March 13, 2017
Interview with Benjamin Reiss, author of the book Wild Nights
Mike Carruthers: We all know the rules of sleep.
Benjamin Reiss: You do it at night for around 7 or 8 hours. You do it more or less in one straight shot. You do it with at most one other consenting adult. And you separate out the children from the parents.
Benjamin Reiss, author of the book Wild Nights How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World…
What’s interesting about that from a historical perspective is that almost nobody in human history did any of that until about the last couple hundred years. And so that’s what I mean when I talk about taming sleep making it conform to these rules that are really rather recent inventions.
The sleep rule that causes a lot of trouble for parents is forcing kids to learn to sleep in their own room at an early age.
It doesn’t correspond with any kind of basic need that humans have. Recognizing that that child’s need for comfort soothing proximity at night. If you look at the scope of human history and the variety of ways that different cultures practice sleep you might start to think that maybe the way we’ve been taught to do it isn’t the correct way.
This is not to say that you should change the rules to sleep just to understand that the rules are arbitrary and can certainly be adapted to fit your own needs.
I just think understanding that might give some people flexibility or leeway for thinking about arranging things differently.
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