Family rest is an issue that worries families and often receives conflicting messages about what they should expect and what is good for their children. But until now we did not have an exhaustive and scientific work that valued all the research and conclusions of the professionals. Now, thanks to María Berrozpe and Gemma Herranz we can have truthful and up-to-date information on science and children's sleep and read it directly on its page: "The scientific debate on the reality of children's dreams".
Babies and more interview today to one of the authors of this exceptional research work, the biologist María Berrozpe, which will reveal to us what is known today, really, about the normal sleep patterns of children and about the supposed disorders that some behavioral methods are trying to solve.
How was the idea of this research project born?
Last year I had the opportunity to repeatedly read the statements of Dr. Eduard Estivill stating that in the scientific world nobody questioned his techniques, that this happened only on the internet, which was not a serious medium where he had to enter into controversy . I knew that was not true.
Is the debate also in the field of scientific research?
Yes. I knew that the debate on children's sleep was also among professionals, in the world of scientific publications and that of congresses.
That motivated me to write some posts in my own blog on the subject, but I felt that that was not enough and I had in mind to do something more complete. Anyway, it was not until Mari Mar García, from The Alternative Blog, proposed an article in the form of a scientific review for his blog, which I threw headlong into the project. The problem was that the project grew far above the expected and instead of being an article for a blog it became a blog in itself.
How was the organization, look for the material, analyze it? Can you explain that process to the readers?
The truth is that one of my biggest limitations was the access to scientific literature from home, since the vast majority of articles are not open to the general public, they are paid and at a price that made it impossible to develop this project without someone to collaborate From a research center. Between that and the certainty that such a research work is always much richer if there are two heads working on it, I dared to ask another woman, mother blogger and active researcher, for her collaboration; and this is how Gemma entered the project. From there we started looking. I started with books aimed at parents who add their bibliographical sources, such as Carlos González, Rosa Jové, Sue Gerhard or Margot Sunderland. From his hand I became familiar with the main authors on this topic, the most important journals and the keywords that would help me find the remaining articles, most of them more recent than the cited books, in the databases of scientific publications compiled in PubMed .gov. Between Gemma and I we had already collected more than 100 works the day we opened the blog. Today we have already accumulated 200, although many are still awaiting analysis and addition. We are constantly adding updates and consulting the database to find new contributions.
We will get into the matter. According to the research of professionals and doctors, is there a scientifically proven normal or natural sleep pattern?
It is proven that sleep is an evolutionary process that changes during the life of the individual. As Rosa Jové says, a baby does not sleep the same as a child, a young adult or an elder. From there it already seems dangerous to establish models that are too rigid since, as all authors admit, the variability is enormous not precisely in the amount of hours each person needs to sleep, but especially in the way they sleep, something that depends greatly from the culture in which it is immersed.
There are cultures in which it is considered correct to sleep at night and incorrect to do it during the day, while in others a daytime nap is perfectly acceptable. In some adults they sleep as a couple, in others mothers with their children, in others they sleep in groups ...
And regarding children's sleep?
Regarding children's sleep, authors such as Ednick or Blair tell us in their publications about the enormous variability of sleep in the child population, so any recommendation on the optimal duration of sleep at any age should take into account the considerable individual variations (Ednick et al, 2009), (Blair et al, 2012). Recently an interesting and very controversial article by Matriacciani (Matricciani et al, 2012) has appeared, questioning the notion of healthy sleep and recommendations based on this notion in the last century. This article has generated many comments from other authors. And this is only a small example of the great debate in the scientific community.
Has it been proven that it is in any way convenient for them to sleep alone?
No. In principle, absolutely all the authors who have talked about the issue colecho / dream alone in their publications admit that sleep alone is an imposition based on purely cultural factors, without any biological basis.
Today it is well known that the baby sleeping alone is a historical exception, as Professor McKenna or the psychologist Rosa Jové say, and that, as a member of the order of primates that we are, the natural and instinctive for our babies is to sleep accompanied by his caregiver, especially his mother. All this has led those authors in favor of the dream alone (where we can include Ferber himself) to consider the colecho beneficial as long as he practices by conviction and as part of the family culture, while keeping what they call harmful the "reactive colecho", that is, the one practiced in families mostly of Western industrialized culture as a reaction to the "sleep problems" of their children, that is, it is a kind of colecho imposed by circumstances. But this classification of the types of colecho has also been highly questioned by various authors who claim that the only reason for children who practice reactive colecho to have a more problematic dream than those who do not, is that they already carry a history of anguish and fear at bedtime, because to get to the point of collecting even against the real will of their parents, they had to first go through a time of trying the dream alone that was very stressful for everyone, so that do not react to the colecho as one would expect from a child who sleeps confident and relaxed (Mao et al, 2004).
And what should they sleep with at a stretch and are waking up worrisome?
As for the night awakenings there are no discrepancies here: all children (and all adults) suffer awakenings every night. This is something absolutely healthy and normal. What some authors consider harmful are not the awakenings themselves, but the fact that the child, upon waking up, needs the intervention of his caregiver to fall asleep. That is, for these authors, if the child wakes up but "self-comforts" and falls asleep again simply by hugging the Pepito doll, moving rhythmically, sucking his finger or taking his pacifier, it is healthy and healthy. If you need to hug your mother or suck your mother's chest it is pathological.
And the same, is there any demonstrable disadvantage in their waking and sleeping accompanied?
As we have already said, awakenings are normal and healthy. The harmful thing is not to get enough sleep and currently there are two major currents that give two different reasons for this to happen: on the one hand, for supporters of the respectful upbringing of babies like McKenna, Jenni or Jove this happens when, After normal awakenings, we do not help the child to go back to sleep by offering him the comfortable and safe environment that he expects next to his mother. On the other hand, for those who base all their beliefs on what is established by Western culture (Ferber, Estivill or Mindell) the sleep problem occurs when the baby does not develop the ability to self-console and go back to sleep without external help from a person (but they can receive external help from an object).
We thank the biologist María Berrozpe this interview about the state of scientific research on childhood sleep and we invite you to read tomorrow the second part, in which we will address in depth the question of behavioral methods, the assessment of research and the message that, studied in depth the question from the scientific point of view, she wants to convey to the families
