A perfect night’s sleep seems a dim and distant memory when you have a new baby. Jane Bartlett looks at the debate about how you settle a crying infant

If you really want to wake up a room full of new parents, talk about sleep. It’s the equivalent of letting off an ideological hand grenade, because a good night’s rest is so much more than just a practical matter. How you handle the big sleep issue says lots about you and your most profound beliefs about parenting.

The perplexities are many, starting with whether you let junior sleep in your bed. Should you ever let a baby cry itself to sleep? At what age do you shunt them into the nursery? And the angst doesn’t stop there. You are likely to be worrying about setting bedtimes right up to the time they’re old enough to witness the TV watershed and risky programmes after 9.00pm.

It seems that in recent years parents have not been very successful in establishing good bedtime habits: research suggests that 50% of British mothers have problems getting babies and toddlers to sleep. According to Professor Gregory Stores, head of research into child sleep disorders at Oxford University, sleep disturbance among young children has become epidemic, and as a result, NHS funded sleep clinics are springing up nationwide to help bleary eyed parents get the shut eye they desperately need.

In the past

Just a few generations ago the prevailing baby care wisdom was based on the virtues of a strict nursery routine, centred on four hourly feeds, and wheeling them down the bottom of the garden where they could holler themselves to oblivion in their prams. Babies were seen to be willful little blighters whose selfish spirits needed to be broken.

All that changed in the 1970s when matron mum became a hippy. Attachment parenting became the cherished philosophy, inspired by the study of indigenous peoples and their apparently well-adjusted infants. This is an overwhelmingly child-centred approach, where baby sleeps in the parental bed, is fed on demand and remains in constant physical contact with their carers. It’s still popular, especially in circles where epidural is a dirty word, but the pendulum does seem to be swinging back the other way. Maybe it’s simply too hard to put baby first in a culture where mum is frequently isolated, and the nearest she gets to an extended family and local community is an episode of EastEnders.

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The big sleep issue