Sleep habitat
But there’s another way that ancient parents approached sleep differently than many of us do today.
When Samson stayed with the Hadza, he described common parenting practices in the US, such as encouraging babies to sleep separately from their caregivers. “They looked at me like I was insane,” says Samson. “They were like, ‘Why? Why? Why?’… I felt bad almost asking the question.”
Hadza mothers, as in many other cultures throughout the world and virtually every hunter-gatherer society ever studied, sleep with their babies and breastfeed through the night. This is a practice dubbed “breastsleeping” by anthropologist James McKenna, the founder and director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, US.
There really isn’t just infant sleep or maternal sleep, or breastfeeding or not breastfeeding. It is all highly integrated. The mother’s body becomes the baby’s habitat – James McKenna
“There really isn’t just infant sleep or maternal sleep, or breastfeeding or not breastfeeding,” McKenna says. “It is all highly integrated. The mother’s body becomes the baby’s habitat.”
Findings about how breastsleeping might affect a mother’s sleep are mixed. But some research indicates it affects how well-rested new parents feel.
One study found that actual sleep time doesn’t, on average, differ much between mothers who do and don’t bedshare. Bedsharing mothers wake a little more throughout the night, but seem to fall back asleep more quickly. Instead, some of the difference lies in the mothers’ mindsets.
“The mums are not aware of how frequently they might feed in the night, or of how often they might check their babies in the night,” Ball says. They may not be arousing fully during a feed. Or they may simply be forgetting the wakes. This may be key to making them feel more refreshed the next day.
Guidance from public health organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics is to sleep in the same room as an infant for at least the first six months of life to reduce the risk of Sides, but on a separate surface from the infant.
The UK’s Lullaby Trust has guidelines for how parents can make bedsharing as safe as possible, and in which situations a family should never bedshare – including after anyone in the bed has been drinking, smoking or taking drugs, if a baby was premature or low birth weight, or on a sofa or armchair.
