Cultural variation in infant sleeping arrangements

Cultural values play an important role in infant sleeping arrangements3. In general, industrialized Western societies are individualist societies, which means that they place a strong value on independence, self-expression, and individual freedoms and achievements. In contrast, collectivist cultures value interdependence, conformity, obedience and group belonging4.

First I will explain the perspective of the individualist cultures on sleeping arrangements. There are several factors that maintain the cultural practice of separate sleeping quarters for infants. Foremost, is the value on self-sufficiency. Although individualistic parents acknowledge that co-sleeping appears to foster attachment, they often find this attachment to be worrisome and somehow emotionally or psychologically unhealthy1. Independence is an important characteristic for a successful person in an individuali

st society and parents want to guide their child down a path of independence as early as possible. But the assumption that co-sleeping inhibits independence is a myth. Children who sleep with their parents are actually more independent than their peers. Another important factor is the fact that the parents fear co-sleeping will cause them sleep deprivation. But every scientific study concludes that parents who bring their babies to bed sleep longer and better5. Parents in individualist societies also have a strong desire for privacy and want to protect their privacy by having their infant sleep in a separate room1. A lot of parents have preconceptions of co-sleeping being a dangerous and rare practice and chose not to co-sleep because of this. These preconceptions are mainly caused by misleading and inaccurate publicity. Pediatric experts in decades past have described children sleeping in the ‘parental bed’ as having serious negative consequences on both parents and children. Child care authors and experts warned parents who co-slept that they would be creating negative habits or sleep disorders in their children, and fostering unhealthy childhood dependency, and that co-sleeping would be harmful to the parents' marriages. Furthermore, in May 1999 the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) released a warning against co-sleeping or putting babies to sleep on adult beds that was based on a study of death reports of children under the age of two. The CPSC statistics resulted in a media frenzy discouraging co-sleeping which, instead of educating the public on how to share sleep safely, chose to alarm parents. Neither media announcement mentioned the 2,700 infants that died in the final year of that study of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), formerly called ‘crib death’; the vast majority of those infants died alone in their cribs2. A recent study persuasively documented that babies who sleep

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