Alertness makes a difference
The quality of wakefulness and how alert mothers are during it likely plays a role. Take, for example, the common advice to put a baby in a crib, if not in a different room entirely; to stay highly alert throughout feeding or re-settling an infant, even if it requires scrolling a phone; and to track waking and feeding times – none of which, of course, our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have done.
All of these stimuli signal to our body to arouse fully, says Pamela Douglas, a senior lecturer at the medical school of the University of Queensland, Australia.
For some of these strategies, this is, in fact, the point. Accidentally falling asleep with a baby in a space not set up for shared sleep – such as a couch or armchair – can make the risk of sudden infant death up to 67 times greater. As a result, some health professionals tell parents to do whatever they need to be fully awake during night feeds.
There’s no way [hunter-gatherer humans] could have evolved unless mothers had had alloparental as well as parental care and provisioning of offspring – Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
One downside to this, of course, is that it isn’t always successful, with parents sometimes falling asleep in these especially unsafe spaces. Another is that it can then be harder for parents to fall back asleep after tending to their baby – ultimately affecting sleep quality, the researchers posit.
To keep parents and children safe, while taking into account the growing body of research on parental sleep quality, Douglas has founded a sleep intervention programmed nicknamed Possums. Her work, on top of promoting strategies for mindfulness and relaxation, for instance, suggests parents should not track wakes and feeds. They should also allow babies to “feed to sleep”.
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