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Throughout history and across cultures, sleeping with your baby has been the norm, yet today the practice is fraught with questions, fear, and guilt. Parents are left exhausted, and those who cherish the closeness of cosleeping find themselves doubting their parental instincts. In Safe Infant Sleep, a globally recognized cosleeping authority breaks down the complicated political and social aspects of sleep safety and counters common misconceptions with hard science. This book shares the latest scientific research on the benefits of cosleeping, offers guidelines for a variety of safe sleeping arrangements, and introduces "breastsleeping," a bedsharing technique based on the fundamental biological connection between breastfeeding and infant sleep. From bedsharing to roomsharing, and everything in between, Dr. James J. McKenna helps you determine how cosleeping can meet your family's unique needs. Complete with resource lists for parents and professionals, this book educates, informs, reassures, and validates the most natural way for your baby to sleep––with you. ; https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1451/thumbnail.jpg

▪ Abstract  This chapter reviews what is presently known about the sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and examines the role that infant sleeping arrangements may play in reducing SIDS risks. Alongside sleep laboratory-based experimental evidence comparing bedsharing and solitary sleeping mother-infant pairs, an evolutionary and cross-cultural framework is used to argue that infant-parent cosleeping is biologically, psychologically, and socially the most appropriate context for the development of healthy infant sleep physiology. It is also the context within which potentially more optimal breastfeeding activities for both the mother and infant are most likely to emerge. A survey of cross-cultural data and laboratory findings suggest that where infant-parent cosleeping and breastfeeding are practiced in tandem in nonsmoking households, and are practiced by parents specifically to promote infant health, the chances of an infant dying from SIDS should be reduced.

The great majority of Old World monkey females are interested in infants, particularly very young ones. Characteristically, females will approach infants cradled by their mothers and subsequently attempt to touch or hold them. For Cercopithecine monkeys, the subfamily that includes the baboons and macaques, caretaking attempts by females other than the mother are ordinarily unsuccessful, at least during the first two or three weeks of life. Mothers are highly possessive of their offspring and will not surrender them to substitute infant‐caretakers. In striking contrast, among the other major subfamily of Old World monkeys, the Colobines, mothers readily allow extensive and sometimes prolonged infant carrying and handling by other females (allomothering), even on the first day of life. This paper reviews the traditional functional explanations for these different maternal systems. Stressing opportunism in evolution, the paper suggests that the social and/or genetic benefits alone are not adequate to account for the origins of allomothering behavior among Colobines. Instead, emphasis is given to the kind of ancestral social structure and its environmental context that might allow such a behavioral system to begin. It is hypothesized that, relative to the Cercopithecines, who do not exhibit infant‐sharing, the dental morphology and digestive system of the Colobines produced food‐acquiring and food‐processing advantages that, in effect, reduced intragroup feeding competition and, concomitantly, reduced the importance of status differences between females. Such a social structure could permit the emergence of allomothering behavior since, for all the participants in this activity pattern, there are varying benefits that contribute to individual fitness. [Colobine, allomothering, functions, opportunism, dietary adaptations, social structure]

ABSTRACTThis article provides a novel synthesis of anthropological research on infant sleep, focusing on work in biological and sociocultural anthropology in the past decade. First, we briefly review early biological anthropological research into infant sleep from 1987 to 2007, which provided the evidence base for the argument that proximate parent–infant sleep combined with lactation represents a complex set of adaptations that constitute the human evolutionary norm. This work challenged the Western pediatric infant sleep research paradigm, which positioned formula‐ or bottle‐fed solitary sleeping infants as the basis for research and universal models about human infant sleep. Next, we address how recent research has built on these foundations and extended anthropological insights into new aspects of infant sleep. Biological anthropologists, who continue to lead this research, have advanced into the hormonal and behavioral ecology of parent–infant sleep and trade‐offs in nighttime care and parent–infant conflict. Moreover, they have made significant progress in translating anthropological research into policy and practice in clinical and health delivery settings. Until recently, sociocultural anthropology has primarily addressed infant sleep as part of broader endeavors, without an explicit focus on infant sleep. We highlight key ethnographic works that shed light on the cultural normalcy and interembodied experience of shared maternal–infant sleep with breastfeeding that help de‐center Western discourses of infant sleep. We conclude by discussing future research agendas to forward an integrated anthropology of human infant sleep that considers its full biological and sociocultural context. Integrated anthropological approaches to infant sleep not only present a path forward for novel cross‐subfield anthropological research but could help guide more effective and equitable approaches to maternal‐infant health. [nighttime care, parenting, infancy, sleep]

AbstractThe authors develop a conceptual, testable model suggesting lack of developmental synchrony between cortical and subcortical neural tracts necessary for breathing control underlying human vocalization (speech breathing), potentially leaving infants vulnerable to inconsolable crying. They propose that this lack of developmental synchrony also helps explain the human susceptibility to sudden infant death syndrome. Beginning around 1 month, during sleep and awake periods, infants gradually learn to shift between volitional and autonomic breathing control based on developing functional interconnections between cortical and subcortical neural networks. The existence of sudden infant death syndrome and inconsolable crying may reflect adaptive failures exacerbated by prolonged parent–infant separation, whether night or day, due to one or the other subsystem of neural networks and/or their functioning nuclei not being equally mature or able to sufficiently send, detect, or respond to signals provided by the other. Implications of these proposed models for family practice and family science research are examined.