To sleep, or not to sleep?

Sleep is good, certainly. So perhaps the questions are deeper.

We've been collecting data on Elise since she was born in the hospital, which should be no surprise, given our careers as behavioral scientists. Only this past week have we been collecting and analyzing data on Elise's sleep and wakeful states, though. The whole topic of baby sleep is very debated: how it should be done, where and with/without whom, how much is enough, relationship to feeding schedules, etc. For anyone who would like to explore some of the intricacies of relationships between culturally-specific values, social/ecological contexts, and our evolutionary history of adaptation, I highly recommend the following read:
http://www.nd.edu/~jmckenn1/lab/culturalarticle.html

There is so much contradictory evidence, and a lot of capitalizing on parent hysteria by people marketing their products, book, programs. And I won't shy away from pointing out that there are some really cruel, and theoretically unsubstantiated, proscriptions for parenting, such as the following which we DO NOT endorse (Douglas J., 1989. Behaviour Problems in Young Children. London: Tavistock/Routledge): "...The parents have to be firm and committed to returning the child to bed..parents have to learn to ignore crying until the child falls asleep. Sometimes children can cry for a couple of hours..Children may vomit with crying and so parents need to be prepared to go in to clean up the child and change the bedclothes quickly and, with the minimum of fuss, put the child back to bed, and walk out."


Anyway, enough discourse on the topic! What matters is that Elise has been doing great and her parents have been generally pleased with our abilities to sleep. Below are some interesting graphs to study, based on Elise's recent data.

(CLICK ON THE FIGURES BELOW TO VIEW THEM AT LARGER SIZE)

This first one shows the probability of Elise being asleep given the hour of the day.



These next graphs show data points representing spans of time awake/asleep, of various lengths, at various times of day. Though a little more difficult to interpret at first glance, these figures are important for showing evidence of repeated patterns of sleep and awake throughout the week.