"Why do we make children sleep alone?"

"For all the tenacity with which we cling to the ideal of solitary childhood sleep, it’s a historical anomaly. 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.

But as industrial wealth spread through the Western economies, so did a sense that individual privacy — felt most intently at night — was a hallmark of “civilization.”...

This new insistence on individual sleeping was reinforced in psychology and pediatrics through the 20th century. In 1928, the behavioral psychologist John Watson argued that children should occupy their own rooms as early as possible for fear that too much coddling would stunt a child’s development. Sigmund Freud’s Oedipal complex — with its nightmarish vision of children permanently scarred by witnessing parental sex — gave impetus to the idea that nighttime proximity was harmful. The most famous pediatrician of the mid-20th century, Benjamin Spock, offered a mélange of Freudian ideas and behavioral training, warning that “the young child may be upset by the parents’ intercourse, which he misunderstands and which frightens him.” To prevent this traumatic outcome, Spock recommended trapping the child in the crib with an adapted badminton net."

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

Related: Why do we eat three meals a day; American parenting

FB: The arbitrariness of the construction 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."