With a new baby in the house, this is a question I hear often. How, when, and how often a new baby is sleeping seems to be a source of anxiety and frustration for so many parents. It also seems to be a way that we judge ourselves and our parenting skills. But even if we don't judge ourselves, there is no shortage of other people (grandparents most often) willing to do the judging for us.
In our class reading for this week (Child Psychology: Development in a Changing Society. Ch. 6) we've read about the growth and development of the brain, and the several key factors in supporting healthy growth. Of these factors, sleep is one of the most important. But what is the best way for an infant or young child to sleep? As the text points out, many cultures have widely differing ideas as to how children should sleep. Even for adults, there are many different sleeping styles throughout the world, and even within one culture sleeping habits can change over time.
Within my own home, there is a bit of a culture clash around sleep. As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm from the Midwest of the US, and was raised with the traditional working-class, Protestant values predominate there in my youth. In terms of sleep habits, most people viewed their days as divided into thirds: one third for work, one third for sleep, and one third for leisure time. Assembly line mentalities kept people on strict schedules, and since many people were on shift work, this idea of dividing and regimenting your day was common. Napping (unless it was Sunday afternoon and you were sitting in front of a football game on the TV) was seen as a sign of laziness, even moral weakness. If you had a bad night's sleep, you just had to power through the next day. I've internalized these same sleeping habits.
In contrast, my wife (who is from India) has very different attitudes and habits for sleeping. For her, sleeping is more a matter of catching some whenever it is available. She is a frequent napper, and seems to be able to sleep anywhere. Additionally, any days spent with my in-laws must always have a period set aside for everyone to nap, usually leaving me as the lone person sitting awake while everyone else snores away.
Much recent research into the history of human sleep patterns is on my wife's side, it seems. An especially interesting fact is the idea of "segmented sleep" discussed in the work of historian Roger Ekirch in his book At Days Close: Night in Times Past. Todays's standard of an 8 hour block of sleep is a relatively modern invention made possible by the invention of electricity and encouraged by societal changes during the Industrial Revolution. Before these events, it was common for people to sleep in several chunks a day: first falling asleep shortly after dusk, waking in the middle of the night for an hour or two before going back to until sunrise, and then adding an afternoon nap as well.
While it might be impractical for adults to return to this more "natural" sleeping pattern, it is interesting to look at this phenomenon in relation to the sleep patterns of infants. Most infants seem to naturally follow this segmented sleeping pattern, with naps during the day and nighttime divided into 2 or 3 different periods of sleep. While most parents try to enforce the regular night of sleep on their children (sometimes gently, and sometimes not so gently), it is almost always a source of stress for both the parents and the child. How much easier could child rearing be (for both the parents and the child) if a more segmented sleep pattern was followed by the whole family? Not only could the baby's natural sleep rhythms be honored, but the parents could much more easily adapt to the situation, eliminating the sleep-deprived zombie state that so many new parents are forced to deal with.
A change to a schedule that more closely follows natural sleeping habits wouldn't only benefit infants. As various studies have shown, even adolescents can have a very difficult time adapting to our contemporary "early to bed, early to rise" 8 hours of sleep tradition. The stereotype of the sleepy, unkempt and unfocused teenager might really be the result of sleep deprivation caused by society forcing them to adapt to a school and sleep schedule that is unnatural for them.
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