053: Sleep! (And how to get more of it)

“HOW DO I GET MY CHILD TO SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT?!” is the thinly-veiled message under the surface of many of the emails that I get about sleep.  And I don’t blame you.  I don’t claim to be a magician in this regard, although I did get incredibly, amazingly lucky – my daughter put in her first eight-hour night at six weeks old, and has regularly slept through the night for longer than I can remember.  I’m really genuinely not sure I could parent if things weren’t like this.   But today’s episode is about the data, not about anecdata.   Zoe in Sydney wrote to me: A hotly debated topic with my friends has been “sleeping through the night.” My daughter never was great at napping and still wakes up once a night, coming into our bed. We have never been able to do controlled crying etc – I would love to know what science says about sleeping through the night! And what is best for your child (vs the parent). My close friend is a breastfeeding counselor and said they are taught that lots of children don’t sleep through until 4 years old! Other mothers I knew were horrified if their child wasn’t sleeping through by 6 months – and the French talk about their children ‘having their nights’ much earlier…   As I started researching this topic it became clear that sleep is driven to an incredible extent by cultural preferences.  Some (Western) psychologists advocate for letting children Cry It Out, while people in many cultures around the world see putting a child to sleep in their own room (never mind allowing them to cry) as tantamount to child abuse.   So: can we get our children to sleep more?  Is bed-sharing inherently bad?  Does Cry It Out harm the child in some way?  Let’s find out!   Jump to highlights 02:31 Introduction to today's topic: sleep, and why Jen finally tackled it 04:26 A cross-cultural look at sleep, and why anthropological literature on it is surprisingly thin 08:16 Why Western attitudes toward bed sharing diverged historically, from Catholic confessions to Freud 10:16 How individualism and "expert knowledge" reshaped Western sleep norms over the 20th century 13:14 Breastfeeding, co-sleeping, and their protective relationship with SIDS risk 17:00 Comparing elaborate Western bedtime routines to cultures with none at all, like a Guatemalan Mayan community 19:40 Whose need is bedtime really serving: the child's, or the parent's? 22:25 Racial differences in children's sleep patterns and parental perceptions of sleep problems 29:24 Weighing popular sleep books against the evidence, including a critical look at claims made in The Baby Sleep Book 34:25 Digging into cortisol and long-term outcome data, and why the methodology raises questions 36:37 How parental sleep and mental health improve after behavioral interventions 42:25 Whether self-soothing at night actually matters for a child's development 44:53 Wrapping up: what the evidence supports, and when behavioral sleep training isn't appropriate   References Amoabeng, A.O. 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