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!   References Amoabeng, A.O. (2010). The changes and effect of stress hormone cortisol during extreme diet and exercise. Unpublished Master’s thesis. Boston, MA: Boston University. 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The relationship between sleep and daytime cognitive/behavioral functioning: Infancy and preschool years. In A. Wolfson & H. Montgomery-Downs (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of infant, child, and adolescent sleep and behavior. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. McKenna, J.J., Ball, H.L., & Gettler, L.T. (2007). Mother-infant cosleeping, breastfeeding, and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: What biological anthropology has discovered about normal infant sleep and pediatric sleep medicine.  Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 50, 133-161. Meleva-Seitz, V.R., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M.J., Battaini, C., & Luijk, M.P.C.M. (2015). Parent-child bed-sharing: The good, the bad, and the burden of evidence. Sleep Medicine Reviews. Full article available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/298427230_Parent-child_bed-sharing_The_good_the_bad_and_the_burden_of_evidence Mindell, J.A., Du Mond, C.E., Sadeh, A., Telofski, L.S., Kulkarni, N., & Gunn, E. (2011). 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New York, NY: Little, Brown & Company. Super, C.M., & Harkness, S. (2013). Culture and children’s sleep. In A. Wolfson & H. Montgomery-Downs (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of infant, child, and adolescent sleep and behavior. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. Teti, D.M., Kim, B.R., Mayer, G., & Countermine, M. (2010). Maternal emotional availability at bedtime predicts infant sleep quality. Journal of Family Psychology 24(3), 307-315. Weinraub, M., Friedman, S.L., Knoke, B., Houts, R., Bender, R.H., Susman, E.J., Bradley, R., & Williams, J. (2012). Patterns of developmental change in infants’ nighttime sleep awakenings from 6 through 26 months of age. Developmental Psychology 48(6), 1511-1528.   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  Before we start today, I just wanted to take a minute and mention what happens around here on the weeks when you don’t hear an episode, because I have a suspicion based on my download patterns that most of you are subscribed to the show through iTunes rather than through my website, which means you’re kind of missing out.  On the weeks when I don’t publish an episode, I send out a newsletter instead – and this is not just any old newsletter.  I keep track of new research and articles related to both child development and education over the previous couple of weeks, and I select the best of them for the newsletter.  Then I don’t just tell you about the new studies and articles, but locate them in the rest of the literature on the topic by helping you to understand how the new work adds to our understanding, and what we’re still lacking.  I also post calls for questions on topics I’ve already decided to do episodes on (and your questions not only get onto the list of questions that I end up asking the interviewee, but also help me to decide which interviewee to ask in the first place), and mention ideas I’m considering for future episodes to see whether you all are interested in them or not.  Finally, I also use the newsletters to do a Q&A on difficult or controversial topics – so after I did the episode on potty training recently, listeners emailed me with their questions and I answered them in a newsletter a few weeks later.  Pretty often I end up in an email conversation with the people who write to me about the topics they’re...