Louise Goncalves

I help parents who are feeling exhausted and at the end of their tether, and want to feel more confident in helping their child sleep well. Every day, I hear from parents who have been bombarded with advice from friends and family, in books and online. Sleep is a highly opinionated subject. Advice is often conflicting, and lots of it is based on myth.

The overwhelm that comes with trying to filter through the advice can be huge, especially when you are sleep deprived and struggling to get through day to day. When you see your friends babies seemingly sleeping well, it can feel demoralising, especially if the strategies that worked for them haven’t worked for you.

I’m here to help. I’m a Holistic Sleep coach with 10 years of experience in supporting sleep deprived families. I can help you solve your child’s sleep puzzle piece by piece, helping them become the best sleeper they can be. If you’re ready for better sleep, you can get started today. Book your 45 minute appointment and let’s work together to help you and your family finally get the sleep you need.

I help families take a stepped approach to improving sleep, so that the sleep coaching journey is stress free and manageable. Often, we’ll start with some quick wins to optimise sleep. When the right steps are in place, Small changes can bring big improvements! Sometimes this is enough to help parents get to a place where sleep feels far more manageable. However, lots of parents are naturally keen to keep the momentum going, so from here, we can start tackling some of the bigger sleep challenges you may be facing. Again though, we can take a stepped approach to this, making a few changes at a time, seeing how the child responds.

I have worked as a Children’s sleep coach for over 10 years, having previously been a Night Nanny and Ofsted registered Child Minder. I am an accredited Holistic Sleep Coach, and have also undertaken courses with MNT and with The Children’s Sleep Charity. I have a wide range of experience, particularly in helping parents to improve sleep as they return to work at the end of parental leave. I am also experienced in supporting children with allergies, reflux, complex needs, ASD, Down’s syndrome, adoptive and foster families, and bereaved families.

In particular, I am able to help with:

• Helping parents create an evening routine that makes bedtimes an enjoyable part of the day.
• Creating bedtime routines that make bedtime quick and easy
• Supporting parents who wish to reduce night feeds
• Helping parents introduce alternative settling methods
• Reducing night waking
• Using gentle methods to help children learn to settle more independently
• Naps – helping parents establish a predictable and flexible nap routine
• Naps – working from contact/pram naps to cot naps
• Solving early rising
• Navigating through sleep regressions
• Supporting babies who have sleep issues caused by reflux
• Supporting families who wish to transition from co-sleeping
• Supporting parents who are interested in using Montessori sleep methods
• Helping families where only one parent has traditionally done bedtime, to work towards the other parent being able to be equally involved (especially where children have traditionally breastfed to sleep at bedtime)

After speaking with me, parents often talk about how much better they feel – they feel both more confident in how they can help their child sleep well, and more hopeful about the future.

I am a member of the International Association of Child Sleep Consultants, The Association of Professional Sleep Consultants, The British Sleep Society and The Holistic Sleep Programme.

Testimonial

“Louise is amazing! She’s helped us get our 9 month old daughter from bed sharing and still waking every hour through the night, to sleeping 10 hours straight in less than a week.Her methods are gentle, something that really mattered to us. Louise herself is lovely to work with and we didn’t feel judged in any way. I feel like we finally found the sensible middle way between harsh sleep training and resigning ourselves to not sleeping for a long time to come. I’m returning to work in a week and Louise’s help has lifted a weight from my mind. I only wish we had contacted Louise a couple of months sooner so I’d been less tired for the last couple of months of my mat leave!”