10/07/2025
HOW BABIES SLEEP: DEMEDICALISING AND HUMANISING THE ISSUE FOR CHILD HEALTH PROFESSIONALS.
"NIGHT FEEDS AND MIDNIGHT WAKINGS DO NOT FIT INTO PRODUCTIVITY METRICS. THEY DEMAND A DIFFERENT VALUE SYSTEM—ONE BASED ON INTERDEPENDENCE AND CARE."
CULTURAL BLIND SPOTS: WHY ‘NORMAL’ SLEEP IS A MYTH
Ball’s central thesis is simple but radical: babies are not broken—our expectations are. In the UK, the USA and Australia, around 30% of parents report infant sleep problems. In Japan and Korea, that number is closer to 5%–7%. The disparity is not because Asian babies are better sleepers—it is because their parents are not at war with biology. In Japan, kawa (family co-sleeping) is the norm, with babies in close proximity to parents on futons. In Korea, infants are carried in slings during the day and breastfed on demand at night. These practices align with babies’ needs rather than trying to suppress them.
Ball’s work aligns with that of biological anthropologist McKenna, whose research into mother-infant ‘sleep synchrony’ similarly challenges dominant models that equate solitary sleep with success.2 It also resonates with Tomori’s Nighttime Breastfeeding: An American Cultural Dilemma,3 which explores how breastfeeding and sleep become incompatible under neoliberal ideals of productivity. Both scholars bolster Ball’s claim that Western sleep guidance reflects not science, but ideology.
Meanwhile, in the West, parents are told that babies must ‘self-settle’ and sleep independently from an early age. Ball shows that this is not grounded in biology, but in cultural ideals of autonomy and post-industrial life. She traces this ideology back to John B. Watson, the American psychologist who warned in 1928 against hugging or kissing your children, lest you make them emotionally weak.
Babies, Ball reminds us, are ‘exterogestates’—neurologically unfinished at birth, their brains still undergoing rapid development best fuelled by proximity, frequent feeding and human contact. Expecting them to sleep alone for 12-hour stretches is, she writes, like expecting a kangaroo joey to hop.
https://bmjpaedsopen.bmj.com/content/9/1/e003760
shared by Jenn Tow IBCLC
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