time I went to bed. And it then made me realize to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish for the rest of the week on Wednesday, Thursday, and today, Friday, I needed to get up at 5 a.m., which is fine because another thing I’ve been prioritizing and I have been crushing is my sleep.

So it wasn’t, I was not cutting into getting adequate sleep, but otherwise I probably would not have set my alarm for 5 a.m. And I did it. And each day I’ve been telling my kids, my gosh, you guys will not believe what I got done today. And you guys should see my Google calendar because it is a little stressful to look at with all the by the second things, including when I’m going to eat and when I’m going to drive somewhere.

It is all there when I’m going to walk the dogs, when that workout is happening, what I’m doing in each chunk of time between clients. You guys, what I’ve accomplished in two and a half days, because now we’re mid day on Friday, is insane for me. So if you are losing motivation in this new year, forget motivation, come up with a plan and stick to it.

And when I wanted to say to myself this morning, for example, I don’t want to walk the dogs in this 30 minute window I have when it’s 15 degrees outside. But then I looked at the rest of the calendar and the rest of the calendar was totally full. I said, screw what you want, Allison, stick to the plan. I put on my long Chicago jacket and off I went and walked the dogs. And the feeling of accomplishment I’ve had the last few days has been so great that it actually is motivating to stick to the plan.

So here is my encouragement. If you’re losing motivation for whatever goal you want, whether it’s to get that workout in, which I got a workout in the last three days I feel so good about, or to get the work done, or to spend intentional time with your kids and not be on your phone, whatever it is, open that Google Calendar and map out your next day with intention. And when you start to question yourself or feel like you don’t want to do it, remind yourself it’s not about what you want to do. It’s about sticking to the plan. Just stick to the plan. Do what you’re supposed to do in that window. Okay. Those are my words of encouragement for today.

Now on to today’s episode because I only have a little bit more time here before I have to move on to the next thing on my schedule today. Today I’m sharing one of my favorite concepts. It’s all about your child’s sleep puzzle. And just like when you walk into a toy store looking to buy a puzzle and you look at all these puzzles and they’re so unique in what’s on them, the number of pieces in the puzzle, the shapes of the puzzle pieces, your child’s sleep puzzle is just like that. It is different than any other child’s sleep puzzle, both in size and complexity. Every sleep puzzle is unique.

And if you’ve ever thought something along the lines of why does sleep seem so easy for other families? Or why isn’t this sleep training method I’ve been implementing working for my child? Or why isn’t what I did with my first child to help them sleep working for my second child? If you’ve been wondering about any question like that, this episode is for you.

Hey there, Allison here. Welcome back to How Long ‘Til Bedtime. The idea that every child has a unique sleep puzzle is a concept that I think every parent can benefit from understanding. And I come back to it again and again when parents are struggling to understand why they have tried all the things that they read in the book, read online, that the pediatrician recommended, that their neighbor recommended, that their sister told them to do, and their child is still not sleeping well. The reality is that these parents are not doing anything wrong. They are just taking an approach to putting together their child’s sleep puzzle that isn’t allowing them to get all the pieces in the correct place. So today I want to explain the sleep puzzle concept.

Here’s how I want you to picture it. Every child is born with a sleep puzzle. You do not get to decide what their sleep puzzle looks like. Some children have a 25 piece chunky puzzle. We’re talking big pieces, easy to see where they go. If you get a couple pieces in place, then it’s not that hard to let all the other pieces fall into place.

Other children are born with a thousand piece sleep puzzle. Think about those tiny pieces with just subtle differences. And if even one piece is slightly off, the whole thing is going to fall apart. And of course there’s everything in between that chunky 25 piece puzzle and that complicated 1000 piece puzzle. There’s that spectrum in between those two ranges. And this is linked to the concept I talk about a lot as well of natural sleep talent. Some kids are just naturally better sleepers from the start. It doesn’t mean necessarily that their parents did anything special to make them good sleepers. I mean, I don’t want to say they didn’t do things right, but they may have just focused on a couple of good things that just set their baby up to sleep well, or they may feel like they did nothing at all. So what I want to stress here is more that the parents who have a child that is more challenging in the sleep department aren’t doing anything wrong. They just have a child with a more complicated sleep puzzle and a little less natural sleep talent.

When a child has an easy chunky puzzle, parents can kind of stumble into success or just do enough things to set them up for the rest of the puzzle to come together easily. The schedule is just close enough. The bedtime routine is decent. They may even rock, feed, or cuddle their baby to sleep at bedtime and for every nap and it still works. They get good nights of sleep and they get solid naps. These are the parents who are often thinking, I don’t know why everyone thinks this sleep thing is so hard. And they’re right because their baby’s sleep puzzle isn’t that hard and it’s pretty forgiving.

The other side of that is when a child has a big complex sleep puzzle. For those parents, they can do almost everything right. They can do it by the book and their baby may still struggle. These are often our most sensitive children. They may need a schedule that lines up very precisely with their ideal circadian rhythm. They may be more sensitive to being overtired or undertired. They may struggle more with transitions. These are the kids who may need to be taught how to self-soothe. That may not come to them naturally and they’re quick to catch on to other sleep associations like being rocked or fed to sleep. These are the kids who may be more impacted by travel, illness, regressions, those regressions are often triggered by traveling and illness, or any sort of routine change can be more challenging for these kids.

And because the puzzle is big, it’s a little more delicate and it doesn’t take much for a piece to fall out of place. This is when parents can really start to feel defeated. They’re thinking, I read the book. I implemented it. I tried multiple sleep training methods. I’m doing all the things that they’re telling me I’m supposed to be doing and still nothing works or it briefly works, but it doesn’t stick. So I want to share a personal story around this concept because I have lived both experiences in the same house with two different children.

My oldest sleep puzzle was very complicated. For the first two years of her life, we struggled. And let me tell you, if you’ve heard my story, you know I read the books. I talked to multiple pediatricians. I asked all my friends who had good sleepers and no one could solve it. And honestly, it really made me feel like I was failing as a parent until eventually I stumbled upon and hired a sleep consultant and she saw the pieces of the puzzle that were out of place and she helped us put the puzzle together. And in 11 days, everything changed. After two years of struggling, everything was fixed in 11 days. And that experience was so shocking and life changing to me, guess very eye-opening that it ultimately inspired me to make a career change.

But let’s talk about the flip side. My second, yes, I handled sleep differently with her, but her puzzle, gosh dang guys, it was easy. I got enough pieces in place early on that she was sleeping through the night at eight weeks old. I’m talking sleeping a full dang night. In fact, she was sleeping through the night before her older sister was, before I hired the sleep coach. And I, while I did do things differently with her in the newborn stage, because I had read a lot more on the science of sleep, I could have done those same things with my oldest and yes, I totally believe she would have slept through the night sooner, but it definitely wasn’t going to be at eight weeks. But her puzzle, her puzzle was just easier. So we’re talking same parents in the same house, very different sleep puzzles. I also want to share one more story that happened recently because it may help this whole concept really click for some of you.

I recently worked with a family who has a two year old and when we started he needed a parent in the room with him in order to fall asleep and it was taking him forever to fall asleep even with the parent in the room and he was waking during the night then screaming and insisting that a parent come back and sleep in the room with him. So we made a plan and these parents followed the plan beautifully. In fact, things improved quickly, ahead of what I anticipated, ahead of what I had prepped them for as a normal trajectory with this situation and this plan. And his parents and I were stoked. We actually started to move faster through the plan.

And then we hit night six and they took the next step in the plan. Every time we’ve been taking a step so far, it’s going well. Everything unraveled. We’re talking, screaming, crying, full on tantrum. They felt like they had gone majorly backwards from the progress we had made over the previous five days and so much so that they couldn’t even stick to the plan. After an hour of tantruming they went back to what had worked the night before. So then we got on a call and I asked them just to walk me through exactly what had happened the night before when things went off the rails. And then I was able to spot the missing piece of the puzzle.

And based on their feedback, which I won’t share too much about their personal situation, I knew the missing piece of the puzzle was that they needed to give their son permission to scream and cry and throw a fit. So the missing piece was for them to say something along the lines of, hey, I get it. You don’t like the change we’re making. And if you want to scream and cry and throw a fit, that’s okay. You are absolutely allowed to be upset, but we’re going to keep working with our plan and we’re going to stick to our bedtime plan and help you learn to sleep well.

And that night, after they moved that one piece of the puzzle, he screamed for three minutes and went right to sleep. The next night, two minutes. After that, no more screaming at bedtime. They had 99 % of the puzzle in place. They just needed that one final piece tweaked just a bit to go from one hour screaming and giving up to a three minute tantrum and then no tantrum within two nights.

So here’s what I want you to take away from this episode. If sleep hasn’t clicked for your baby, your toddler, your elementary school age child, it’s not because you’re doing something wrong or you have failed. It’s not because you haven’t tried enough. It’s likely because your child may be more sensitive and has a bigger, more complicated sleep puzzle. But the good news is that bigger sleep puzzles can still absolutely be put together. I truly believe that every child can learn to sleep well. Some just need all of those pieces in their sleep puzzle put together just right in order for sleep to feel easy.

If this episode was helpful and resonated with you, would you please take a second to share it? Send it to someone you know who might benefit from hearing it or share it in your stories on Instagram. Because my hope is that this knowledge will provide some relief to some parents because your child isn’t being difficult and you’re not doing anything wrong. We’re all just working with unique sleep puzzles.

So thanks for being here. Thanks for sharing this episode. We spend a lot of time working on putting this podcast together for you all and it’s absolutely free. And so any help you can provide and helping us share this with other parents is greatly appreciated. All right. I hope you’ll come back again next week. Bye for now.