Traditional & Modern Views of Infant Sleeping

The difference between modern sources on childrearing and more traditional ones is fairly large in most areas. This is partly because some traditional views were based on erroneous information or childrearing trends that have since been displaced. However, some childrearing wisdom does remain the same from one generation to the next.

To identify the differences, I read an article from a popular source Today's Parent and then interviewed my mother to compare what she had been taught with the information in the article. The article, with a prodigiously long title, "Mother knows less: of course grandma doesn't understand night waking. In her day, bedtime was a different story," was itself quite appropriately about the differences in parenting wisdom among the various generations. It presented the new concepts and contrasted them with traditional concepts of years past. For example, it stated that mothers sleeping close to their babies is a good thing; in fact, "sleeping close to you alters your baby's sleep patterns" (Reichert, 46). It contrasts this idea with the notion in the 50's and 60's that what it terms "co-sleeping" was "aberrant, and definitely to be avoided" (Reichert, 46). Furthermore, although co-sleeping, particularly in conjunction with breastfeeding, is now considered normal, it was not considered so then.

Another issue it addressed was infant position, stating that mothers were traditionally advised to put their babies to sleep on their stomachs to promo

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baby sleep patterns, and she said that she had always breastfed her babies so she would not know the difference. Asked if she ever co-slept with her babies, she answered that this was something that was considered wrong and that she had only done it a couple of times when she was concerned about a sick baby. When she speaks of co-sleeping, she is referring to sleeping in the same bed with the baby. She says that she always slept in the same room with the baby; she slept in the bed, while the baby slept in a crib. I asked her what she did if a baby cried during the night. She responded that she always picked the baby up, never let it just cry. If the baby could not fall back to sleep, she would try burping it to see if that would help. I asked if she ever tried feeding the baby at that point, and she answered that she didn't, because babies were fed at specific times and it had already had its mealtime. There were a couple of questions that I asked my mother that the article provided no information on. To my question about whether she ever did anything specific to help a baby fall asleep, she replied that one of her babies had colic, and she walked her to sleep nearly every night. I also asked her what she put infants to s

Category: Psychology - T