After all, sleeping with your child is unusual?

To share a dream with your child is not unusual and not abnormal. Recently, the national television asked me to take part in the

show devoted to the problems of sleeping with children. The producer, learning that I'm on the side of parents sleeping with their children, asked: "Dr. Sears, how many parents practice this innovation?" Puzzled that she meant by "this innovation", I guessed what she saidabout a joint dream. I informed her that "innovation" is to sleep separately. In countries deprived of such "advantages" as experts and specialists, joint sleep is considered as a natural extension: from the mother's womb to the mother's breast and into the mother's bed. They never even consider another alternative.

The mother of one of my patients recently conducted a sleep study in the families of the island of Fiji as a research project for the World Health Organization. On the island of Fiji, children sleep next to their parents before weaning. Local women were surprised that the researcher in general asked where their children were sleeping and asked the following question: "Is it true that American mothers put their children in the cage for the night?" Fortunately, we do not export our parents' ideas.

A separate nursery is a strange concept for most parents around the world. When studying 186 traditional societies around the world, it was found that in most cultures, the mother and child share one bed, and none of the societies studied in this study know what a typical children's child is typical of Western society. We broke the world tradition and lost sleep.

Suppose we spend an evening in the library reading materials on how to sleep around the world. If you take books from the section "Anthropology", in all of them a joint dream is seen as a norm of parental care, like breastfeeding and rocking the baby in the arms. So why all this noise about the children in the parent's bed? After all, this is the place for them, according to anthropologists.

The case of

is entirely different with medical and psychological literature, which provides a wide variety of justifications for the fact that this time-tested custom, established at the very moment of the birth of the human tribe, suddenly became wrong. The fact that such a natural human custom can be called into question is simply ridiculous. In fact, joint sleep is a continuation of the same approach to which breastfeeding belongs. In the fifties, breastfeeding was also questioned! Now, when more and more parents refuse to recognize the invented taboos, breastfeeding has returned, and his close relative, a joint dream, is making his lawful return.