"Why do we make children sleep alone?"

"This system of sleeping — adults in one room, each child walled off in another — was common practice exactly nowhere before the late 19th century, when it took hold in Europe and North America. Even in wealthy families that could afford to spread out, children generally slept in the same room with nurses or siblings. Indeed, solitary childhood sleep seems cruel in those parts of the world where co-sleeping is still practiced, including developed countries such as Japan... 

According to the physician William Whitty Hall, author of a popular 19th century sleep hygiene book, individuals in co-sleeping societies were like “wolves, hogs and vermin” who “huddle together,” whereas in the civilized West, “each child, as it grows up, has a separate apartment.” Where social sleeping persisted among white people, it was usually associated with poverty and considered a social ill — as in Jacob Riis’s 1890 “How the Other Half Lives.” One hundred and fifty tenement dwellers, he observed with horror, slept “on filthy floors in two buildings,” and tramps dozed off in the doorways... 

The best-known method for separating children from parents involves training rather than webbing. “Bedtime means separation,” wrote Dr. Richard Ferber in 1985, because learning to sleep apart from parents allows the child “to see himself as an independent individual.” Ferber later backed off the claim that solitary sleep was universally preferable to co-sleeping and acknowledged that “co-sleeping predominated as our species evolved.” He instead counseled parents to “choose whichever system best suits you.” But he loaded the dice, reminding readers that co-sleeping societies tend to “remain socially and economically most ‘primitive’” — perhaps unintentionally echoing old asso­ciations of collective sleeping with supposedly inferior cultures."

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-reiss-sleep-alone-20170324-story.html

Related: eating 3 meals a day

FB: ugh, the arbitrariness of whiteness

"Ensuring privacy at night was not just a health concern; it was also a matter of defining proper “whiteness” or “Europeanness.” While reformers endorsed solitary sleep as healthful and moral, they noted that “savages” slept collectively — and this practice was somehow to blame for underdevelopment of the non-Western world."