We live in a sleep-training culture. The goal of this type of parenting is control. Submission, compliance, and fear are desired. You are the expert on your child!

• A cultural shift began to take place in the 1800s during the Industrial Revolution that changed the way doctors and parents perceived infants’ sleep and feeding patterns. With more parents working outside the home and increased emphasis on efficiency and productivity, there was a growing demand for strategies to manage infant sleep and behavior.

• These behaviorists viewed infants as blank slates whose behavior could be shaped through external stimuli and reinforcement. This perspective led to the development of sleep training methods that focused on conditioning babies to adhere to predetermined sleep schedules and self-soothe without parental intervention.

However, from a biological standpoint, these rigid sleep training methods go against our natural instincts.

Human infants are born highly dependent on caregivers for survival, and their sleep patterns reflect this dependence.

• Anthropological studies of traditional societies have shown that co-sleeping and frequent nighttime breastfeeding are common practices, promoting maternal-infant bonding and ensuring infant safety and nutrition.

• From birth to about six months of age, infants have small stomachs and rapid metabolic rates, necessitating frequent feeding throughout the day and night. Furthermore, babies are born with immature nervous systems and limited self-soothing abilities, making them reliant on caregivers for comfort and regulation. Attempts to impose rigid sleep schedules or ignore a baby’s cries may disrupt these biological imperatives and lead to increased stress and anxiety for both infants and parents.

The pioneering work of psychologist John Bowlby on attachment theory emphasizes the importance of responsive caregiving in infancy for healthy emotional development. Secure attachment is built on trust and reliability, with caregivers meeting a child’s needs promptly and sensitively. Sleep training methods that involve leaving babies to cry it out may undermine the establishment of secure attachment bonds and lead to long-term negative consequences for emotional well-being.

• Many of the foundational writings and thoughts that developed this idea of “sleep training” are not only heartless, they are very dark and disconnected. It makes me sad to think that people have believed these lies that have told you to ignore your intuition to care for your child, supposedly “for their own good.” I cannot even imagine how damaging this has been to society since these teachings first began. 

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Historical Context

1894 Luther Emmett Holt – a physician who strongly encouraged parents to implement strict routines related to feeding and sleep.

• He recommends babies sleep away from their parents, have regular sleep times, and first uses the term cry it out. In this quote, he talks about ignoring crying:
  

  “How is an infant to be managed that cries from temper, habit, or to be indulged?” [The infant] should simply be allowed to “cry it out.” This often requires an hour, and in extreme cases, two or three hours. A second struggle will seldom last more than ten or fifteen minutes, and a third will rarely be necessary.” 

• Holt states that an infant should never sleep in the same bed as his mother because:
  

  “There is always the temptation to frequent nursing at night, which is injurious to both mother and child.”

• He advised that:
  

  “Babies under six months should never be played with: and the less of it at any time the better for the infant. They are made nervous and irritable, sleep badly, and suffer from indigestion.”

1928 John Watson – Took Holt’s recommendations a step further to ensure that “routines and regulation” were implemented from day one, to not interfere with a mother’s additional responsibilities, such as maintaining the household, and caring for her husband.

• “…let your behavior always be objective and kindly firm. Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job of a difficult task”

• These beliefs also shaped the idea commonly referred to as ‘self-soothing’ and the suggestion that children should be able to care for their emotional well-being as infants; any reliance on their caregivers automatically meant that they were overly dependent and thus, the parents failed.

• In his book, Watson states: “Parenthood, instead of being an instinctive art, is a science, the details of which must be worked out by patient laboratory methods.”

His own granddaughter, Mary Loretta Hartley, had this to say about him: “Grandfather’s theories infected my mother’s life, my life, and the lives of millions. How do you break a legacy? How do you keep from passing a debilitating inheritance down, generation to generation, like a genetic flaw?”

1911 Dr. Anna Fullerton – wrote that too much holding would spoil babies or turn them into “little tyrants.”

• “If a baby is picked up every time he cries, he will soon develop the habit of crying insistently each time he wakes until the mother does pick him up…. This is not a good habit for the baby or the mother. It interferes with the baby’s sleep and with the mother’s work or rest. It teaches the baby that crying will give him control over his parents, whereas a baby should learn that such habitual crying will only cause his parents to ignore him.” 

• Parents should “not spoil the baby by picking him up every time he cries. A certain amount of crying is not harmful; it even gives him some exercise.”
  
  • In the 1980s, we begin to see our first glimpses of modern-day sleep training.

1985 Dr. Richard Ferber – published Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems. He advocated for a method of sleep training called “controlled crying”, or “graduated extinction”, which is essentially letting a child cry alone for longer and longer lengths of time. Today, we still know this method as The Ferber Method, or “Ferberizing”.

• • According to NPR, Ferber changed his mind about sleep training and co-sleeping and now believes that sleep training doesn’t always work and was misunderstood and that co-sleeping works fine for many families. It seems his approach is now more of a “do what works for your family” kind of approach.

1987 Dr. Mark Weissbluth – published Healthy Sleep Habits, Healthy Child. In his book, he advocated for complete extinction, or cry it out.

• He believed that you should put your child in their crib, close the door, and don’t come back until the morning unless there is an emergency or they need a diaper change.

Why is there an underlying assumption that a baby should sleep through the night!? When left to their own devices, adults don’t sleep through the night.

• The curious thing, then, is why we expect adults–never mind infants–to sleep for eight or more hours without interruption.

1987 Marc Weissbluth –  published Healthy Sleep Habits, Healthy Child which advocates for unmodified extinction, cry it out.

• The baby is put to bed awake, in their own room, and the door is closed at 7 pm. At 7 am the parents return. During the night the baby is not attended to unless in extreme circumstances, such as vomiting. This approach is the most extreme interpretation of Holt’s 1894 advice.

• Becoming Baby Wise: Giving Your Infant the Gift of Nighttime Sleep written by Gary Ezzo and pediatrician Robert Bucknam (US) in 1993 brings Christianity into the mix.
  
  • Introducing the concept of feeding, play, and sleep, the book directs parents to take charge of the baby’s feeding and sleeping schedule.

However, all techniques like these are based on the premise that infants can learn to settle themselves to sleep.

• This implies behavior, not development, is the reason babies seek contact with their mother at sleep times.