The holy grail for American parents: sleep.

I took a seminar in graduate school called Cultural Psychology of the Self. The class explored how basic psychological processes - cognition, emotion, motivation - that were once assumed to be universal are actually culturally constructed. The very first reading (Shweder, Jensen and Goldstein, 1995) addressed the topic of sleep arrangements. What I learned from the article was that while middle-class, white Americans don't sleep with their kids, in many other cultures, co-sleeping is the norm (note - the article was written before attachment parenting became "en vogue"). In fact, Shweder et al. (1995) contend that among the non-Western communities studied by anthropologists around the world, there isn't a single culture in which infants sleep alone. During our class discussion of the reading, I was surprised to learn that I was the only person in the room who didn't co-sleep with his/her parents. I was the only middle-class, white American in the class. And so it dawned on me: "[w]ho sleeps by whom is not merely a personal or private activity. It is a social practice, like burying the dead or eating meals with your family or honoring the practice of a monogamous marriage, which (for those engaged in the practice) is invested with moral and social meaning and with implications for a person's standing in a community." (Shweder at al., 1995, p. 38)

I discussed the culture of sleep arrangements with detached interest. I was single with no kids, and left the discussion feeling that co-sleeping was a fine and good thing. But just not for me. When I was pregnant with Lydia, we heard lots of opinions about the issue, but I felt for the sake of my marriage that I was not interested. Shweder et al. (1995) would say I placed a high value on the "sacred couple," something upon which many non-Western cultures place less value. While I was studying abroad, my home-stay family left town for several weeks, and I stayed with their friends who had two younger children. They co-slept with their 11-year old son. When I expressed curiosity about it, the matriarch told me, "Americans have a romantic notion of marriage. And we don't." I thought, "Darned right, I have a romantic notion of marriage!" I'm very American in that way.

Then Lydia was born. And we soon realized sleep was a thing of the past. She would not sleep in her bassinet, which we never ended up being able to use. She wanted to sleep on my chest, if it was up to her, so during the day I let her, and at night we battled. A regular swaddle would not work - she struggled to get her arms free and woke herself up. We swaddled her in a straight jacket (miraculous or not, that is what it is)! She would still wake up every 2-3 hours, so I would go in to her crib, nurse her, swaddle her, rock her, and attempt to sleep before she would wake up again. We were zombies for weeks, and finally bought a ridiculous co-sleeper to put in our bed, but it was still too detached for her. She wanted to be by mommy. So for months we juggled some crib sleep with some co-sleeping just so we could get some semblance of sleep. Still, Lydia did not sleep through the night in her own bed until she was 18 months old. By that point, I was so screwed up that I had to see my physician about insomnia. But the sacred couple was in tact... though too tired to enjoy each other.

I was starting to think that there was more to the co-sleeping issue than cultural values. I suspected babies just aren't made to sleep alone. In nature it would make no sense to leave a baby to sleep by herself, and for most of human history, people lived in small spaces with large families. Co-sleeping was a given until only very recently in modern, Western cultures. So when I was pregnant with Anna, we borrowed a bedside co-sleeper for her. I figured having her at our bedside for a while would work well, and we would eventually manage to get her to transition to a crib as we did with Lydia.

But then we met Anna. Colicky, adorably insane Anna. She would scream for hours nightly for the first few months of her life, and only eventually fall to sleep with the hair dryer blaring and snuggled right on top of me. There was no way she would sleep in her crib for months without wailing ten times louder than Lydia ever had. She napped in the baby carrier buried in my chest, and I fought for weeks to get her to even nap in the crib. Yet, as we co-slept with her out of necessity at night, we were getting better sleep than we ever did with Lydia. Once we gave up and surrendered to the arrangement, we were actually well-rested. We were not happy to lose the "sacred couple" space of our bedroom, but we were not exhausted.

I don't think I am alone. Friends who are parents constantly lament sleep deprivation, and everyone has their favorite sleep training book to recommend, myself included. I read half a dozen of them before realizing it boils down to this: unless you are willing to let your baby cry it out in the crib, you are unlikely to get much sleep. We chose not to do the cry it out method, though we have and do let our babies cry for a few minutes to see if they can resettle themselves. There are lots of reasons we've made that personal parenting choice. The top among them are: 1) I'm a working mom during most of the day 4 days a week and want to be there for night parenting and 2) the research on the stress hormones produced by excessive crying. I hear that some people just have easy babies who are happy to sleep in a crib with little or no crying. To all my friends with such babies, a plague on your houses (translation - I'm insanely jealous of you).

I was curious, are parents in co-sleeping cultures this sleep deprived and obsessed with sleep training? I asked my cultural insider friend and amazing mother Lucy, who currently lives in Tokyo. She took a look at the parenting book section in a bookshop, and she said not one single book was on sleep, but many talked about how to raise a genius. Apparently, sleep is a non-issue in the Japanese parenting literature. Clearly this isn't a rigorous investigation, but it is supportive of my hypothesis that kids just are not designed to crib sleep, and co-sleeping parents and babies on average sleep better.

Jeff and I are at a point where we're fine with the current arrangement; Jeff always says, "It's just a temporary phase." But I've found that it is swimming against the current even despite the popularity of the attachment parenting movement, which advocates co-sleeping. Our first pediatrician told me that it was dangerous to co-sleep. Both sides of the debate - pro- and anti-co-sleeping folks - cite scientific studies that show the SIDS rate is lower for the sleep practice that they support. Our current pediatrician said she is convinced that it is totally safe to co-sleep if done properly. However, at Anna's 4-month appointment, she strongly suggested that we sleep train Anna, and gave me a handout that she herself termed "propaganda" entitled "Sleep Problems." One gem of advice on the handout? "Children should never sleep with parents." It seems even the medical advice we get is culturally biased. When I told her that I choose not to let my kids cry it out, she said that she found listening to her babies cry was so hard that she had to leave the house for several nights and let her husband do it. I admire her will power and respect her parenting choices. When talking about the issue to folks other than our pediatrician, I've had some really awkward social interactions. When I share openly that we are currently sleeping with Anna, I am often met with silence and/or expressions of shock. I typically don't openly share this information in order to avoid such conversations (though I guess this blog post blows my cover).

Shweder et al. (1995, p. 28) think that what is most interesting about the literature on sleeping arrangements is that it is "packed with moral assumptions and evaluations." They note that there is no evidence one way or another that one sleeping arrangement is better for the long-term psychological health of the child, but rather that "sleeping practices may serve mainly as daily ritual enactments of the fundamental values of a group and/or as a measure used by insiders for determining who should be accepted as 'normal' and 'cooperative' members of that society." (p. 29) In many ways, Jeff and I have intentionally strived not to be "normal" or "cooperative" members of American society. We both feel that some of the core American values - individualism, materialism, nationalism - are opposed to our spiritual beliefs. So I guess I'll just embrace our current sleep arrangement as another thing that makes us weird by American standards.

Reference:

Shweder, R. A., Jensen, L. A., & Goldstein, W. M. (1995). Who sleeps by whom revisited: A method for extracting the moral goods implicit in practice. In J. J. Goodnew, P. J. Miller, & F. Kessel (Eds.), New directions for child development: No. 67. Cultural practices as contexts for development (pp. 21-39). San Francisco: Jossey-bass.