Word: sleep
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...topic of continued debate among parents is co-sleeping, or bed-sharing, a common practice in countries outside the U.S. Fueled by increasing evidence, however, more pediatricians and sleep experts are dissuading parents from sharing a bed or a bedroom with their babies, recommending instead that babies be allowed to learn how to fall asleep and stay asleep on their own. Studies suggest that establishing independent and healthy sleep habits early in infancy not only improves babies' daily mood and behavior, but may also have long-term implications for their overall health and well-being. Children who don't sleep...
...where should parents draw the line between goodnight cuddling and unhealthy bedtime coddling? Sleep researcher Jodi Mindell says it has less to do with where the baby's crib is physically situated - although, ideally, it should be in a separate room - and more with what parents are doing when their children fall asleep. "It's parental presence," says Mindell, author of Sleeping Through the Night: How Infants, Toddlers and Their Parents Can Get a Good Night's Sleep. "Even if you're sharing a bed or a room, don't be present, either literally or figuratively...
Mindell, a psychology professor at Saint Joseph's University and associate director of the Sleep Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, gathered sleep data on nearly 30,000 children up to 3 years old in 17 countries - among them, some that were predominately Caucasian (including the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and others that were predominately Asian (such as China, Thailand, Malaysia, Japan and Korea). In the U.S. and other mostly Caucasian countries, Mindell found that only 12% of parents reported bed-sharing, and 22% reported room-sharing. But in Asian countries the numbers were much...
Consistent with previous research, Mindell found that co-sleeping - sleeping in the same bed or bedroom - led to more disturbed sleep in infants. Accordingly, babies living in Asia got much less sleep overall and significantly less quality sleep than infants in the U.S. But the differences, upon further analysis of the data, were somewhat more nuanced. When Mindell and her fellow researchers examined data on babies in Asia who slept alone, the quality and duration of their sleep were just as low as babies who co-slept with parents...
Mindell is careful to emphasize that while her research, which was funded by Johnson & Johnson, does not support co-sleeping, it doesn't absolutely condemn it either. One question that remains: if vast numbers of babies in Asian populations are sleeping less than their Western peers - without any apparently society-wide disadvantage - does it truly matter if babies co-sleep...