Parental Regulation of Infant Sleep: Round-the-Clock Efforts for Social Synchronization

Abstract

The sleep-cycle development of infants is influenced by familial and sociocultural conditions, but there is a lack of knowledge on how parental regulation of infant sleep is related to the specific life situation of a family. This article describes a context-sensitive study of parental regulation of infant sleep that includes the whole 24-hr day, parents' intentions, and familial and sociocultural conditions. The results are based on a longitudinal qualitative study in Norway of 51 families. Parents were interviewed in the infants' first year of life and approximately 18 months later. An interpretive analysis in four steps was conducted, informed by cultural psychological perspectives on development. The parents were found to perform five types of regulatory actions: facilitating sleep, letting sleep, letting be awake, keeping awake, and waking. These actions were performed continuously throughout the 24-hr day, each to different extents and at different hours in individual families, forming a regulation cycle. We describe patterns and variations in regulation cycles, changes over time as increased social synchronization, and how the regulation cycle is embedded in familial and sociocultural conditions. Finally, implications for clinical practice are discussed.

Effect of a behavioral-educational sleep intervention for first-time mothers and their infants: pilot of a controlled trial

“…A transactional sleep framework acknowledges multiple influences on infant sleep development, such as environmental (including health promotion guidelines), cultural (including sleep location), and infant and parental factors (including beliefs, temperament, and choice), meaning approaches that can be tailored to individual families may ultimately have more appeal and increased adherence and use than one-size-fits-all guidelines. 44 The current pilot study was necessarily limited by size. Ethnically and demographically similar groups of women were targeted for participation to control those factors.…”

Video evidence that parenting methods predict which infants develop long night-time sleep periods by three months of age

“…In this study, increasing the interval before feeding as infants aged was the General-Community parents’ most common longitudinal parenting strategy, suggesting that parents who implemented this from birth adopted a form of parenting which is normative as infants grow older. Evidence that parenting typically becomes less infant-cued as infants age has been found, too, in other English (Williams et al ., 2016 ) and Norwegian (Sudnes and Andenaes, 2016 ) studies. It seems likely that parents’ initial concern about their baby’s well-being and weight gain gives way to a more deliberated approach as infants develop.…”

Parenting the crying infant

“…In contrast, both infra-red video recordings and most randomised controlled trials have found that ‘limit-setting’ parenting supports both breast and formula-fed infants in developing long night-time sleep periods [43]. ‘Limit-setting’ parenting—an approach which employs routines and delayed responding to encourage infants to develop autonomous settling— is common in western societies and increasingly adopted by parents in general as infants grow older, at least in Norwegian [47] and English [48] families. A provocative idea, supported by correlational evidence, is that some parents’ unwillingness to tolerate crying leads to excessive involvement in soothing their infants to sleep, which gives rise to the development of sleep problems [49].…”