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The same is true of sleeping. Human children are designed to be sleeping with their parents. The sense of touch is the most important sense to primates, along with sight. Young primates are carried on their mother’s body and sleep with her for years after birth, often until well after weaning. The expected pattern is for mother and child to sleep together, and for child to be able to nurse whenever they want during the night. Normal, healthy, breastfed and co-sleeping children do not sleep “through the night” (say 7-9 hours at a stretch) until they are 3-4 years old, and no longer need night nursing. I repeat— this is NORMAL and HEALTHY. Dr. James McKenna’s research on co-sleeping clearly shows the dangers of solitary sleeping in young infants, who slip into abnormal patterns of very deep sleep from which it is very difficult for them to rouse themselves when they experience an episode of apnea (stop breathing). When cosleeping, the mother is monitoring the baby’s sleep and breathing patterns, even though she herself is asleep. When the baby has an episode of apnea, she rouses the baby by her movements and touch.
This is thought to be the primary mechanism by which co-sleeping protects children from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In other words, many cases of SIDS in solitary sleeping children are thought to be due to them having learned to sleep for long stretches at a time at a very early age, so they find themselves in these deep troughs of sleep, then they may experience an episode of apnea, and no one is there to notice or rouse them from it, so they just never start breathing again. Co-sleeping also allows a mother to monitor the baby’s temperature during the night, to be there if they spit up and start to choke, and just to provide the normal, safe environment that the baby/child has been designed to expect.
Is this convenient for parents? No!
Is this difficult for some new parents to adjust to? Yes!
No doubt about it, the gap between what our culture teaches us to expect of the sleep patterns of a young child (read them a story, tuck them in, turn out the light, and not see them again for 8 hours) and the reality of how children actually sleep if healthy and normal, yawns widely.
But the first steps to dealing with the fact that your young child doesn’t sleep through the night, or doesn’t want to sleep without you is to realize that:
- Not sleeping through the night until they are 3 or 4 years of age is normal and healthy behavior for human infants.
- Your children are not being difficult or manipulative, they are being normal and healthy, and behaving in ways that are appropriate for our species.
Once you understand these simple truths, it becomes much easier to deal with parenting your child at night. Once you give up the idea that you must have 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep at night, and view these nighttime interactions with your child as precious and fleeting, you get used to them very quickly.
I highly recommend Dr. Sears’ book on Nighttime Parenting [available from the La Leche League International Catalogue]. Our children’s early years represent the most important and influential time of their lives. It passes all too quickly. But meeting your child’s needs during these first few years will pay off in many ways in the years to come.
Feel free to respond, argue, disagree, ask questions, ask for references, etc. Or visit my web page at prairienet.org/laleche/dettwyler.html
About the Author:
Dr. Katherine A. Dettwyler is now a semi-retired Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at Texas A&M University, where she taught from 1987 to 2000. She is the author of Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa, which recounts tales of her fieldwork on child health in Mali. Dancing Skeletons was awarded the 1995 Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology. She is also the co-editor of Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives, which includes her own two chapters “Beauty and the Breast: The Cultural Context of Breastfeeding in the United States,” and “A Time to Wean: The Hominid Blueprint for a Natural Age of Weaning in Modern Human Populations.”
 This article appeared in Pathways to Family Wellness magazine, Issue #01.
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