CHILDHOOD & PARENTING
The Traditional View Of Baby Sleep Or Why We Can’t Rely On Most Infant Sleep Studies
What Science And History Actually Say About How Babies Should Sleep | Part I
When it comes to infant sleep, we’ve been told a whole bunch of contradictory things. The idea of what is “normal” for babies when it comes to sleep is highly dependent on our socially constructed assumptions of what sleep “should” look like for infants. In short, we don’t know what normal is. Read that again; we don’t know what baby sleep is supposed to look like, so don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Elaine S. Barry did some wonderful work in her recently published article: What is “Normal” Infant Sleep? Why We Still Don’t Know.” Typically, when I find a study I feel like more people should know about, I share the information in a single article. However, Barry’s work is a WHOPPER which means I’m going to break it up into a series with a few parts.
Barry broke down the four main approaches to studying infant sleep architecture:
- Historical and traditional
- Medical and pediatric
- Evolutionary and anthropological
- Sociocultural
