Night Terrors

How TikTok has supercharged the age-old debate over sleep training.

- By Laura Hazard Owen

In January 2021, Alice Bender made baby sleep go viral on TikTok.

While holding her 5-month-old son, Fern, in his nursery, Bender, then 21, explained to her iPhone camera why he didn’t have a crib. “We literally buy these little baby jail cells so that we can just leave our baby in there and walk away,” she said. “I don’t have a crib because I will never enforce my baby to have a bedtime. Babies are people, too, and forcing anyone to sleep when they’re not tired is inhumane. Imagine if your partner locked you in a container you couldn’t get out of and told you you had to sleep even though you weren’t tired. That would be abuse, and you’d probably leave them.”

In the background, a lop-eared bunny hopped on the floor near a piece of white wooden furniture that looks like a crib except it hovers a few inches off the floor and has half a side missing. “The floor bed allows the baby to sleep when the baby is feeling sleepy and get up and move around when the baby’s not,” Bender said.

The post racked up more than 7 million views, made international headlines, and inspired an awful lot of tweets (“Next week on this lady’s tik tok: why I let my 5 month old drive”) before Bender took it down. But she didn’t stop offering baby-sleep advice. In a post from August 2021, she wrote, “There’s no such thing as sleep training.” Bender pointed to the words as music played. “But there is such a thing as training a baby they were left to die.”