Eating and sleeping

‘’ Behavioral insomnia and feeding difficulties are 2 prevalent conditions in healthy young children.’’ This quote is the opening sentence of a recently published study in eating and sleeping in babies and toddlers. This quote might suggest that this is a universal phenomenon. In fact, probably it is only so in industrialized societies. In the press reports the language used suggested that the children themselves suffer these problems and that they are one way or another each other’s causative factors. When reading the original article carefully, this seems not to have been the authors’ intend. Data collecting was done using questionnaires for parents and all questions were about the perception o parents regarding eating and sleeping behavior of their children. Practically this let to parents indicating their interpretation of the normalness of their children’s’ eating and sleeping behaviors. The children were not studied for signs of problems like being ill or not thriving as result of sleep deprivation or malnourishment. One conclusion the researchers made was the problems reported by parents tended to co-exist, that these parents worried more about their child’s performance but they do stress the fact that parental behavior and expectations can actually influence child behavior. While reading this research report the fact must be considered that what is studied here is a cultural interpretation of ‘’normal eating behavior’’ and ‘’normal sleeping behavior’’. Waking t night, night feeding and frequent breastfeeding after the first birthday and selective intake of solids in industrialized societies may be viewed as abnormal and unwanted behavior, but in others it may be interpreted as perfectly normal. Eating- and sleeping problems in babies and toddlers in reality are more often the problems of the parents and society, not the children's.
Tauman R, Levine A, Avni H, Nehama H, Greenfeld M, Sivan Y: Coexistence of Sleep and Feeding Disturbances in Young Children. Pediatrics 2011 127: e615-e621