About this site

Marion is a free, independent self-help site for families in the UK who are having a hard time with a child's sleep. It sells nothing, takes no advertising, and has nothing to recommend to you at the end.

Our editorial rules

Sleep advice has a habit of making tired parents feel worse. These are the rules we hold ourselves to.

Non-judgement is a rule, not a tone

We do not use the words "good baby", "bad habits", "rod for your own back", or "spoiling". These turn a biological fact into a moral category, so that a baby behaving exactly as babies behave becomes a bad baby, and a parent responding to them becomes a parent making a mistake. We also avoid "just", as in "just put them down drowsy but awake", because "just" implies something is easy and that you are failing at it.

We treat "sleeping through the night" with care, because in the research it means at least three different things: midnight to 5am, any eight-hour block, or 10pm to 6am. On that last definition, more than a quarter of one-year-olds in a careful study still did not manage it. It is not a milestone, and it is not a test you can fail.

Firm only where lives are at stake

There is a small number of things on this site written as flat instructions with no hedging: put babies on their back, never fall asleep with a baby on a sofa or armchair, never shake a baby, never leave a baby alone in the bath, do not raise the head of a cot, and the emergency red flags. Those appear in red boxes and nowhere else.

Everything else is a choice. Bedtime routines, settling methods, nap timings, dropping night feeds: these are decisions for your family, and we try to give you the evidence rather than an instruction.

Harm reduction, not prohibition

The clearest example is co-sleeping. Telling parents "never co-sleep" is not just unhelpful, it is actively counterproductive: UNICEF UK's guidance for health professionals says plainly that parents "can easily choose the more dangerous sofa over the less dangerous bed because they are trying to follow advice to never bed-share". Around 22% of babies will be in a bed with a parent tonight. So we tell you which circumstances are genuinely dangerous, and how to make a bed safer in advance in case you fall asleep, rather than issuing a rule that many exhausted people cannot keep.

Everyone does the nights

We never address the reader as "mum". Around 1 in 10 fathers develop a mental health problem in the year after their baby is born, and UK research finds fathers questioning whether they are even entitled to ask for support. Single parents get particular attention, because almost all standard night-time advice quietly assumes there is another adult in the house, and for 3.2 million UK families there is not.

Where the facts come from

We work from primary sources: the NHS, The Lullaby Trust, UNICEF UK Baby Friendly, NICE guidance, BASIS at the University of Durham, Cerebra, The Sleep Charity, and the peer-reviewed literature. Every page ends with a list of what it drew on.

Charity registration numbers and helplines in the support directory were checked against the Charity Commission register for England and Wales, OSCR for Scotland, and each organisation's own website, on 1 August 2026.

That check mattered more than we expected. Several helplines that are still widely published across the internet, including on council directories and on other charities' websites, have closed or never existed. One well-known charity has been removed from the register entirely. We have listed those explicitly rather than quietly dropping them, so that if you have found the old number somewhere else you know why it is not here.

What we deliberately leave out

Where we could not verify something, we left it out or said so. That is why you will find some gaps that other sites fill confidently.

• We give no night-waking figures for two to three year olds or for school-age children, because we could not find sound UK data for them.
• We do not publish "wake window" timings. It is a popular idea rather than a clinical one, and it does not appear in NHS guidance or the paediatric sleep literature.
• We do not treat "sleep regression" as a real thing, because it has no biological basis, although the increased waking parents notice around four to five months and eight to nine months is real and well documented.
• We give no melatonin doses. It is a prescription-only medicine in the UK and that is a conversation with a specialist.
• We do not publish a UK prevalence figure for night terrors, because we could not verify one.
• Where a technique has never been properly tested, such as pick-up-put-down or dream feeding, we say that plainly instead of presenting it as evidence-based.

Accessibility

This site aims to meet WCAG 2.2 AA. In practice that means it works without JavaScript, it can be read at 200% zoom without anything breaking, it can be navigated entirely by keyboard, it respects your system's dark mode and reduced-motion settings, and it does not use colour as the only way of telling you something.

The illustrations are drawings rather than photographs, and each one carries a written description for screen readers as well as a caption that repeats the useful information in text.

"Disability friendly" also means the content itself. Sleep and additional needs is a full part of the site rather than a footnote, and we follow the government and NHS guidance on how to write about disability: disabled people rather than "the disabled", "has a condition" rather than "suffers from", seizures rather than "fits".

What this site is not

If we have got something wrong

Services change, helplines close and guidance is updated. If you find something on this site that is out of date or incorrect, particularly a phone number or a charity registration number, please tell us so we can fix it. We would much rather be corrected than have a parent ring a number at 3am and get nothing.