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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