Quote

Differences in attitude toward sleep in general were equally clear between the two cultures. American parents used lullabies, stories, special clothing, bathing, and toys to ritualize the sleep experience, whereas Mayan parents simply let their babies fall asleep when they did, with no folderol. When the researcher explained to the Mayan mother how babies were put to bed in the US, they were shocked and highly disapproving, and expressed pity for the American babies who had to sleep alone. They saw their own sleep arrangements as part of a larger commitment to their children, a commitment in which practical consideration plays no part. It did not matter to them if there was no privacy, or if the baby squirmed at night - closeness at night between mother and baby was seen as part of what all parents do for their children.

[libaware.economads.com]

Quote

As anthropologist Susan Abbott points out, "[Cosleeping] is not some kind of quaint hold-over from an archaic past, nor is it pathological in its constitution or outcome for the majority of those who experience it. It is a current, well-situated pattern of child rearing that is withstanding the onslaught of advice by contemporary childcare experts."

The point is to make a tightly knit family and keep children close. Seventy-five-year-old Verna Mae Sloane writes of motherhood in Appalachia: "How can you expect to hold on to them in life if you begin by pushing them away?"

Why is cosleeping important? Science is just now learning the answer to that question. No one yet knows why animals sleep, but we do have a pretty good idea how sleep occurs. Like most physical states, sleep involves a number of biological or physiological mechanisms. Sleep is controlled by the primitive brain stem, which sends messages to and from the heart, the lungs, muscles around the diaphragm and ribs, and hormone- producing organs - all systems that monitor and regulate the choreography of sleep. In sleep, just as during times of wakefulness, adult humans shift through periods of controlled neocortical-driven breaths and automatic brainstem-initiated breaths. Adults are able to manage the shift between these types, but infants do it less easily. Infants are born with neurologically unfinished brains. They don't develop the ability to easily navigate types of breathing until they are at least three to four months old, and the sleep patterns of newborns reflect this. As mentioned earlier, they are unable to consolidate periods of sleep and don't distinguish between day and night; they also spend more time in REM sleep than adults do.

When sleeping with her mother, a baby reacts to her movements and goes through any number of changes in sleep stages, far more than when the infant sleeps alone, practicing the transitions from one kind of breathing to another. Left alone, babies must steer through night sleep with little training, and no external environmental stimuli or cues. Most babies eventually develop the skill to shift between types of breathing as their brains develop. But for some infants, such shifts may be harder; they could benefit from the external metronome of parental breathing. Cosleeping, with all its entwined movements through various levels of sleep, and its physical checkpoints, may be exactly what nature intended to ensure babies survive through the night as well as learn how to sleep and breathe on their own.

Most parents in Western culture, by opting not to cosleep, have thus altered the physical parent-baby interaction during sleep hours. But it is important for parents who have done so to realize that they have opted for this arrangement because of cultural reasons, not out of biological appropriateness. What these well-meaning parents do not realize is that they might also be putting their babies unnecessarily at risk.

Infant needs and parental responses to those needs do, after all, constitute a dynamic, co-evolving system, a system that was, and is even now, being shaped by natural selection to maximize infant survival and improve parental reproductive success. Culture may change, and society might progress, but biology is modified at a much slower rate. Babies are still stuck with their Pleistocene biology despite our modern age, and no amount of technological devices or bedtime routines will change that. What babies need from parents is to be part of that interactive parent-baby system that evolved for good evolutionary reasons, and which is a biological necessity even today.

[libaware.economads.com]