Depending on your social circles, sleep training is a given, a tool reluctantly used to improve sleep, or something to strongly oppose. In all the controversy surrounding sleep training safety, efficacy, necessity, and whether or not it’s moral, we rarely stop to consider how the concept got started. Sleep training, however, is a relatively new entirely western idea. It is a concept that emerged from changing values, shifting cultural norms, and the beliefs of prominent physicians in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

We live in a sleep training culture. Over the last 200 years, our values and beliefs have shifted leaving few parents and professionals familiar with biologically normative feeding and sleep patterns. Even modern pediatricians have minimal training on developmentally normal sleep and lactation. Modern life makes these norms difficult to support, and the response by our systems has been to push change on babies rather than develop new ways of supporting families.