Anonymous wrote:Here's a question.
Do we imagine that there were fewer or more sleep disorders in older children and adults before the advent of widespread "sleep training", which was less of a thing before the 1940s and much less of a thing before the late 1800s?
I know other changes happened during the same historical period that complicate things, but it's interesting to consider.
Also an interesting idea that people whose kids don't sleep train (which would be most of the world, and the vast majority of the world 100+ years ago) are largely destined to become needy, entitled-- and utterly exhausted-- brats.
Do you think mill workers in the Victorian period got up with their children all night? Russian peasants? Babies just cried. That was the end of it. Life was hard from the minute you were born. Call it what you want but humans have always sleep trained. There's this dumb fantasy that until the baby boom women just nurtured and co-slept and everything was oh so natural and loving, one big family bed where everyone got enough sleep. That's just not the case.