The History of Sleep Training

Whilst sleep training is the dominant paradigm in western parenting, and has been for quite some time. It is historically and culturally, an anomaly. A blip on the radar of human existence. 
For good reason, since it goes against the biological norms of our species. 
If you have ever wondered how we got here, how sleep training came to be "required" to be seen as a "good parent", read on: 

​Before Sleep Training

For 99% of human history, human infants have been parented in essentially one way. The way of the Evolved Nest. 

For 30 Million years, all human babies have slept with their mother or another primary caregiver, breastfeed on demand day and night, been carried 24/7 until they were mobile, then kept in proximate reach until about age 4. They continued to sleep with caregivers or siblings until marriageable age, simply moving from being the one cared for to being the person doing the caring. 
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No one in their right mind would ever have considered leaving a baby unattended - especially to cry, because crying attracts predators, and that risked the survival of the whole tribe. 

THIS is the setting humanity has evolved to expect. This is our species specific expected norm. This is the setting in which humans developed the skills and independence required to become what we are today. Children as young as 4 were able to go out hunting, walking for days without their parents, as a direct result of the independence instilled in them by interdependence.  This (24/7 carrying, responsive care and breastfeeding on demand) is how humans are supposed to develop independence. 

Just like how we see ongoing effects to animals behaviour, instincts and coping skills when they are raised in ways that do not mimic their species norms, when we started messing with humanity's norms we forever altered the development of our species. 

The first step in this downward trajectory? Farming. 

When we transitioned to farming communities, the whole of humanity went through a major shift. We stopped being nomadic, we stopped being socialist, we changed how many and we raised our children, we changed where and how we lived, they types of shelter we used, and we changed what we ate. The introduction of farming literally altered the Human Genome. 

"Many different groups began experimenting with ways of producing extra food, which eventually enabled them to start a new way of life: settling down in more stable social groups....A stable food supply enabled their populations to explode, and small egalitarian groups turned into kingdoms sprawling across hundreds of miles."

"Contrary to many popular perceptions, our hunter-gatherer ancestors were not warring, heartless brutes. While the data is a bit hazy—and tribes varied—researchers believe that, for the most part, they committed minimal acts of violence and were remarkably generous and cooperative. Anthropologists have also studied more contemporary tribes that live and parent as they believe our hunter-gatherer ancestors did, and noticed similar trends of non-violence and compassion. It's not until societies became (or, become) more complex that these characteristics begin to break down"

Think about it. When you transition from a society in which children are raised communally, resources are shared communally, and the tribe will move to avoid starvation, to a society wherein belongings are "a thing" you get a natural shift, from seeing children as tribe members, to seeing them as your property. 

As Jared Diamond asserts in The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, people, are "a species of chimpanzee that is increasingly out of kilter with the natural world, particularly since the invention of agriculture, "a catastrophe from which we have never recovered". With the arrival of farming, Diamond argues, women were subjected to domestic drudgery; people started to hoard resources and wealth; and our proximity to animals triggered disease epidemics that still threaten to overwhelm us. "With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence,"

it is with the development of agriculture that we see a key shift in the way children are raised, particularly the way fathers and children interact. They started being disciplinarians. 

"Overall, hunter-gatherer fathers have more intimate (and less domineering) relationships with their kids than do men from horticultural, agricultural, and herding societies. These latter societies are not likely to meet with the approval of the modern, sensitive, involved dad. Fathers are distant. Their main roles seem to concern discipline, status, and providing vocational training to their sons."

Hunter-Gatherer tribes as a rule, do not punish children. They definitely do not smack them. 
Farming societies, by contrast whip children with branches and leather. Why? Probably because all of a sudden, if your kid wasn't paying attention and left the gate open and all the sheep got out, your family starved. Also parenting became more stressful, as adult to child ratios began to inverse. 

So what's all this got to do with sleep training?

A lot. Because sleep training first emerges at another critical change in human evolution.

​The Beginnings of sleep training

The industrial era provided a perfect storm of conditions that lead to the development (and rise in popularity) of sleep training. They are: Colonisation, Sexisim, Industrialisation, Modernisation and Urbanisation. 

​Sleep Training didn't develop in a vacuum. It developed out of a greater social desire. To apply Victorian ideals of efficiency, and independence to every walk of life, including child rearing. and with more and more young people moving to the cities for work, new mothers were isolated from the practical help, and guidance provided by their mothers and grandmothers, making parenting once again, more stressful.

The stage was set for a scene we know all too well now. Isolated young women, with little practical experience in child rearing, are ripe for manipulation and indoctrination. And so begins the era of the "parenting expert"  

(I've interspersed the history of sleep training in English speaking countries, with that of Germany. Germany provides a more clear cut line from "Baby expert" to sleep training, whilst the English speaking nations, jump around a bit more.

1830's - Germany.  (From PHD in Parenting) "The literature of the 1830s, includes books by doctors and medical professors (e.g. Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, Adoph Menke) who wrote about infant sleep. They note that, for example, by about six months of age babies could get used to sleeping at specific times of the day and that an appropriate sleep environment should be created to facilitate this (e.g. turning off lights at night, avoiding noise). They do mention that mothers could attempt to night wean their babies (e.g. by using methods other than nursing to settle the child) and that they should not rush to comfort the baby immediately, but should instead see if it resettles on its own. However, they also note the importance of caring for babies day and night and indicate that if the baby does not resettle on its own and if gentle rocking does not help that no other tricks should be used to get the child to sleep."

1890's - UK and USA. At the turn of the last century (1800-1900) two books came out, Luther Emmett Holt’s “The Care and feeding of Children” and John B. Watson’s “Psychological Care of Infant and Child”. These are the first known books to explicitly mention the need for crying setting up the argument for “self-soothing” that we now hear.
They are also the first books to specifically ban overnight feeding, and to pathologize and condemn mother’s who comforted their children.

Their impact is outlined in more detail In "Why Everything Sleep Trainers Tell You Is Rubbish."

1900's -  Germany.  (From PHD in Parenting) "Marie Susanne Kübler (who wrote books for housewives in the 1890s) and Dr. Otto Köhler (who wrote a book about the care of infants in 1921), both agreed that around eight hours of sleep was an absolute necessity for mothers (otherwise they would have problems with milk supply). They both recommended mother-led feeding schedules (e.g. mothers feeding based on feeling in their breasts or feeding at specific time intervals instead of feeding on cue). However, Köhler also noted that not all babies would easily sleep through for eight hours and that it was better to give them a nighttime feeding than to have them disturb everyone with hours of crying at night. Overall, however, this time period seemed to mark the beginning of sleep being characterized as a problem and the child being considered the source of that problem."

1900's - New Zealand, Australia, UK. Dr Fredrick Truby King rises to fame in New Zealand, before spreading across to Australia and the UK. He begins the Plunket society, Still NZ's primary service for providing help and information to mothers. In Australia, the Karitane parenting services (and sleep schools) owe their existence to him as well, and despite a sabbatical to Japan impressing upon him the Japanese breastfeeding rates, he is one of the first developers of infant formula. 

"Truby King's legacy, widespread in New Zealand, Australia and Britain, was the doctrine of feeding by the clock. Removed from the enthusiastic personality of its founder, the Truby King system became formalised into a set of rigid rules propounded by Plunket nurses." 

Like Watson, Holt and their ilk, Truby King, unashamedly played on the fears of the population at that time. 'It was not only the high infant death rate that made his doctrines accepted by influential people.  He also addressed the concerns of the Caucasian world of his time.  The European birth rate was falling and there was fear that 'Asian hordes', particularly from China, would overwhelm the white races.  New Zealand was under-populated and many of its citizens thought the country was very vulnerable to Asian immigration. It was that same fear that made King officially oppose contraception."

"King, along with his new formula, began mixing his pro-breastfeeding ideas with data on child mortality, and began firing on all barrels.  He led a crusade to lower infant death rates, built a factory to make his 'humanised' milk and dreamed of a troop of specially trained women who would take his sensible mothering advice into every New Zealand home.
King wrote new rules for raising infants - strict four-hourly feeding, no night feeds, potty training from an early age and fresh air day and night.   Mothers were urged to breastfeed, and if they couldn't, there was his own formula, made up according to age and weight.​"

Whilst there are definite upsides to Truby King's reign, (like a massive reduction in infant death rates once the Plunket nurses rolled out their in-home care), there are downsides too. His advice, like many still today claimed to be breastfeeding friendly, yet undermined breastfeeding success through a combination of misunderstandings about how breastfeeding works (eg. the push for scheduled feeds) and the promotion of formula. The promotion of times feeds and no night feeds remains a mainstay of sleep trainer gospel today, continuing to undermine breastfeeding rates, and create "sleep problems" that only exist because of the disconnect between the way we parent and the way our babies are designed to be parented. Evolutionary mismatch. 

1930's - Germany (From PHD in Parenting) In 1933, pediatrician Dr. Philipp Niemes wrote that sleep is incredibly important for mothers and babies and that nighttime rest needed to be strictly enforced. He wrote that it was especially important not to pick up the child at night, even if it screams. He said that tending to the baby at night could lead to overfeeding, which would lead to more illness. Around the same time, in 1930, Dr. Walter Birk and Dr. A. Mayer wrote that newborns call out in the night, but that nighttime feedings were unnecessary to the child and disruptive to the mother. They also suggested a variety of tricks that could be used to get the child to sleep better. Ultimately, if none of those tricks worked, the mother must absolutely enforce nighttime rest. The most "heroic method" for a young mother, in their opinion, was to let the baby cry it out.  In their work, the infant's behaviour is suddenly characterized not only unhealthy, but also bad and in need of correction. Sleep had become a battleground and the child was the enemy. Bergstermann notes that the influence of Nazi ideology here is unmistakable and that the need to portray the child as a problem in need of correction was definitely politically motivated.

(From Scientific American) "In 1934 physician Johanna Haarer published The German Mother and Her First Child. Her advice guided child-rearing in the Third Reich. In that book, Haarer recommended that children be raised with as few attachments as possible. If a child cried, that was not the mother's problem. Excessive tenderness was to be avoided at all cost.

“Children like this—who are easily seduced, don’t think and don’t feel—are fodder for a nation bent on war,” says Karl Heinz Brisch, a psychiatrist at the Dr. von Hauner Children’s Hospital at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. “In Johanna Haarer’s view, it is important to deny caring when a child asks for it. But each refusal means rejection,” Grossmann explains. The only means of communication open to a newborn are facial expression and gestures, he adds. If no response is forthcoming, children learn that nothing they try to communicate means anything. Moreover, infants experience existential fear when they are alone and hungry and receive no comfort from their attachment figure. In the worst case, such experiences lead to a form of insecure attachment that makes it difficult to enter into relationships with other people in later life."

The question becomes, why did so many mothers follow Haarer’s advice? Well much like Watson and Holt in the west, (and today's sleep trainers too) Haarer was good at tapping into parent's fears. 

(From Scientific American) "Radebold, whose research has focused on the generation of children born during the war, notes that Haarer’s views on child-rearing did not appeal to everyone during the 1930s and 1940s but attracted two groups in particular: parents who identified strongly with the Nazi regime and young women who had themselves come from emotionally damaged families (largely as a result of World War I), who had no idea what a good relationship feels like. If, in addition, their husbands were fighting at the front—leaving them to fend for themselves and to feel overburdened and insecure—it may well be imagined that the toughness promoted in Haarer’s books could have been appealing.
Of course, strict child-rearing practices had been commonplace in Prussia well before the Nazis came on the scene. In Grossmann’s opinion, only a culture that already had a tendency for hardness would have been ready to institute such practices on a grand scale."

Indeed according to this article (major trigger warnings) at the beginning of the 20th Century "the underestimated figures given by officials showed German infanticide at the end of the twentieth century as 20 percent, half again higher than France and England.5 Infant mortality in Bavaria, where breastfeeding was rare, was given as 58% and was probably closer to 75%, which means almost every child watched their mothers strangle or otherwise kill their siblings when born. Mothers were described as being without remorse as they killed their newborn. Children routinely saw dead babies in sewers, on roads and in streams as they played."

This along with harsh discipline by fathers, is theorized to have played a key part in determining who followed the Third Reich without question, and who resisted. "Dicks found that Nazis had “particularly destructive mother images,” and the Oliners found German rescuers of Jews had families that showed them more love and respect than Nazi parents."

This might sound like a stretch, but being normalised to such violence, and the causal disregard for human life at such a young age, would certainly help explain why the German people were so prepared to send so many to the gas chambers. 

At any rate the 1930's is when German sleep training advice shifted from being a question of health (eg. babies require x hrs of sleep for optimal health) to one of morality (good mother's sleep train.)

1950's - USA & UK

The post-war period thankfully saw a reactionary swing away from the harsh parenting of earlier years, and responsive parenting got it's first "experts" in Dr Spock, and Dr Brazelton. However, like all leaps forward in human rights, the campaign to treat babies like human beings wasn't without it's critics. 

There was mass panic amongst conservative parenting circles, as a result of the popularity of Spock and Brazelton, who both advocated for a much more gentle approach to parenting. These methods, conservatives would claim, were to blame for the counterculture of the 60's, the anti-war movement, and were guaranteed to create "juvenile delinquents" and "commies"

The Houston police department, went so far as to publish a handout for parents called "The Rules for Raising Juvenile Delinquents" which included picking up after your child and giving in to your child's (or baby's) wants. And in 1962 Paediatrician Walter W. Sackett Jr wrote  "If we teach our offspring to expect everything to be provided on demand, we must admit the possibility that we are sowing the seeds of socialism," (By which, as an American in the middle of the cold war he meant a "damn Ruskie") ​

Sackett wrote his own series of parenting books, and was considered a baby expert in his own right. Along with this ridiculous claim that meeting a baby's needs bred socialism, he encouraged parents to feed their babies premasticated food from birth, and to give tea and coffee from 12 months, as well as weaning them off ALL full fat milk by 12 months. Yet another self proclaimed expert who really had no idea what they were talking about. 

Over in the UK, resident baby expert Sheila Hardy, insisted that "babies were put on a four-hour feeding schedule from birth, usually with formula, which was thought better." 

Britian's Dr Fairbairn, in his midwives textbook,  encouraged schedules too. "Forget feeding on demand.... (he) declared this would ruin the health and character of the child, and mothers who did it were “careless, shiftless and ignorant”. Babies had to be trained into a strict routine, which involved leaving them in their prams outside to “air” for most of the day on their own. Between 5 and 6pm you were permitted to “visit with your baby” and had to sever night feedings after seven weeks old."

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​The last 30 years

The 1980's saw yet another surge in the rise of "baby experts". 

What to Expect When you're Expecting, Babywise, Toddler Taming, Gina Ford, Tizzie Hall, Marc Weissbluth, Midwife Cath, "The Baby Whisperer" and more, were all published in the 1980's or early 90's. The market was saturated by these self-proclaimed experts and their sleep training programs. And sleep training was once again cemented as a "necessity". It was just a matter of when and how you did it, not if. 

It was bad enough before the rise of social media, but now, all those people and thousands more have facebook and instagram pages, and youtube channels, and they have no qualms about doing publicity stunts and jumping on anyone with a big following to sell their sleep training programs. As this great post by Natural Mamma Co says: Babies don't manipulate, the Sleep Training Industry does. And they have done such a good job of it over the last 120 years that we now have parents convinced that they need to sleep train in order to "give their child the gift of sleep".

Sorry, but babies know how to sleep. They were doing it in the womb, and when we meet their needs they just fall asleep when they're tired and wake when they're rested. It's our approach to sleep that is creating "problems" and the "fix" is to change expectations, educate on biological norms and human development, and find ways to meet mum's needs too in our isolated culture. 

Tizzie Hall, camped out to see Duchess Megan just so she could give her a copy of Save Our Sleep, and post about it on social media. 

Aussie News Presenter Carrie Bickmore's Insta post was imediately considered a sales opportunity for this sleep consultant. 

​The Future has Hope

It's easy for those of us who have researched/who work in child development, attachment, trauma, psychology etc to feel despair that despite so much research proving that babies need to be responded to and fed day and night to develop optimally, sleep training culture still has such a hold. But there is hope. 

Back in Germany, the psychology community are noticing a trend: as more of the children of the war reached old age, were confronted by returning memories of their childhood traumas and sought therapy, a pattern emerged. The war children, despite having seen horrible atrocities, tended to focus in therapy sessions,  on the way they were parented just as much as the horrors of war. Psychologist took note. 

(From Scientific American) "Ilka Quindeau of the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences and her colleagues have studied the generation of children born during the war. They initially intended to examine the long-term effects of bombing raids and flight under perilous circumstances. But after the initial interviews, the researchers decided to adjust the study design: so many of their conversations revolved around experiences in the family that the team added a lengthy interview that focused exclusively on those interactions. Ultimately, the investigators concluded that many interviewees exhibited a pattern of unusually strong loyalty toward their parents and that their failure to include mention of conflicts in their descriptions was evidence of “a relational disorder."
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Quindeau has pointed out that Germany is the only country in Europe where what happened to the children of war has been so broadly discussed, despite destruction and bombings having occurred in other countries as well. She has also noted that  psychoanalyst Anna Freud found that children with a healthy attachment to their parents were less traumatized by the war than those with a less solid attachment. Putting everything together, Quindeau concludes that the interviews she conducted about bombings and exile had actually uncovered something more than the effects of war: they revealed deep grieving about experiences in the family that were so traumatic they could not be expressed directly.

​Studies on attachment conducted in the 1970s are consistent with this view. He (Grossoman) notes, for example, that in Bielefeld, which is in northern Germany, half of all children were shown to exhibit an insecure attachment; in Regensburg, which is in southern Germany and never came under Prussian influence, less than a third fit that category."

​This research, and the subsequent news articles related to it, is just beginning. But it certainly gives hope that sleep training, and the greater context of childisim will one day come under scrutiny at a systemic level. 

Sleep training would never have taken off, if we didn't also have a culture where children are treated as possessions, undeserving of respect.  Sleep Training would have died out generations ago, along with the belief that women suffer from Hysteria if there was a children's rights movement as big as the Women's rights movement has been. Peaceful parenting is on the rise, but we need a movement to see real change. 

For more on this topic, see "Parenting For A Peaceful World" by Robin Grille, and look out for a book by Dr Cecilia Tomori, coming soon. (In the meantime listen to this podcast) and read the work of Dr Darcia Narvaez  (This podcast is great too).