Nights around the world: where babies sleep and why it varies in : the main line · 534

Few parenting topics attract more certainty than infant sleep. Yet ethnography shows enormous diversity: some societies expect night nursing and bodily contact; others engineer dark rooms and long stretches without feeding. Public health guidance about safe sleep surfaces matters. Moral panic about “creating bad habits” often does not. Separating safety physics from lifestyle fashion is the first diversity skill of nights.

Suffocation and overheating risks on soft sofas, alcohol-impaired adults, and cluttered beds are real. Those risks are about surfaces and impairment — not about whether a culture values proximity. Room-sharing without soft bedding hazards is recommended in many high-income guidelines for early months. That can coexist with responsive night feeding; it does not require ignoring a crying infant for ideology.

Cold climates, small dwellings, breastfeeding norms, malaria nets, and beliefs about spirits or independence all shape night architecture. What looks like “spoiling” in one frame looks like vigilance in another. Urban middle-class campaigns for early solo sleep often track maternal return-to-work schedules and housing with spare rooms — material conditions, not timeless wisdom.