Stop Putting Your Baby to Sleep
One of the most prevalent problems for health — both mental and physical — is lack of enough, and proper, sleep. We talk about this a lot, and how to fix it for both teens and adults — but what if we didn't let it get broken in the first place?
Sleep is a pretty natural thing. It's kind of hard to mess up. And yet, we have. With the combination of artificial lighting, time-based pay, alarm clocks, and always-on entertainment we're pretty compelled to sleep improperly.
And while we've been sleeping worse and worse, society has been teaching us that it's good to give these terrible habits to children, as early as possible — even into infancy.
Before the 20th Century, approximately no one, nowhere slept alone as a child. This practice of putting children into their own rooms, and putting babies into cribs, is an outcome of weird 19th Century thinking about savages vs. the cultured world; and it was reinforced by crazy ideas from Freud, and then crazier notions from Spock, who recommended trapping babies in their crib with a badminton set (note the implication here — when Spock's book on "common sense" raising of babies and children came out in 1948, it must have been more common to have badminton sets than cribs with walls).
Babies sleep — a lot. For the first few months, they sleep 12–16 hours a day, and many up to 19 per day. But as soon as we can, we're trying the latest fad to "put the baby down" and get it to sleep. And if we have the space, we're putting them in their own room as soon as possible. How often have you seen on a TV show, some expectant couple trying to figure out what color to paint the nursery (i.e., the separate room where they'l put the baby), before they even know its gender, let alone it's born.
What happen then? Well, babies turn into toddlers. And what do toddlers do? They get up in the middle of the night and crawl into bed with their parents. This should tell you a lot about what's natural — this certainly isn't learned behaviour. In fact, it's behaviour we've been trying to train out of them basically since they were born. And it's not inherent rebelliousness either — the "terrible twos" aren't terrible because two-year-olds are trying to oppose their parents' wishes, they're terrible because we're trying to coerce someone who doesn't yet understand language, and certainly can't pass the marshmallow test, to do totally unnatural things.
If you're lucky enough to have a baby, try not to train it into the terrible habits that you're now trying to fix as an adult. Let it sleep when it needs. Let it sleep with you. As your children age, put them all in the same room. You'll be raising a stronger, closer-knit family, with less intergenerational conflict, and better chances of a less-stressful marriage (or even maintaining a marriage).
