Topic
: Infants and toddlers in
Western cultures are expected to sleep alone and on a regular sleep schedule.
Among the Asians, bedtimes vary and no infant sleeps alone. In your opinion,
which approach is best for infants and toddlers, and why?
Sleep
being a very essential routine in a human being’s daily life since the
important cognitive processes takes places while the body is ‘asleep’ such as processing
the information that one has gathered the whole day and since sleep is a very
basic need during the infancy and toddlerhood, the approaches are also
considered to be playing a vital role in providing such need.
The Eastern approach in
sleeping for infants and toddlers is also known as co-sleeping where the
parents will share beds with their child until they reach a certain age for
them to sleep separately from the parents meanwhile the Western approach is
where the parents put the infants to sleep in their own cribs in a separate
room from the parents and usually practiced in North America, Europe and
Australia. In the Eastern approach, the parents usually have this strong
concern to keep the child close to them as it makes them more secured and easy
to cater their needs at night and in the Western approach, the parents will
place a microphone inside the baby’s room and hold a mini speaker with them all
the time so that whenever the baby cries, they can actually attend their needs.
For parents who practice the Eastern Approach, the bedtime and naps of the
infant or toddler may vary according to the environment and situation whereas
in the Western approach, the infants are practiced to have a regular sleep
schedule with fixed time for naps and bedtime. Both approaches are strongly
connected to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) because theories had been
suggested that parents might ‘roll’ over their newborn infant because being
unaware of the child’s presence on the shared bed which leads to suffocation.
Another scientific hypothesis made was when the infant shares the bed with the
parent(s), the level of carbon dioxide in the room’s atmosphere is higher than
when the infant is to put to sleep separately in baby’s crib in baby room. However
these hypotheses are rejected by the experts because the adults usually will be
able to sense the presence of the child on their bed even in their subconscious
mind unless they are under the influence of alcohol or substances and the high
level of carbon dioxide doesn’t lead to suffocation or breathing difficulties
as shown in a trial comparing 20 infants sleeping in these two approaches. And
as for letting infants to sleep alone, it’s quite risky as the infant might
sleep on his or her stomach unintentionally which leads to SIDS.
In my opinion, the
Eastern approach is more suitable for an infant or toddler although their
sleeping pattern might vary. This is because by practicing the co-sleeping
approach, factors such as the bond, the feeling of family, the need of each other side by side,
the importance of the family as a unit will be established naturally during the
process. This is completely opposite with the Western approach whereby values
such as self-dependent and courage will be instilled at a very young age. According
to Erik Erikson’s stages in a human development, a child from the age of 0 to 3
years will undergo the trust versus mistrust stage where the amount of care and
attention given by the parents will dramatically affect the child to grow up
with a positive mental state and a safe environment. As for the infants, having
their mother sleeping next to them will automatically make them feel secured as
they are used to the breathing pattern of the mother and heart beat rate since
they used to listen to it in the womb. Eastern mothers usually considers
breastfeeding quite important and there is scientific research saying that
breastfeeding a child until he or she is 2 years old will provide all the
necessary nutrition that a child needs for his or her development. Therefore
having one or both parents to sleep with the child might foster, especially the
maternal bonding between a mother and child due to breastfeeding at nights. Regarding
the variations in bedtime and naps in Eastern approach does not seem to be a
bad thing after all. Parents allowing child to sleep whenever they are tired or
sleepy will help the child to get enough sleep as much as he wants when he
actually needs it. This is contrast with the Western approach where the parents
tend to force the child to follow a regular sleeping time pattern but this
won’t really works because forcing a not sleepy child to sleep is such a
wasteful action.
As for the conclusion, I personally relate to
my experiences of being raised in the very same Eastern approach where the family
bonding and relationships establishment are prioritized which actually seeds
tradition and respect for the elders in the family so that when a child grows
to be an adult, he or she will always depend and consider the family in their
decisions. The Eastern approach indeed provide a nurturing and safe environment
for an infant that always felt safe in a mother’s womb to continue feeling such
after being brought to this world.
(851
words)
References
:
1. Online
sites
·
Why babies should never sleep alone: A
review of the co-sleeping controversy in relation to SIDS, bedsharing and
breast feeding (By James J. McKenna and Thomas McDade) http://cosleeping.nd.edu/assets/31970/mckenna_why_babies_should_n.pdf
·
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome – Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_infant_death_syndrome#Bed_sharing
2. Books
·
Erik Erikson’s 8 stages of human
development – Educational Psychology, Fifth Edition by John W.Santrock (The McGraw-Hill Companies)
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