the Institut de Psychologie, University René Descartes, Paris, France
ABSTRACT
Objectives. Significant cultural variations exist in sleep practices for young children, including bedtime rituals and routines, soothing techniques, and cosleeping. This study examined parenting styles at bedtime and sleep behavior in a group of German infants. The results are compared with sleep practices of other western European countries.
Participants. German parents of 50 boys and 50 girls 6 to 30 months old.
Method. Parents were asked to fill out a questionnaire about the sleep behavior of their child. Personal interviews with the parents were conducted to augment the survey results; in selected cases, bedtime routines were filmed.
Results. The infants in this sample largely slept in their own bed in a separate room. Bedtime rituals were common and in general characterized by parents maintaining behavioral distance from the infants during the bedtime routine. However, parenting style was likely to become more "proximal" (close) in response to bedtime refusal and nocturnal infant crying. A majority of parents (79%) used lullabies as part of the bedtime ritual, and the use of a sleep aid was very common (80%).
Conclusion. As is the case with most cultures, German bedtime parenting practices tend to reflect parenting values and beliefs associated with their specific culture. The parenting style at bedtime in this group of infants in general seemed less rigid and less distancing than bedtime rituals typically described in other northern European countries and may represent more of a synthesis of parenting styles across various Western cultures.
Key Words: sleep practices independence German culture
Although sleep practices among infants and children is a topic that often stimulates discussion and controversy among child specialists, all parties ultimately share the same goal: the child's psychologic and physical well-being. After many decades of research, there is still no consensus regarding the "best" sleeping arrangement for children and the "optimal" way to prepare a child for a restful night's sleep, and there are as many ways to sleep as there are cultural variations. An important step in understanding the social, ideological, and cultural factors that shape sleep practices is to examine the evolution of specific practices in a given culture. This exercise helps put sleep practices in a historical and cultural context and provides a window into the parenting beliefs and values in which sleep practices are embedded.
To this end, we recently conducted an informal, Web-based survey of the sleep practices of 100 German children 6 to 30 months old. Parents, all readers of the German parenting magazine Eltern ("Parents"), were asked to complete a questionnaire regarding the sleeping environment, bedtime rituals, transitional objects, soothing techniques, and sleep problems of their children. Many of the questions were purposefully left open-ended to encourage parents to elaborate on their answers. The results of this informal survey revealed some interesting commonalities regarding sleep practices in this group of middle-class German families.
The majority of these parents (91%) believe that a bedtime ritual and singing a lullaby is necessary to prepare a young child for sleep and overcome the anxiety of separation; however, only 1 of 5 parents stays with the child until he or she has fallen asleep, and most infants sleep alone in their own rooms.
Most of these parents believe that some assistance is necessary to help infants fall asleep. Because most parents do not wish their children to depend on parental presence, they tend to favor a "sleep aid." More than three quarters of the infants used a combination of objects intended to promote a feeling of safety in the dark and help them fall asleep. These "beloved dolls" are also expected to soothe children when they wake during the night.
Most of the parents stay "distant" in their physical gestures when they prepare their children for sleep. Parents prefer to transmit calmness, love, and affection by their tone of voice. However, the gestures tend to become more proximal when the children resist falling asleep. At that point, most of the parents (especially the mothers) become physically close to their children, using soothing techniques such as holding, rocking, or lying down next to the children.
Many of these parents obtain most of their information about child rearing, including "appropriate" sleep practices, from printed materials (books, magazines) and the media, principally television. This reliance on "expert" advice in many cases has superseded seeking information from health care providers or family members.
So, how do we interpret these practices in the larger context of parental beliefs and the values of modern German society First, it is a truism that becoming a parent involves some reiteration of beliefs and values that one has inherited from one's own parents. In addition, parenting beliefs and practices are necessarily part of the larger cultural fabric, which is influenced by politics, economics, religious beliefs, etc. Thus, to a certain extent, parenting style depends on a heritage that is specific to each family as well as reflective of the cultural context. Therefore, to understand the peculiarities of German parenting and sleep practices, it is important to review their historical context and learn more about the transmission of a heritage that is personal and cultural at the same time.
Until the second half of the 19th century, German childcare practices did not differ significantly from those in other European countries. In an era of extremely high rates of infant and child mortality, the principal focus was on minimizing exposure to environmental risks and protecting children from very real and omnipresent dangers. Consequently, sleep was not regarded as playing an important role in children's overall health, and advice about sleep practices not directly linked to safety issues was not a high priority.1 Nevertheless, there are hints that bedtime practices have been a source of anxiety for parents for centuries. Certain German lullabies such as "Sleep, Infant, Sleep" (Schlaf, Kindlein, Schlaf), dating from the 17th century, show clearly how desperate parents must have been then: "... and don't bleat like a sheep, because otherwise the dog of the shepherd will come and bite my evil little child! Sleep, infant, sleep." The lyrics of a number of other lullabies also suggest that bedtime was a difficult moment of separation for both parents and children (S.R.V., Sleep Research of the German Infant: Tradition and Modernity, unpublished thesis, Paris, France; Institut de Psychologie, University de Rene Descartes; 2004).
Advice regarding sleeping arrangements dates back to St Augustine in the 5th century. Parents were warned that infants should not sleep in their beds to avoid the possible risk of "suffocation" (meaning infanticide).1,2 In wealthy families, especially from the 18th century on, the issue of where infants slept and with whom was often not addressed directly, because infants were placed under the care of wet nurses for several years right after birth. Even at the end of the 19th century, with the ascendance of Freud's theories of child development in Germany, psychoanalytically oriented childcare practices also advised that infants sleep in their own rooms to avoid trauma related to possible observation of parental sexual activity, the "scene primitive."3
More recently, the Nazi ideology under Hitler dictated that children were not allowed to be close to their mothers. The model German child should be a "member of the masses"; thus, any emotional attachment to parents was seen as an obstacle to this goal.4 Infants had to sleep alone from birth on, and mothers did not have the right to soothe them unless it was feeding time. Infants could not even self-soothe with "unhygienic" comfort objects: "We will wash and clean all toys!"5 Finally, in the late 1950s, the childcare theories of Dr Benjamin Spock became popular in Germany. For different reasons, Dr Spock's advice was also to have infants sleep alone and allow them to cry in their own cribs for as long as it took to fall asleep.6 Thus, one could conclude that many different factors across the centuries conspired to encourage German parents to keep a certain distance from their children from birth on, especially during the night.
Another reason for this distancing behavior in German child-rearing practices seems to be an actual "cult" of independence. Child-rearing practices across cultures, no matter how different, are all meant to give children the inner strength to succeed in life by becoming well-balanced and harmonic individuals. "Well balanced" and "harmonic" in Japan, as in many other Asian societies, means that the child is open to fellow human beings and lives and works as an adult in community with others.7 Most Anglo-European societies, however, including Germany, place greater value on the development of autonomy and independence in children. Child-rearing practices reflect a parental desire to raise children who are, first and foremost, self-reliant. German parents in particular tend to believe that individualism and autonomy are the basis of a future successful life. Because in Western societies only the strongest will "survive," the fear of having a child who cannot cope with stress, competition, and psychological pressure is always present in parents' minds. Depending on another person, even a parent, could become an obstacle to survival.
In Germany, this concern about raising dependent children manifests itself as early as the first year of life and is a powerful influence on child-rearing practices, especially on sleeping arrangements and bedtime practices. For a child to sleep alone in his or her own bed and room is the first step toward "independence" and "autonomy" and, thus, toward adult life (as one parent stated: "We want to bring up a boy who can take care of himself"). Thus, allowing a child to self-soothe is actually considered by German parents to be a parental duty ("Otherwise, my son expects someone to stay with him all the time when he has to sleep" and "[falling asleep alone] strengthens his self-confidence, and my son becomes independent and not anxious"). Parents tend to believe that their children's characters are shaped through their "nonpresence" at bedtime.
These cultural and social pressures obviously also heavily influence parents' decisions to take their children into their beds. Parents who do decide to cosleep with their children are often made to feel guilty and are pressured to stop doing so by family and friends, because the practice of cosleeping is often considered tantamount to spoiling the child ("You don't know what you are doing to your infant!"). Thus, cosleeping parents are conflicted regarding their own personal convictions and those of society. German parents' attitudes toward the use of transitional objects also seem to reflect this ambivalence. For most parents, sleep aids are "friends" or "companions," so that "My daughter has something to cuddle during the night, and when she wakes up in the night she falls asleep without waking us up." This implies that parents acknowledge that it is often difficult for a child to sleep alone, although culture and society dictate that "good" parents insist on the practice.
Although most of the parents who responded to the survey seem to stay distant in their gestures when they prepare their children for sleep, parent-infant interactions often turn from distant to proximal in response to bedtime refusal or night waking. These proximal gestures, therefore, may act as a kind of "first-aid kit," which parents describe as stemming from instinct or intuition in response to their children's distress. It is possible that parental sleepiness during middle-of-the-night wakings lowers the defense mechanism of intellectualization, leading parents to abandon the "official" rules of child rearing and respond more instinctively to infant crying. Influenced by child-rearing practices, German parents are in a huge conflict: They want to help their crying children, but if they do so, they apparently risk turning them into dependent and weak individuals. It is interesting to note that parents who do soothe their children in the night are equally convinced that this will help the children become self-confident human beings, because the children then know that they can count on their parents for assistance.
In the survey mentioned above, parents often stated that they also do not want to be "slaves" of their children. In Germany, as in many Western societies, child care is still primarily the responsibility of the mother; however, the independence and equal status for which many women in the last century have fought is sometimes perceived as being endangered by having to stay home and look after a child. In addition, many mothers in Germany work full-time. Thus, for many women, the issue is balancing their professional careers with motherhood. It follows that, if a mother wants to be at her best at work the next morning, it is an advantage to have an infant who sleeps well. Sleep problems among children seem to put more pressure on mothers by requiring that they be effective and energetic at work while at the same time expecting them to be good mothers who are always there for their children. By teaching her child to sleep alone, a mother may be conceding to her child some of the autonomy she wants to preserve for herself.
Are German sleep practices unique compared with those of other Anglo-European cultures Generally, there seems to be a similar trend in Europe toward adopting a more distant behavioral style in sleep practices. As one approaches southern Europe, however, sleep practices seem to become more and more proximal. In Portugal, for example, 40% of parents stay with their children until they fall asleep, and cosleeping is much more common: "The infant falls asleep in the arms of his mother, close to her body and listening to her singing."8 The vast majority of parents believe that it is important to take an infant into one's arms to calm him or her down, and almost no parents let their infants cry during the night.8 In contrast, in Finland, only 10% of children sleep in their parents' beds,9 and in Sweden, only one third of parents hold or lie down next to their infants at bedtime.10 It is interesting to note that in France, even the traditional practice of singing lullabies is slowly giving way to the use of recorded music, another reflection of a more "distant" approach that contrasts with the holding and rocking of the child that lullabies usually involve.11 Geographically, Germany is in the middle of Europe, and, concerning child-rearing practices, Germany may be somewhere in the middle as well (for example, the remarkably common use of lullabies reported by German parents in the survey is accompanied by a number of more "distant" bedtime practices). Especially in well-educated, more open-minded middle-class German families, parents are trying to strike a compromise between traditional practices, psychological theories of childcare, and personal values.
SUMMARY
It seems that a child who learns to self-soothe and can fall asleep alone and who can go back to sleep during the night alone or with the assistance of a sleep aid (rather than a parent) before the age of 1 year represents the ideal for many German parents. The conviction that an individual has to become independent early to succeed later in life greatly influences early parent-child interaction and child-rearing practice. Parents tend to place a priority on "molding future character" rather than focusing on the immediate needs of the child. The fear of making errors and being responsible for destroying the life of their child is a dominant theme for German parents. Only when the child manages to overcome these parental projections by calling out in the night for something beyond do parents seem to listen more to their inner voices and forget their worries and fears. At that special moment, we can observe the "accordage affectif" in parent-child bedtime interaction,12 beyond the cult of independence!
FOOTNOTES
Accepted Aug 5, 2004.
No conflict of interest declared.
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