If we are interested in what "normal" range of variation is for humans in
terms of when babies sleep through the night on a regular basis (however
defined), that research needs to be done with breastfed, co-sleeping babies,
since we know that humans are mammals, and are primates, and as such are a
species where breastfeeding and cosleeping are the evolutionary adaptations.
Any research done on babies who sleep in cribs, in another room, where
parents can't hear and interact with them during the night ---- doesn't
apply to humans as a species. Any research done on babies who bottle-feed
with formula ---- doesn't apply to humans as a species. Solitary sleeping
and bottle-feeding with formula are recent cultural improvisations, of
limited temporal and geographic distribution.
There are some research studies done on how babies sleep in cultures where
breastfeeding and cosleeping are the norm, and neither babies nor adults
(including childless adults) sleep through the night on a regular basis. I
direct interested parties to the work of the Robert Levine and Whiting and
Whiting, also Barry Hewlett's work on fatherhood among African rainforest
populations (see below). I suspect that much of this work is summarized in
Meredith Small's book on parenting cross-culturally, "Our Babies, Ourselves."
Title: Parents' cultural belief systems : their origins, expressions,
and consequences
Publication: New York : Guilford Press, c1996.
Title: Japanese childrearing : two generations of scholarship
Publication: New York : Guilford Press, c1996.
Search Request: A=LEVINE ROBERT Texas A&M U.General Lib
Title: Child care and culture : lessons from Africa
Publication: Cambridge <England> ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University
Press, 1994.
Author: Whiting, John Wesley Mayhew, 1908-
Title: Child training and personality; a cross-cultural study
Publication: New Haven, Yale University Press, 1953.
Author: Whiting, Beatrice Blyth.
Title: Children of six cultures : a psycho-cultural analysis
Publication: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1975.
Author: Whiting, John Wesley Mayhew, 1908-
Title: Culture and human development : the selected papers of John
Whiting
Publication: Cambridge <England> ; New York : Cambridge University Press,
1994.
Search Request: A=HEWLETT BARRY Texas A&M U.General Lib
Title: Father-child relations : cultural and biosocial contexts
Publication: Hawthorne, N.Y. : Aldine De Gruyter, c1992.
Author: Hewlett, Barry S., 1950-
Title: Intimate fathers : the nature and context of Aka pygmy
paternal infant care
Publication: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, c1991.
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