Batelle Sleep SchoolReviews of batelle.com

Empty Promises Buyer Beware: Dear Parents, I want to let you know that it is very unfortunate that we have not received personal contact with the batelle team in years! I wrote them this email about our V who is already 3 years old and explaining that many things have changed since we have started with Miss Megan at Batelle when it first opened. I shared that Miss Megan would lay out schedule changes according to progression of age and maturity. She kept regular open and personal communication through the app to check up on V and us. She would provide updates on the progression of soothing methods and nap changes. These are just a few examples of the support we initially experienced from her when she was there. Her personal touch made all the difference to help comfort our child and us in relation to sleep. Now, V has outbursts of crying and waking up at night. Climbing out of the crib multiple times. We feel we do not have the same support as we started with Batelle. We have also found out through other Trust Pilot reviews that Miss Megan is no longer part of the Batelle Team. This is a total shock as Miss Megan was our guide throughout the whole process and I know the company was initially built on her method. With this news we do not feel the service is there in the same capacity any longer and is not living up to the standards and expectations of the program we paid $1500 for. Other families have said it feels like cry-it-out all over again. Something which we never will do. Noone has informed us of Miss Megan's leave and this is again a shock to us. Miss Megan was the reason why we called in the first place and put our trust throughout the whole process with our young one. Given the circumstances, we asked for a refund in an email to the alumni team email. As we now feel we need to hire someone else to fill her shoes as the batelle organization has not been able to deliver on the guarantee of ongoing support through the 5th year and we refuse to do a cookie-cutter cry-it-out process. Due to the lack of developmentally appropriate ongoing support, we feel now more than ever we are back to where we started. After emailing them this we thought they’d understand and be true to their word about a refund, but instead, they passed us around to multiple well meaning people and no one took responsibility! Polly wouldnt help. Katie wouldnt help. They kept telling me “its not their department” and would offer a link to someone else to book a meeting to ask for the refund but someone who isn’t even available much later from now. There was one opening but I had a meeting at work and could not miss it. When I told them this, then they send a video that doesn’t even work. And then when they fixed the video, it was just a apology repeating they cant really do anything about it and they are sorry. No real solution. Just another let down. This is not okay. If you are in a regression and your child starts jumping out of bed 30+ times a night dont expect any support. I am still waiting to hear from Emily about my refund as I was told by Polly that she “has made her aware of the nature of my complaint.” My complaint?! Anyway Its been more than a week. And they said “I have a lot of built-up anger” in the email response to me. Not very respectful to say when you have been up for hours patiently trying to help the child but not getting promised support. And I’m really not angry. More sad and worried more than anything. And I’m still struggling. The email said “batelle is fully committed”...then give my refund please, you have done enough as it is.

We had our consultation with one of the Batelle consultants and had a detailed discussion about the specifics related to our daughter who is facing sleep difficulties. He mentioned that he will setup time with another sleep consultant as a next step to move forward in the process within the next 24 hours. I followed up with him after 2 days to check on the next steps, but today it’s been 6 days and I have not heard back anything. He was very reassuring in the call. However, no response (yes or no) to move forward is not cool. You kept the customer hanging.

Imagine signing up for this course as an exhausted parent who is having trouble getting any sleep. You sign up for this hoping for a lifeline. You force yourself out of bed for a zoom consultation with Batelle because you didn't get any sleep yet again. Only you are to be completely ghosted with no way to contact them to say hey are you going to log on? The consultation is booked with Calendly, so really there's no excuse. Now Batelle has me even more sleep deprived than before. What a complete waste.

I set up a zoom call with battelle via their website. I received 2 confirmation emails. One from Natilie with the date and time confirmation and another from Pierre who said he was doing the actual zoom meeting with us. We sat on zoom for the entirety of the meeting and no one ever showed up. I then reached out to both Natilie AND Pierre and neither even bothered to respond to me. If this is the type of service I received just upon introduction, I don’t even want to know what the service of the actual school is like. Extremely disappointing and defeating for how my mental state was, especially with how expensive they are.

Our twins went through the program in early 2021 when Miss Megan was leading the classes. She was beyond amazing and accommodating with our unique needs. With her method and support, our twins began sleeping 12 hours a night within a very short timeframe. We were thrilled. A couple weeks ago however, I noticed her mantra stopped working. We were very upset because the twins love to listen to it before they go to sleep. Now keep in mind, most families use it for training and then phase it out, but we asked Miss Megan if we could keep using it even after sleep school - it's great how she was able to tailor her method to my children and it didn't feel like a cookie cutter approach. Anyway, once we realized it wasnt working and seemed to be flat out deleted for some reason, we tried to contact someone from Batelle through their app and via email but the app never works and we rarely get a prompt reply via email, and the app is honestly just horrible for communication anyway. So instead, I started to research what was going on, and what I learned shocked me. I saw that the website had changed dramatically and does not feature Miss Megan or her method any longer and the app content has also changed so much and I'm noticing more differences from when we originally did the method in 2021. After completing my extensive research, and reading other recent reviews, I concluded that Miss Megan is no longer with Batelle. I am saddened, as I remember how passionate she was about her work there. She made such a difference in our children's lives and it wouldn't have been the same without her. Additionally, I feel like I should now warn interested families. As I will no longer be recommending this program to other parents. Miss Megan is an amazing human and extremely gifted when it comes to working with young children. I’m not sure how Batelle will be successful without her as it was 'her method' that directly changed our lives. I'm also concerned that now we cannot trust that we will get consistent care for what is suppose to be 'thru our child's 5th birthday' (a part of their guarantee)...as even now, one of my twins recently fell out of their crib head first! It made me wish we had used 'the Hug' Miss Megan developed (a safe sleep sack that allows them to move in any direction and stand comfortably but not leave the physical mattress), as it would have prevented his fall in the first place, but when we finally chose to use the Hug after the fall, for the first time, we realized they are too small. When we contacted Batelle to get an appropriate up size no one got back to me. Do you know how anxiety provoking it is to not have a safe sleep set up for your child who just seriously injured himself in his current set up?! These are our children's safety and lives at hand, and we are paying a very high price to have that safety guaranteed as Batelle also says they aim to be 'your child's sleep assurance policy'. But to not be responsive nor efficient about maintaining their level of service is not acceptable! We are forever grateful to Miss Megan and her unique approach, but if you’re going to invest in Batelle now, buyer beware, as she is no longer with the company so you likely won’t be receiving her method or level of care any longer.

I think I have PTSD after this experience. The theory is great, the women who support you are amazing, but for whatever reason it made everything worse for us. It’s incredibly high touch and perhaps my baby got freaked out by it. I can’t even say the mantra anymore because it gives me anxiety. We stuck to it like glue, did everything we were supposed to do and even repeated it. But it didn’t work. And every month I see the money taken off my credit card I feel like it was $1500 wasted. Tried to get a refund but you have to send everything back in that giant box and pay for shipping etc.

Literally the CEO of this company states that he is going to rectify the issue of them making me pay to send the box back by saying oh I'm more than happy to reimburse you the shipping costs. Then the CFO jumps in and says they'll send me a wire knowing that wires have fees so that I actually end of only getting back half. When I question them about it, they basically say they could care less. If the CEO is this bad, you definitely have to read through the lines when it comes to this deceptive company.

We signed up for Batelle based on the review on trustpilot, as well as the promises of gentle sleep training. Batelle came up in our search results when we looked for an alternative to CIO and sleep training. They market themselves as aligned with attachment parenting and supportive of breastfeeding and cosleeping, which were all things we were doing, and which became unsustainable when our son was waking every 40 minutes around the clock for months with no consolidated sleep. Since our son was 5 months old, we enrolled in Batelle Babies, which consisted of weekly zoom meetings that walked you through the foundational steps of their method. Seeing other parents struggling with many of the same issues definitely made us feel less alone, although some parents had kids were were already sleeping through the night and waking 1-2 times and I have no idea why they signed up. We faithfully spent a month attending the weekly classes and adhering to the method, which is designed to break negative sleep associations and to replace with new anchors, namely your voice over a monitor, and a "ok to wake" clock. They also use a "hug" which is basically a sleep sack that straightjackets your kid to the mattress to limit their movement. You are also conditioning your child to respond to a "mantra" by playing it continuously on loop throughout the night and singing it upon wake ups. They say that "no cry goes unanswered" and you are always responding, just varying the response depending on the cry level. They method is also a mash up of other sleep training protocols that essentially fade out your presence or other sleep anchors over time. There is a lot of good stuff here, especially since this is such a critical issue for parents like us who are really struggling with severe sleep deprivation. All of the sleep consultants are themselves parents who went through the program so they believe wholeheartedly in the method and seem to have a lot of passion for helping parents and babies transform their relationship to sleep. And no doubt Miss Megan successfully implemented her bespoke method with many children through the years. All start-ups have the problem of scaling, however. How do you generalize the method to reach the most people and make your product work for everyone? Herein lies the problem when it comes to sleep. While all humans need sleep, not all people sleep the same - there are wildly different chronotypes and temperaments. Where it fell apart for us, and likely others, is that after a month plus of working the program, we weren't seeing progress and our son seemed to regress. After one night when the team tuned in to watch our bedtime routine, and our son had been screaming for an hour, the remote team began messaging us all of their theories for why the methods were not working: perhaps we gave him too much daytime sleep, perhaps he was teething, we weren't doing the mantras right, we didn't internalize steps 6 and 7, etc. The real kicker was when Miss Megan said the "entire team feels your son isn't emotionally ready and that you're trying to push him to accommodate your work schedules." Several times I tried to set boundaries - we're in our jammies on the ring camera, our kid was screaming, and I repeatedly said, "this is not helpful right now." But instead of giving us support, they repeatedly admonished us (so we could "understand the situation you find yourselves in"). I also know my kid, and knew in that moment he was overtired and overstimulated. I lost my temper, said a few choice words, and we withdrew. The next morning we checked the app to debrief and found that several messages had been deleted, mostly the ones where the team or Miss Megan had been unkind. We brought that to the attention of the team, who said it must be a technical glitch. My husband is a computer scientist and asked for the app logs, which had the full conversation. We got our refund that day. Batelle may work for some kids, but it did not work for our kid. It was not our failing; he responded very well to another method that was custom crafted for him (mostly to undo the work of Batelle) by a behaviorist. Our son needed NO stimulation - no light, no noise, no mantra - on order to fall asleep. We did a modified check and console and most of his sleep associations extinguished the first night with much less crying than we experienced in Batelle. The big takeaway for us is to rely upon your own intuition for what works or doesn't for your kid. The big takeaway for Batelle should be to recognize the method doesn't work for ALL kids and have some kindness and humility when it doesn't. Also train your sleep guides to know how to support sleep deprived parents. We wouldn't recommend this to anyone, but there needs to be a solution that scales and we wish them the best in figuring that out.