Baby sleep has become a sign of parenting competence – and a source of shame | Lucy Pasha-Robinson

Admitting my two-year-old still wakes at night can elicit a gasp of horror. Expectations around infant sleep are often way off

Expecting your first baby? An inescapable truth is that you are about to lose a lot of sleep. You will know by now that seasoned, weather-beaten parents relish sharing this news. It's all about survival in the early days," friends would say, when I was pregnant. Enjoy those lie-ins while you can!"

By the time my daughter arrived, I had collected a small armoury of tools for the battle against her anticipated wakefulness. Swaddles, blackout blinds, a white-noise machine; for months after she was born, I used apps to obsessively track her wake windows" and sleep totals to the minute, determined to crack the code for a good night's sleep. When I think back to her first summer, I'm transported to my in-laws' attic bedroom, where I spent hours in the dark, sound machine blaring, rocking her - willing her - to nap. But no matter what I did, my daughter never slept well, and I nearly drove myself mad in pursuit of discovering why.