Is the Western way of raising kids weird?

Kelly Oakes, BBC, 2/22/2021

"Is he in his own room yet?" is a question new parents often field once they emerge from the haze of
life with a newborn. But sleeping apart from our babies is a relatively recent development – and not
one that extends around the globe. In other cultures sharing a room, and sometimes a bed, with your
baby is the norm.

This isn’t the only aspect of new parenthood that Westerners do differently. From napping on a
schedule and sleep training to pushing our children around in strollers, what we might think of as
standard parenting practices are often anything but.

Parents in the US and UK are advised to have their babies sleep in the same room as them for at least
the first six months, but many view this as a brief stopover on their way to a dedicated nursery. In
most other societies around the world, babies stick with their parents longer. A 2016 review that
looked at research on children sharing not just a room but a bed with one or more of their parents
found a high prevalence in many Asian countries: over 70% in India and Indonesia, for example, and
over 80% in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Research on bedsharing rates in countries across Africa is patchy,
but the existing research suggests the practice is near-universal.

Debmita Dutta, a doctor and parenting consultant in Bangalore, India, says that despite Western
influences, bedsharing remains a strong tradition in India – even in households where children have
their own rooms. "A family of four has three bedrooms, one each for each child and for the parents,
and then you would find both the children in the parent's bed," she says. "It's that common."
Bedsharing is one way to reduce the burden of babies waking up at night, says Dutta. Her own
daughter had a rollout bed next to her parents' that she could sleep on until she was seven years old.
"Even after she stopped breastfeeding, she still liked to sleep with us in the same room," she says.

Many parents in Western societies instead turn to sleep training methods, the most extreme version
of which involves leaving a baby on their own to "cry it out", in an effort to encourage their babies to
sleep for longer stretches so their parents can get some much-needed rest. In Australia there are
even state-funded residential sleep schools parents can check-into, to sleep train their children.

Encouraging early independence aligns with a typical Western cultural focus on individualism. For
that reason, bedsharing can seem to some like giving in to your child, and encouraging them to stay
dependent on their parents. But parents with a more collectivist mindset, like Dutta, usually don't see
it that way. "You give them some self-confidence and some independence, they will separate from
you on their own," she says. "They will not stick to you forever."

Cultural factors affect not just where babies sleep, but when and how much they sleep, too. Research
by Jun Kohyama, CEO at the Tokyo Bay Urayasu Ichikawa Medical Center, and colleagues found that
babies in Japan tend to nap less than those in other Asian countries once they reach three months of
age, possibly, he says, because "sleep is considered a lazy attitude in Japan". Kohyama also found that
children in Asian countries tend to have later bedtimes than their counterparts in predominantly-
Caucasian countries. He thinks parents wanting to spend time with their children in the evenings is
partly to blame. Bedsharing – the cultural norm in Japan – could also be a factor. "Parents feel their
baby is a part of his or her own body," he says.
Though, as in the UK, the US American Academy of Pediatrics advises parents to share a room with
their baby to reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), it warns against sharing a bed
because bedsharing has been associated with an increased risk of SIDS. But Rashmi Das, a professor
in pediatrics at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Bhubaneswar, and author of a review on
bedsharing safety, says that a lack of high-quality research on the topic makes it difficult to say
whether bedsharing itself increases the risk of SIDS in the absence of other risk factors like smoking
and drinking. "We could not tell whether bedsharing is actually increasing the risk of SIDS," says Das.

Studies on the topic mostly come from high-income countries, where bedsharing is less common. But
low-income countries, where bedsharing is traditional, also have some of the lowest SIDS rates in the
world. It doesn't seem to be a simple issue of geography: when someone living in the West has
imported their cultural practices from elsewhere, they bring the lower SIDS risk with them too.
Families of Pakistani origin living in the UK, for example, have a lower SIDS risk than white British
families – despite mothers commonly sharing a bed with their baby.

"It's the cultural practices that are associated with the lower SIDS," says Helen Ball, a professor of
anthropology at the University of Durham and director of the university's Parent-Infant Sleep Lab.
Mothers of Pakistani-origin in Bradford have higher rates of breastfeeding and are less likely to
smoke, drink, and put their baby to sleep in a separate room – all factors that are known to reduce
the risk of SIDS. Das says he'd like to see bedsharing encouraged but "with a cautionary note that
those persons who are bedsharing should not smoke, should not take alcohol, should not be very
obese.”

Just as bedsharing keeps babies close during the night, babywearing provides a way to keep them
close in the day while parents run errands or work around the house. Rather than a new trend,
carrying children in a sling is something humans have done for as long as we’ve been around. It was
only when prams became popular during the Victorian era that traditional baby carriers became less
common among some sections of Western society. In the rest of the world, there are seemingly
almost as many different ways to carry a baby as there are cultures in which babies are carried.

Even parents who don't use a sling will probably have noticed the instant calming effect of picking up
their baby and moving with them. "They intuitively know that this kind of rhythmic motion has some
power to calm down a baby," says Kumi Kuroda at the Riken Centre for Brain Science in Japan.

Kuroda began looking into the physiological effects of carrying infants when she saw that previous
research, which used parental diaries rather than real-time physiological measurements, didn’t find
any correlation between the amount of time babies were carried and the amount they cried. "I
couldn’t agree with that," she says. Her research found that carrying a baby reduced their heart rate
and movement as well as how much they cried. She says subsequent research found that movement
without holding, such as transporting a baby in a pram or car seat, as well as holding without moving,
also calms a baby over time, but that they work faster in combination.

Close contact, day and night, is what babies expect, biologically-speaking. In their first months they
need to be fed frequently around the clock. Even when a baby's circadian rhythm develops and their
sleep begins to consolidate during nighttime hours, waking during the night for at least their first year
is normal.

"Babies' biology has not changed dramatically over hundreds or thousands of years," says Ball. "But
our culture has changed dramatically, and our expectations of babies and of parenting has changed
dramatically over the course of a few decades." The idea that night-waking is normal is not the
message that new parents in the West are getting from family, friends and the wider culture. "We've
sort of developed this cultural myth that babies shouldn't wake at night," says Ball.

That myth has consequences. Disturbed sleep in early parenthood has been associated with
postpartum depression. But Ball says that trying to "fix" a baby's sleep isn't getting to the heart of the
problem – instead, supporting the parents directly is more likely to improve their mental health.

"Parents who are depressed experience their baby's sleep disruption worse than parents who aren't,"
she says. "Our argument is that actually, we need to fix what's going on in the parents' heads, we
need to support them to think about all of this in a different way." She put together the Baby Sleep
Info Source to arm new parents with accurate information on baby sleep.

The idea that older babies "should" be able to sleep through the night comes from research from the
1950s that found, out of a group of 160 babies living in London, 70% began "sleeping through the
night" by three months of age.

But the researchers defined "sleeping through" as not waking their parents by crying or fussing
between the hours of midnight and 5am – far from the unbroken eight-hour stretch that many new
parents long for – and not whether the babies themselves were actually asleep during that period. In
any case, 30% of the babies hadn't begun sleeping longer stretches by that age, and half of the babies
that were "sleeping through" reverted back to waking more at night later in their first year.

Even today, much research on infant sleep only looks at a specific subset of the global population. "So
much of the research over the last several decades has been done on Western babies," says Ball.

While there are undoubtedly differences between cultures when it comes to how we care for babies,
there are many differences within them, too. Not everyone in the West thinks a baby sleeping in their
own room is ideal. In one study, for example, Italian parents called it "unkind".

Personal circumstances play a big part in how people care for their babies, and every parent finds
their own particular way to do things. "All families are different, so a wide diversity is OK," says
Kuroda.

For her part, Kuroda co-slept with her four children as a way to adapt to being away from them
during the day. "I'm working full time and if I separate the whole night, it's really minimal time for the
baby. We can intensely communicate, even in the nighttime. It’s real communication and time
together."

But she says, as with all parenting choices, people should find what works for them and their baby,
rather than worrying too much about what anyone else is doing. "I think the parent and the infant
can adapt to each other," she says. "It's like a tango."

The key to thinking outside the Western box might be to remember that babies are not out to
manipulate us, no matter how tempting it might be to see it that way at 3am. "What we really need
with babies is to stop thinking about them as hard-to-please bosses," says Dutta. "They're helpless
little beings that have come into this world, and we must look at them with empathy and
compassion."