Children's Sleep: Sketching Historical Change

Children's Sleep: An Interplay Between Culture and Biology

“…These include such matters as values placed on independence or interdependence of individuals and establishment of the sense of self 12,38 ; establishment and maintenance of social class or rank identity and the behavioral emblems of their differentiation 14,34 ; gender roles (eg, whether women rise earlier than others and prepare the household and its members for the day or whether men retire later than others because of work or social activities to which they are mandated or entitled); idealized family structures and behaviors (including not just the question of cosleeping of children and parents but also that of cosleeping of spouses); definition and enactment of religious duty; concepts of character and of moral and admirable behavior as persons; and so forth. 34,39,40 Social institutional demands, such as requirements that school or work be standardized to begin at certain hours and that the children and adults who attend them be on time or that certain sectors of the society or the economy be available and functional at specific (including any and all) hours, influence the cultural regulation of sleep across societies.…”

“…Also contributory to this effort are historical studies of changes in sleep behavior and attendant attitudes within a culture over time. 14 Cultures are inherently dynamic, changing as new ecologic or political conditions emerge or old demands fade, adopting or adapting elements of other cultures with which they come into contact, incessantly testing conservation of the time-honored and traditional against the impulse to innovate. Cultural changes over time may be gradual or rapid and dramatic, with sudden shifts.…”

“…14 In the early 1900s, when psychologic experiments had begun to produce scientific data on children's sleep, a new level of interest arose, and concerns about the adequacy of children's sleep time permeated both the scientific and popular literature. 14 At that time, a number of authors from different countries gave details about sleep duration across childhood and adolescence. [46][47][48][49] The main theme of all these reports was that children at the beginning of the 20th century did not get enough sleep, a view that was in sharp contrast to the 19th-century opinion.…”

“…70 From a social-ecological perspective, climatic factors, family size, and space availability have often determined sleeping arrangements. 11,14,71 Space availability and climate, however, seem to play only a minor role in cosleeping in highly industrialized modern societies. Rather, parental beliefs and cultural preferences such as a high value being placed on individual independence (individualism) or on familial interdependence (collectivism) have been proposed as "driving forces" for choosing sleeping arrangements.…”

Co-sleeping and children's sleep in China

“…From a socio-ecological perspective, climatic factors, family size and space availability have often determined sleeping arrangements (Stearns 1996;Liu et al 2003;Li et al 2009a). Among these factors, space availability often used to be mentioned as one of the main reasons for the high frequency of co-sleeping in China.…”