Batelle Sleep SchoolReviews of batelle.com

I liked the concept. It is a well thought out stepped approach. However, we followed it religiously for three months and our child is still not sleeping through the night consistently. As others mentioned, the support seemed generic and the responses were the same every time. It is advertised as a highly individualized program but the support we got was from another tired mom with her own fussy newborn in the background who I felt like barely had time to address our actual issues. If our child was sleeping I would sing praises. But he’s 18 months and still not sleeping and particularly fussy during the day so we are alll exhausted. Which is why we invested in the program in the first place.

First I’d like to say that I DO believe that the program CAN work for anyone, as can be attested by the large number of positive reviews. However, I feel that each child’s experience and acclimation to the program can be drastically different so the claims/promises/expectations, such as “no-cry” approach isn’t always realistic. Now that being said, the program didn’t work for us as our child was extremely opposed to sleeping in her crib and doesn’t know how to self-soothe. In addition, my partner was apprehensive about this sleep training approach and the excessive crying just made the whole process extra challenging for her. The program is focused on an incremental “step” approach and I just felt that our daughter was not really succeeding at each step milestone but the program still encouraged moving forward through steps. Ultimately, we decided to give up around step 6 or 7, because we weren’t really seeing any progress, and this is when the reality of the “guarantee” was revealed, that the money back guarantee is only if you finish the full program. This doesn’t really make sense to me, if your child isn’t able to make progress on preceding steps, how can they be expected to finish the program? So the reveal is that you forfeit $500, of the $1,500 if you don’t finish the program. I had a few other minor gripes with the program generally speaking, I wish they had been more transparent about certain things and I definitely wish it had worked for us because we are still struggling to help our daughter self-soothe. Congrats for all those who is DID work for.

UPDATE: After a lot of broken communication and almost treats they did pay us back fully. They decided the option they had given us and that we had accepted was no longer but they came through. I want to say I still use some aspects of batelle and I recommend giving it a try as every child and family is different and their method is soft and kind. Just didn't fully work for our family, but after about 2 months of us keeping the good habits our son sleeps alone. I do recommend but be prepared to have a fight if you need to be reimbursed. After they replied to my review: so once I posted my review batelle send me a message and email, saying they experienced issues and they were going to refund us...again. They have stopped answering following the email saying the would refund us for the 100th time. At this point we are looking at dealing with this at higher levels. This is rude. Batelle had some great aspects. The idea behind everything you do is good. The ladder method is excellent and I will definitely keep it. Through this experience I was able to move my son from my room back to his own bed. However, he keeps needing our close support which means we never made it to the last step and this well beyond the 2 weeks they say they can achieve. So we contacted them to be reimbursed which seems fair considering our son after 5 to 6 weeks of their help still doesn't fall asleep alone or sleep through the night. They offered us to get half the price of the program reimbursed and keep access to the info and occasional help. To not fight and make everyone happy, and because like I said some of the info on the app is valuable I accepted. Well now they have stopped answering us (for over 3 or 4 weeks now) and we still haven't seen the portion of the money they offered us back. This is unacceptable as they didn't provide my family with what they promised. Also, for families with more then 1 child it is not sibling friendly.

I started Batelle around last year. The 2 week programme is very extensive and they are very supportive and approachable and accessible throughout the 2 weeks. No question is too small. I did give it a good go and my daughter did manage to achieve some improvement in her sleep: she used to wake up every 1-2 hours which reduced to maybe once and then a few nights none. The programme helped me wean her off her milk and get a good bedtime routine. However, she never stopped waking up at 5am. On maybe one two mornings a weeks she’ll sleep until 6/6:30. I qualified from the programme without really achieving this. They were still available for tips on how to improve this but despite trying what they suggested and looking at the trouble shooting I haven’t managed to fix it. I understand that there can be regressions but we never managed to sort this it out ever. For the price I wonder if a follow up perhaps 1 week of video help would be beneficial. I’m only rating it three star because of we didn’t achieve the 12 hour sleep that they promised. It also takes longer than 5 mins to get to sleep but I’m not too bothered about that.

We participated in ms megans sleep school in october 2020. Ever since her amazing method our son has still been sleeping great and also using her sweet mantra to go to sleep to each night. This was never required but we saw how much he loved it and decided to let him keep using it even after sleep school. However, we have been having issues maintaining a consistent feed for the mantra in the last couple days. My wife used to have it downloaded on her phone but since that phone is out dated now and not working anymore when she went back to the site to gain access to his mantra she realized it was gone! It has since made mason anxious since we can no longer depend on that nightly audio file to play for him to calmly fall asleep. To be honest this is quite frustrating as we thought we could count on battele to maintain these elements in our long term guarantee but now we dont feel so confident in this. Would it be possible to get that file permanently? I loved how ms megan personalized it for mason using his name in the song.

I desperately wanted to love this company - I thoroughly appreciated each and every one of the trainers. I was ready to become one myself and wanted to scream out to the world I FINALLY found an answer with baby #3!! The trainers were extremely supportive and loving, at first. However, I strongly want to advise parents out there that this method doesn’t necessarily work for all babies, and I wish they could modify that and not have a one-size fits all approach. There is a LOT of crying, but you end up convincing yourself it’s not full out extinction (CIO) because you’re with the child. We started at 5.5 months with some gentler techniques to ease him into the official school at 6 months. Within 2-3 weeks, he was doing great (though not sleeping/staying in bed for 12 hrs) and got the hang of 5 min bedtime routines and going to sleep on his own. But every regression, illness, travel, etc took us waaay back and it was hard hearing him cry over and over and over again. Standing next to his crib constantly singing and brushing him got excessively exhausting, and he started to get really irritated with the touching as well. We tried for FIVE months, but we were kept rushing through the steps to be considered a ‘graduate’, which is when the 24/hr support stops. Suddenly, no one was responding for days and I was left distraught. I can’t even begin to explain how desperate I was- I was crying, screaming, and begged them for a response because I was losing it and got no response for days. The CFO (or COO?) and some other trainers reached out to me and mention Miss Meghan, the one who developed this method, had left the company and so everyone was a bit lost. I understand- it’s a startup company and changes happen. But the thing is- my baby and I suffered as a result. Someone should’ve still been with us through it- or told us what was going on. You can’t just ghost a parent when they’re that invested, sleep deprived and just plain out going crazy with a crying baby on their hands! Most importantly, the method needed to be tweaked. Not every baby sleeps 12 hrs. Not every baby is patient enough to stay awake in bed “quietly” for 1-2 hrs. Not ever baby naps more than 1 hr. And it’s not ok to keep them crying for months on end expecting one day, they’ll just learn. They don’t learn - they just give up. Which is exactly what CIO is- the child just gives up and that’s not what I wanted. If I did, I wouldn’t pay this much money and time for the school! Anyway, I got my money back and I truly appreciated that. We left with some good techniques though which are still useful. Do I think it’s worth it despite all this? If Miss Meghan was still on board, yes- because if after 2 weeks it doesn’t, you can get your money back- and that’s a win win because you still walk away with some great knowledge. Now with the new team? Im not sure because I didn’t have a great experience right after the transition, but it may have changed.

One star each for the leaders Kim and Emily. Very helpful and supportive! One star only for the program. After 10 weeks we still have 30+ minutes of crying before bed and unable to do naps in cribs. Sleep is still improved from when we started though.

I enjoy the support from Batelle but I do feel it’s very firm. My daughter has reflux and I found doing sleep school flared it, which they made her work through. Admittedly she is sleeping well in her own bed now, but we stopped at step 3 with no plans to move forward with sleep school. We also didn’t want to ditch the dummy, however did go forward with trying. It definitely did help with my daughters sleep but we actually have given it back to her. They didn’t seem overly happy about this and encouraged weaning it again. The app is a bit hit and miss, it played up a lot in sleep school and I’m still after 2 months getting notifications about sleep school…. Which I’m not doing. All in all, it helped but it’s just so firm set. The expectations are high and you do feel like a failure if you don’t reach their expectations. Also recently we have found out our daughter benefits from a feed right at bedtime which is massively frowned upon with their system. But with this she sleeps well and has one feed a night at 8months old. Rather than 3 to 4 feeds that she was doing. I don’t know, it does seem like a waste of money but it has helped. Also being outside of the US didn’t help. The kit they send over is all US plugs and then zoom calls can be a tad hard with timing. I do recommend the hug though. edited to add. that I do recommend them if you are in the US I do not think they are frauds, and they have been brilliant service wise. just not quite the right fit for us with our daughter but it HAS helped.