A mother of two has gained widespread attention for her unconventional approach to getting a full night’s sleep, opting to co-sleep with her baby.
Diana Yefymets (@dianayaroslav), 27, shared a video of her partner setting up the mattress in the playpen to co-sleep with their daughter, which garnered 140,000 likes and 4.1 million views on TikTok.
She explained to Newsweek that her first child faced challenges with anxiety and was unable to sleep or nap alone. She spent seven to eight months solo-parenting due to her husband’s job commitments.
“The only thing I was told is your baby MUST sleep separate from you, alone and in their own sleep space.”
“This caused my son to wake up every single hour at night. Uninterrupted sleep comes with having children and while I completely accepted that, in practice I was incredibly sleep deprived, anxious, and the only time I was sleeping for more than an hour was when I would sit in the middle of the mattress surrounded by pillows holding my newborn while he napped taking a barely asleep guilty nap,” Yefymets told Newsweek.
Exhausted, Yefymets acquired a large playpen where she could attempt to curl up in the corner to get some rest while her baby played.
In her search for solutions, she discovered the Safe Sleep Seven guidelines, which “changed her life.”
The Safe Sleep Seven, developed by La Leche League International, are guidelines designed to make bed sharing safer for parents and babies. They include: no smoking, sobriety, breastfeeding baby, healthy baby, baby placed face up on back, no sweat (no clothing/swaddling) and a safe surface.
@dianayaroslav/@dianayaroslav
By following these guidelines, Yefymets and her baby began sleeping four hours at a time at night. Daytime naps transformed into comfortable shared rest periods. Her postpartum anxiety quickly diminished, and she began to thrive in motherhood. She expressed concern over the lack of education on co-sleeping in the United States, noting that “what’s the norm in a lot of countries is shamed here.”
Yefymets found the societal pressure on mothers to adhere to sleep training methods “appalling.”
According to the Sleep Foundation, sleep training involves teaching a baby to fall asleep independently, with the goal of the baby being comfortable sleeping for several hours through the night on their own. Techniques include methods like the cry-it-out approach, where parents allow the baby to cry for progressively longer intervals before offering comfort.
“After my daughter turned four months we went from a floor bed to a floor bed in the playpen because she started crawling really early. We have a hard mattress that’s a few inches off the ground where we sleep together. After four months of age research shows that safe co-sleeping is just as safe as your baby sleeping in their own space,” she explained.
The video received mixed reactions from viewers.
One mother commented: “I sleep trained my daughter but I just let her cry. Worked wonders! Took 2 days to sleep through the night. Neglect is a good thing sometimes.”
Another viewer shared: “On day 4 of gentle sleep training and he slept 12 hours on his own in his crib. It helped me regain my sanity,” said Jay.
Conversely, Lily expressed: “I’m still not getting a full night’s sleep because I refuse to sleep train, not going to traumatize my baby… they’re little only for so long.”
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