An evolutionarily informed perspective on parent-infant sleep contact challenges recommendations regarding appropriate parent-infant sleep practices based on large epidemiological studies. In this study regularly bed-sharing parents and infants participated in an in-home video study of bed-sharing behaviour. Ten formula-feeding and ten breastfeeding families were filmed for 3 nights (adjustment...

OBJECTIVE We report here the influence of sleep patterns on the development of infants in Japan. A total of 479 infants were registered in two different Japanese cities. Direct neurological observations were performed by licensed pediatric neurologists. METHOD We designed a prospective cohort study and identified the sleep factors of children showing atypical development. The Kinder Infant De...

BACKGROUND The northern territory Nunavut has Canada's largest jurisdictional land mass with 33,322 inhabitants, of which 85% self-identify as Inuit. Nunavut has rates of infant mortality, postneonatal mortality and hospitalisation of infants for respiratory infections that greatly exceed those for the rest of Canada. The infant mortality rate in Nunavut is 3 times the national average, and twi...

This review covers the literature on behavioural and cognitive-behavioural treatments for sleep disturbance in infants, pre-school, and school-age children. Treatment areas are dyssomnias (disorders of initiating, maintaining, or excessive sleep) and parasomnias (behaviours which occur predominantly during sleep). Interventions aimed at preventing sleep disorder through targeting infant sleep p...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effectiveness of a behavioural-educational sleep intervention delivered in the early postpartum in improving maternal and infant sleep. DESIGN Randomised controlled trial. SETTING Postpartum units of two university affiliated hospitals. PARTICIPANTS 246 primiparous women and their infants randomised while in hospital with an internet based randomisation service t...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Randomized trials have demonstrated the short- to medium-term effectiveness of behavioral infant sleep interventions. However, concerns persist that they may harm children's emotional development and subsequent mental health. This study aimed to determine long-term harms and/or benefits of an infant behavioral sleep program at age 6 years on (1) child, (2) child-parent...

Aim To provide descriptive figures for infant distress and associated parenting at night in normal London home environments during the first three months of age. BACKGROUND Most western infants develop long night-time sleep periods by four months of age. However, 30% of infants in many countries sleep for short periods and cry out on waking in the night: the most common type of infant sleep b...

We show how a recently developed wavelet packet modelling methodology could be useful for infant sleep state classification using heart rate data. The suggested approach produces adequate classification rates when applied to recordings from an infant who was placed to bed at night at different ages. As well as classification, this approach gives us valuable information about the relationship be...

The controversy around mother–infant bedsharing continues to grow. In order to make sound policy recommendations, policy makers need current data on where infants sleep and how families handle nighttime feedings. The present study is a survey of 4,789 mothers of infants 0–12 months of age in the U.S. The findings indicate that almost 60% of mothers bedshare and that this occurs throughout the f...