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As a GP, writer and currently full-time mother to four children,
I have many concerns about the standard advice that mothers are
being given about young children and sleep. ‘How does your
child sleep’ in the Oct Playtimes, endorsed by Queensland
Health, and the U.S. ‘Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems'
by Richard Ferber are two examples of this approach.
These sources suggest methods such as leaving a child alone to
cry for increasing periods (so-called ‘controlled crying’)
and shutting a crying child in their bedroom so that they learn
to go to sleep alone.
Advising parents to ignore the cries of a distressed child, for
however long, does not produce a loving and trustful parent-child
relationship. I wonder how many of us would want our partners
or friends to treat us this way, if we were alone at night and
feeling upset and frightened.
But it is not only the hard-heartedness of these suggestions that
concerns me. All of the scientific and anthropological research
that I have read supports my instincts and experience. Our babies
need constant care and attention because of their extreme immaturity.
Unlike other mammals, they cannot keep themselves warm, move about,
or feed themselves until relatively late in life, which makes
the mother-infant relationship crucial to our offspring’s
survival. (McKenna 1996) Our children have therefore developed
behaviours and expectations to ensure that they get the special
care that they need in babyhood and beyond.
For example, for a baby, the safest place is in the mother’s
arms-and this is still true today, with SIDS being the leading
cause of death in young babies. This applies equally at night,
when sleeping with the mother- also called co-sleeping- gives
the baby protection, temperature regulation, emotional reassurance
and breast milk. It’s a perfect system, and what babies are
born to expect.
The mother also receives rewards - nature always puts in a reward
to encourage us. Co-sleeping gives us less disturbed sleep because
we both get into the same sleep cycles, and our babies will wake
to feed when we are both are in light sleep. We can do more breast
feeding for less effort and therefore maximise the contraceptive
effect.
We will also benefit from the extra doses of two breastfeeding
hormones. Oxytocin- the hormone of love- is stimulated by both
breastfeeding and by skin-to-skin contact, and keeps mother and
baby soft and loving with each other. Endorphins are the hormones
of pleasure, making mother- as well as baby- relaxed and sleepy:
just right for night feeding. No wonder co-sleeping mothers and
babies wake up with a smile.
World-wide research confirms the safety of co-sleeping, as long
as parents are not smokers, grossly obese, or under the influence
of drugs or alcohol, and attention is given to avoiding the suffocation
hazards that go with our soft western bedding.
My other major concern is that this approach to sleep follows
our society’s belief that our children will not become independent
unless we force them. In fact, research shows that the exact opposite
is true. "Research by Mary Ainsworth confirms that indulgence
of early dependency needs leads to independence" and "A
mother’s reliability and receptivity promote trust and emotional
stability in her child". (Klein, 1995). In other words, when
we treat our children with love and respect for their needs, we
plant the seeds for a lifetime of happiness – and relaxed
sleep.
For myself, the benefits of co-sleeping do not end with babyhood-
my older children are equally sweet and cuddly at night, and sharing
sleep into the pre-school years has its own rewards.
For example, sleep becomes a time to share intimacy and loving
feelings, especially when the day has been gruelling or conflict
has arisen. There is nothing so sweet as lying next to my child
as he/she drops into dreams (and often we do this at the same
time). We have never had the bedtime battles or night terrors
that are considered ‘normal’ in our culture- and remember
that our culture is totally abnormal, in global terms, in not
sharing sleep between family members.
Every co-sleeping family that I have met has their own unique
arrangement. Right now in our household, our middle children sleep
together in a double bed, and our eldest Emma, 10 has graduated,
in her own time, to her own bed. We continue to lie down to settle
Zoe (8) – although she says she can put herself to sleep
now- and Jacob, 5, who often joins us in the wee hours. (We have
a king-sized bed which we have turned around to make it 6’6
wide and 6’ long- a real ‘family bed’)
These three children, who are very confident and sociable, have
no problems with different routines when they sleep over with
their friends- and why would they, when sleep has always been
easy and pleasurable for them?
My youngest, Maia, who is 15 months, continues to fall asleep
most nights with Mother Natures best toddy- breast milk. Breastmilk
contains oxytocin and endorphins, and it seems right that we give
ourselves and our babies the benefit of these gentle hormones
at sleeptimes.
Since my first baby, I have gained more confidence and experience
with co-sleeping, and honestly, some of the things that are said
to discourage us strike me as crazy. For example, I have read
in many places -also in the previous article- that if we cuddle
or nurse our baby to sleep, they may awaken later and "…may
not be able to go back to sleep because their environment has
changed". As an adult waking up, I don’t remember how
I got to sleep, and it seems to me that our babies simply want
to be held and nursed to sleep because it is pleasurable, biologically
adaptive, and it works.
A family bed might not suit every family, but I feel that it is
important to consider that co-sleeping is what we as humans have
evolved to do with our young, and it is in turn what our babies
and small children expect. When we ask our children to sleep alone
all night, we are stretching their biological capabilities, and
there is a good chance that they will protest.
If this happens, we can choose not to lock them up, but to take
their feedback seriously and work to find loving, gentle and co-operative
solutions- and there are many different possibilities.
For example, some families have invited an older child back into
their bedroom, and found that a ‘dose’ of co-sleeping,
or even sleeping on the floor (in what Emma calls a ‘nest’)
is all that is needed.
In many families- as in ours- one parent lies down with a child
or children until they fall asleep, giving reassurance at the
time when it is most needed. Sitting quietly or meditating also
work well at this time- and I am less likely to fall asleep myself.
When children wake in the dark hours, we have often gone into
the child’s bed- double beds work best for obvious reasons-
and fallen asleep until morning. This is currently my partner
Nicholas’s specialty- we have a casual division of night-time
labour with Maia being my responsibility, and the others his.
When a child is sick or needing extra care, it feels good to have
them in our bed, only an arm’s length away. Needing an extra
dose on Mummy or Daddy is a good enough reason most of the time,
and I notice that sleeping together promotes harmony with each
other in a subtle and beautiful way.
As parents, we are in it for the long haul, whether we like it
or not. Controlled crying, ‘Ferberizing" and the like
are short-term solutions that I see as detrimental in the long-term.
Our children will outgrow their dependency needs- including the
need for company at sleep time- in their own time, and our job
is to provide the love, reassurance and guidance that maximises
growth and happiness in the short, medium and long terms.
As one !Kung mother from the African desert responded to Dr Spock
(who also advocated ignoring our children’s cries) "Doesn’t
he understand that he’s only a baby and that’s why he
cries? You pick him up and comfort him. When he’s older,
he will have sense and he won’t cry any more."
I hope that we as a culture can come to our senses also and treat
our children lovingly day and night.
References
Klein, Paul. The needs of children. Mothering magazine (US) number
74, Spring 1995. P 39-45
McKenna, James. Babies need their mothers beside them. World Health,
the journal of the World Health Organization, March-April 1996.
Also at www.naturalchild.com
Konner, Melanie Childhood Little Brown & Co, Boston, 1991
Further reading
Meredith E Small. Our Babies, Ourselves – How Biology and
Culture Shape the Way We Parent. 1998 Doubleday.
Tine Thevenin The Family Bed: An Age-Old Concept in Child Rearing
Avery 1986
Debra Jackson. Three in a Bed- the benefits of sharing your bed
with your baby. Bloomsbury New York 1999
William Sears Night Time Parenting
Sarah is a GP (family physician), an internationally published
writer on pregnancy, birth, and parenting, and mother to four
home-born children. Click
here for more of Sarah's writing on gentle birth and gentle
parenting, and for information about her upcoming book, Gentle
Birth, Gentle Mothering: The wisdom and science of gentle choices
in pregnancy, birth, and parenting.
Published
in Playtimes, the magazine of the Queensland Playgroup Association,
May 2002
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