Solitary sleeping is new
WHY DO WE MAKE OUR CHILDREN SLEEP ALONE? IS YOUR KID THE KIND THAT IS CONSTANTLY PLOTTING TO TAKE OVER YOUR BED AND YOUR SLEEP? READ THIS, WRITES DONNÉ RESTOM OF KIDSPOT.COM.AU
Why do we make our children sleep alone? Author, Benjamin Reiss, explores the subject in his new book, Wild Nights: How taming sleep created our restless world. He has traced the history of our sleeping habits through time and found that this system of sleeping – adults in one room, each child walled off in another – was not common practice anywhere before the late 19th century, when it took hold in Europe and North America.
IT has been over three years since a small child didn’t wake me in the middle of the night.
It’s entirely my fault – I made him after all.
But after night 974 of being woken at approximately 3am by the entrance of a miniature human and his miniature human feet and his miniature ability to take up 76 per cent of available bed space, I began to wonder why we bother with a separate bedroom at all.
Apart from the whole sexwith-your-husband thing (let’s face it, that’s rare and sporadic anyway), the desire for children sleep close to their parents makes a lot of sense.
How many times have you lain awake through a thunderstorm panicking that your baby snoozing in the next room is in grave danger? I do it all the time. Author, Benjamin Reiss, explores the subject in his new book, Wild Nights: How taming sleep created our restless world.
Here, by tracing the history of our sleeping habits through time, he has developed a fascinating theory – that by separating at night, we have created a society that lacks kindness, compassion and that often struggles to sleep at all.
When did we start sleeping alone?
“This system of sleeping – adults in one room, each child walled off in another – was common practice exactly nowhere before the late 19th century, when it took hold in Europe and North America,” Reiss wrote in LA Times.
“Even in wealthy families that could afford to spread out, children generally slept in the same room with nurses or siblings.
“Indeed, solitary childhood sleep seems cruel in those parts of the world where co-sleeping is still practised, including developed countries such as Japan.
“But as industrial wealth spread through the Western economies, so did a sense that individual privacy — felt most intently at night — was a hallmark of ‘civilisation.’” Isn’t it funny, that a means of sleeping so widely practised for the majority of human existence, can be reviled so quickly?
While there were some arguments for solo sleeping as a means of preventing the spread of disease in the late 1800s, Reiss argues that much of the rally to put children in separate rooms came as a result of superstitions and faulty science.
“In 1928, the behavioural psychologist John Watson argued that children should occupy their own rooms as early as possible for fear that too much coddling would stunt a child’s development,” Reiss wrote.
He also quotes physician William Whitty Hall, who described those in co-sleeping societies as akin to “wolves, hogs and vermin” who “huddle together.”
In the civilised West, however “each child, as it grows up, has a separate apartment”.
It’s interesting to note how the same era of morality-based science that brought us nipple creams made from industrialgrade insecticide, thought it was A-OK to give an upset
INDEED, SOLITARY CHILDHOOD SLEEP SEEMS CRUEL IN THOSE PARTS OF THE WORLD WHERE COSLEEPING IS STILL PRACTISED, INCLUDING DEVELOPED COUNTRIES SUCH AS JAPAN BENJAMIN REISS A BIZARRE BELIEF SYSTEM
child opium, and thought a baby should be coated in lard for the first two weeks of it’s life (no baths allowed), is responsible for the way we sleep (or try to sleep) in this day and age.
NOBODY PANIC!
This doesn’t mean we all have to start co-sleeping.
Reiss himself points out that there are plenty of good reasons for children to have their own bedroom.
“It’s more practical for adults to pursue night-time leisure in an area where children aren’t sleeping,” Reiss says.
“It’s easier to set everyone on a proper schedule for work and school when they can all retire to different spaces at different times; and parental intimacy may increase without little ones around.
“Doctors advise parents not to share soft mattresses with infants – in case they roll over and suffocate the child – especially if the adults have been drinking before bed.”