About

Pelin KARANFIL

I am Pelin, an Early Years Practitioner and OCN Level 6 Holistic Sleep Coach (the highest level of qualification in this specialism). With significant professional experience in the field of early years, I am dedicated to helping parents and young children with their nights (and days!).

My passion and curiosity about child development has been with me since 2003, when I first started my studies in childcare and education. From the very beginning, I believed that the world of children is unique, delicate, and full of promise.

Over the past 20 years, I took on exploring this world through continued education and hands-on experience with children and families. This career path has been one of joy and fulfilment, but was also one that impressed upon me the significance that caring for the first years of life holds for future generations. As the renowned psychologist and clinician Joan Raphael-Leff describes, ‘Babies are the potential of any society, and their health predicts the quality of the future’ (‘The Psychological Processes of Childbearing’, Routledge, 2005).

Sleep Coaching

Sleep is, for children and adults alike, a threshold into different worlds: It grants rest, dreaming, and the promise of the next day. It brings together the vitality of waking life, the mysteries of biology and the power of development. Yet it can also be a challenge for mothers, fathers and their babies – Is this too much or too little? Why won’t sleep come to him/her? Should I worry about this or that change I’ve noticed? My hope is that by sharing some of the load, we will restore the sense of balance that has gone missing. 
In my professional career, I worked closely with new and experienced parents in the intimate environment of their homes. Through this personally rewarding journey, I saw the hurdles of the first years of life first-hand. I shared in the many joys that the arrival of a little one brings to a family home, and joined in the struggles and worries too. Childhood illnesses and skin issues. Weaning and fussy eating. Bearing with separation anxieties, troubling behaviours, and developmental delays. During such foreseen, and unforeseen moments of crisis, I worked in concert with parents to figure out options, strategies, solutions. It was a collaborative approach that felt most fitting to me, underpinned by a conviction that a problem shared is a problem halved. It is this same approach that I now bring into my practice around supporting sleep.
I feel privileged to have learned from many incredible teachers throughout my career, and particularly grateful for the opportunity to study sleep coaching with Dr. Lyndsey Hookway, whose research work has reshaped the way we understand children’s sleep. Today, I am proud to deliver sleep solutions for your little ones through an evidence-based, attachment-focused approach. I do not endorse sleep training techniques (such as the so-called ‘cry-it-out’ method), which place excessive strain on the maturing brain and body and are not supported by the evidence base. Instead, I will work together with you, to understand what your baby or child struggles with, needs, and will benefit from.

To find out what this can look like, keep up the tab-jumping!