Sleep habitat
But there’s another way that ancient parents approached sleep differently than many of us do today.
When Samson stayed with the Hadza, he described common parenting practices in the US, such as encouraging babies to sleep separately from their caregivers. “They looked at me like I was insane,” says Samson. “They were like, ‘Why? Why? Why?’… I felt bad almost asking the question.”
Hadza mothers, as in many other cultures throughout the world and virtually every hunter-gatherer society ever studied, sleep with their babies and breastfeed through the night. This is a practice dubbed “breastsleeping” by anthropologist James McKenna, the founder and director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, US.
There really isn’t just infant sleep or maternal sleep, or breastfeeding or not breastfeeding. It is all highly integrated. The mother’s body becomes the baby’s habitat – James McKenna
“There really isn’t just infant sleep or maternal sleep, or breastfeeding or not breastfeeding,” McKenna says. “It is all highly integrated. The mother’s body becomes the baby’s habitat.”
Findings about how breastsleeping might affect a mother’s sleep are mixed. But some research indicates it affects how well-rested new parents feel.
One study found that actual sleep time doesn’t, on average, differ much between mothers who do and don’t bedshare. Bedsharing mothers wake a little more throughout the night, but seem to fall back asleep more quickly. Instead, some of the difference lies in the mothers’ mindsets.
“The mums are not aware of how frequently they might feed in the night, or of how often they might check their babies in the night,” Ball says. They may not be arousing fully during a feed. Or they may simply be forgetting the wakes. This may be key to making them feel more refreshed the next day.
Guidance from public health organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics is to sleep in the same room as an infant for at least the first six months of life to reduce the risk of Sides, but on a separate surface from the infant.
The UK’s Lullaby Trust has guidelines for how parents can make bedsharing as safe as possible, and in which situations a family should never bedshare – including after anyone in the bed has been drinking, smoking or taking drugs, if a baby was premature or low birth weight, or on a sofa or armchair.
This chimes with research on how the way we view our sleep can change our own energy levels. Less rigid expectations of sleep might not just help us relax and unwind at night but also help us feel less fatigued during the day, no matter how we slept the night before.
Since mothers who breast sleep are breastfeeding rather than using formula or pumping, their sleep quality may also feel improved due to the hormone prolactin, which spikes during breastfeeding and can make mothers sleepier. One study of 133 mothers found that breastfeeding parents got around 40-45 minutes more sleep than parents who used formula, for example, while another study on 120 mothers found that mothers who breastfed exclusively got about 30 minutes more sleep per night at one month postpartum.
Samson himself swears by this. He and his wife spent their daughter’s first three months struggling to get the sleep they needed until trying the same breastsleeping he’d witnessed with the Hadza, following public health guidelines about how to bedshare as safely as possible. “Our entire life changed,” Samson says. “She didn’t have to sit up, she didn’t have to wake up, she was just aware – oh, she’s feeding now – and then boom, back to sleep. And it changed everything.”
Not all studies have found that sleeping close to one’s infant improves a parent’s sleep. One study that followed 139 families across the first year of infancy, for example, found that mothers who shared a room or bed with their infant had more disrupted sleep than those who did not. Their babies, however, did not wake more. (Of course, it is hard to tease out cause and effect: it could be that more vigilant or anxious mothers, who also might wake more often, were more likely to want to keep their babies close during sleep rather than separate.)
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