12/17/2025
A baby sleeping separately in a cot/ crib is the anomaly not the norm.
And yet, if asked before we have our first baby to close our eyes and picture where a baby sleeps, for most of us westerners that’s what we’d picture.
Because that’s what we’ve been sold in so many ways, in so many layers, through so many avenues …
It’s our point of reference because that’s what has been the most visible representation of baby care and it has entered our subconscious whether we realise it or not.
TV, movies, magazines, advertising, books, blogs, forums, podcasts have all shaped our preconceived ideas on baby sleep long before we are being *gifted* a sleep training book at our baby shower or postpartum.
The subliminal messages we have received through media act as the seed when we begin to prepare for our baby.
They feed the need to buy a cot and set up a nursery fully expecting that this is a baseline requirement.
But this socially engineered version of infant care is the product of a culture that prioritises independence and productivity.
It seeks to minimise the deep, connected needs of our human infants for intensive, proximal care throughout the day and night. It sets the stage for *fixing* infant sleep problems when baby won’t have a bar of it and / or parents are beyond exhausted trying to tend to their needs and get them back in it before they themselves can get some sleep.
Babies are meant to wake and need feeding and nurturing in the night for the first few YEARS of life.
Their physiology expects these needs will be met and they will be in near constant contact with their mother or other caregiver, day and night.
Breastfeeding mother’s physiology acts as a mirror to this and she, too is primed to meet her own sleep and rest needs while tending to her baby’s needs by having her baby next to her and breastfeeding throughout the night.
That’s actually baseline.
How much nurture a baby needs in the night, and for how long they will require this proximal care is hugely variable but the baseline holds.
And if we start with THIS baseline, suddenly the energy and resources put into setting up that cot in the nursery seem an unusual thing to do … unless that cot is being side-carred to the parent’s bed.
Even writing this, I can already hear people shouting down the comments section with ‘well my baby slept better in their own room’, ‘ I don’t feel safe bedsharing, don’t shame me for sleeping my baby in a cot’, ‘the AAP recommends…’
And to that I say, regardless of your own experience, western versions of infant care are WEIRD and a poor match for what MOST infants actually need.
Most cultures around the world continue to share sleep with their babies as we have done as a human species for millennia.
Cots are the anomaly.
To re-think our expectations on infant sleep, we need to see where our preconceived ideas fit in …
If we all closed our eyes and pictured a baby side-lie nursing next to their mum I guarantee we’d have far less infant sleep problems reported by parents.
And that’s a hill I’m willing to di3 on ⛰️
Carly✨
