After my daughter was born in 2022, I became extremely familiar with the online baby sleep boom. For the unfamiliar, a profitable — and unregulated — sleep-training industry of online influencers and consultants has emerged among Millennial and Gen Z American moms over the last decade. From paying $300 for a course to learn how to get a baby to sleep to spending thousands of dollars on a sleep coach, this universe has become synonymous with modern parenting. So much so that it’s hard to have a baby and not hear about baby sleep expert Cara Dumaplin, who runs the well-known— and sometimes controversial— Instagram account Taking Cara Babies.
However, since the 2023 launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, many parents (myself included) have turned to ChatGPT for pediatric sleep advice. It started when I came across a Reddit thread about parents using ChatGPT to help with baby sleep. In a state of exhaustion, my curiosity piqued. Since then, I’ve asked it about helping with a nap schedule and used it as a sounding board to complain at 2 a.m. when my baby is wide awake — and I’m not alone.
When Christian Zeron’s 18-month-old was in a “merciless sleep regression” for a month and a half, he turned to ChatGPT too. The New Jersey-based father said he entered details, like the time his daughter woke up at night. Within two weeks of implementing ChatGPT’s gradual sleep plan, his daughter slept 11 consecutive hours every night.
“ChatGPT transformed my family’s sleep schedule by offering immediate, custom advice in those desperate 3 o’clock moments when mainstream resources weren’t at hand,” Zeron, a partner and a creative director at the marketing agency LMFNYC, said. “Unlike infomercial sleep books or costly consultants at $300+ per consultation, ChatGPT provides live troubleshooting at half the cost, at only $20 monthly.”
Baby sleep isn’t a new parenting problem created by very online parents. It’s been in the public parenting sphere for decades. In 1985, Dr. Richard Ferber wrote the bestselling book, “Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems,” later updated in 2006, detailing his method that advises parents to let their babies cry to sleep for a specific period of time before comforting them. The debate over whether the Ferber method and other “crying it out” methods are good or bad still exists in parenting today — but they’re happening almost exclusively online.
Some sleep consultants have branded themselves by specific sleep training methods, promising to implement their own version of Ferber’s “cry it out” method, while others promise a “gentler” way. But as I reported for Salon previously, there is no authoritative baby-sleep-consultant board to certify that coaches are properly trained and licensed. A scam could be just a click away, and it’s possible that while someone might look like an authority figure on infant sleep on Instagram, they don’t have any training at all. At the same time, ChatGPT doesn’t necessarily promise to provide accurate information, with its reputation for hallucinating.
Much of the discourse on artificial intelligence has been about how it will affect jobs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, whose company markets the Claude chatbot, once warned that AI would wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar occupations. The effects are already being felt on software engineers and more in the tech industry. Could this also be the end of the baby sleep coach industry?
Brittany Sheehan, a sleep consultant based in Los Angeles, told Salon she hasn’t seen the popularity of ChatGPT impact her business directly. But she could, in theory, see how it could affect the sleep consultant business model, as many offer free downloadable content, ask consumers to buy an e-book or purchase an online course that they created.
“If people want to go that route of ‘I just want downloadable information,’ they may no longer feel like they need to pay for it,” Sheehan said, adding that she can’t see ChatGPT replacing the one-on-one connection. Indeed, when it comes to baby sleep consultants, it’s not so much the information that’s valuable but having someone to “hold your hand” along the way. Many consultants compare their occupation to hiring a personal trainer for fitness goals.
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Parenting is something that people love to have strong opinions about. When millennial parents embraced “gentle parenting,” some wondered if they were being “too gentle.” When baby-led weaning became the popular way to feed infants, some said it made parenting a lot harder. And when it comes to sleep, many parents today feel as if they have to be secretive if they choose to co-sleep because they’re afraid that the truth will be met with backlash. Inevitably, the next trend of parenting to be judged will be the use of artificial intelligence.
And parents aren’t just turning to AI for sleep. They’re using it for all aspects of parenting. More parenting influencers are coming forward to say that they’re using ChatGPT essentially as a co-parent. One based in Switzerland recently said, “ChatGPT handles 97% of my mental load.”
Jessica Siegel, a 37-year-old mom, told Salon she uses ChatGPT “all the time” to help with sleep and general parenting woes. She’s used it to learn about “different sleep training strategies, troubleshoot sleep, and behavior issues.” The AI bot has also helped her “come up with scripts” for what to say to her child when he’s struggling, Siegel said.
Diana Babaeva likewise told Salon she actually uses it as a “tool” with her partner in parenting. “What made it work was that I treated it like a sounding board, not a substitute for instinct or pediatric advice,” Babaeva said. “It can turn those super stressful moments into real teamwork.”
But there are also reasons to be skeptical of the advice a chatbot may provide.
Last year, a study published in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology emphasized the “critical need” for expert oversight on ChatGPT, specifically for safeguarding pediatric healthcare information. Research from the University of Kansas’ Life Span Institute found that parents rated AI-generated text as more credible, moral and trustworthy than “expert-generated content,” even as researchers found inaccurate information was being given to the parents regarding children’s health.
“When we began this research, it was right after ChatGPT first launched — we had concerns about how parents would use this new, easy method to gather health information for their children,” said lead author Calissa Leslie-Miller, KU doctoral student in clinical child psychology. “We’re concerned that people may increasingly rely on AI for health advice without proper expert oversight.”
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Sheehan said another concern with ChatGPT is the way sleep consultants themselves might use it.
“If someone is paying for your personal feedback, that’s what you should be getting,” she said. “And if I was a parent looking for a sleep consultant, I would ask that question: do you use AI?”
Indeed, even parents who avoid AI may end up paying for a sleep consultant who could themselves be using ChatGPT, leaving parents to pay for AI slop. Sheehan said she would consider such undisclosed use “unethical.”
And while parents are trying to get their children to sleep, part of the problem they might be looking to solve when they turn to ChatGPT is information overload. In that sense, having an AI chatbot just feed them information directly could be more convenient.
“There’s just so much information out there now,” Sheehan said. “The feedback I get from parents when they come to me is they’re just really overwhelmed.”
