How Babies Sleep: A Science-Based Guide to the First 365 Days and Nights

by Helen L. Ball

Over the past century and a half, in modifying the world to better suit our needs in industrializing, industrialized and now digital-era societies, we have tried to manipulate baby sleep to fit with the rapidly changing nature of adult lives. Our ideas about sleep, and particularly baby sleep, have been influenced and shaped by the socioeconomic pressures, political philosophies, religious values, academic theories and cultural ideologies that have waxed and waned during this time. The mismatch we have created between our babies’ biology and our contemporary lives has caused conflict between parents’ and babies’ needs—now framed as “baby sleep problems”—for which babies are often “treated” using behavioral and clinical interventions.