The genre of parenting advice books that focus on children’s sleep might seem like a strange archive for a feminist philosopher. Like many of us, I only started reading them because I had a baby who didn’t sleep well and I was exhausted. This was in 2009, and even then I was astonished by how many there were and how much information and advice they offered, while at the same time the differences between them—in terms of what one might actually do—were hard to discern. The overall impression was of a crowd of voices whose tone varied from chiding to sympathetic, all intent on justifying their own publication and trying to create a market niche. Looking back, I realize too that acute sleep deprivation had destroyed my cognitive capacities. I simply couldn’t understand, let alone apply, what the books were telling me, decide which one offered the better path, or grasp that I needed to take decisive action to get more rest.
The period between the mid-1980s and about 2010 marked a significant uptick in advice to parents on children’s sleep. In my ongoing project, somewhat facetiously entitled “Sleep is The New Sex” (referencing Foucault’s “incitement to discourse” and his claims about the will to knowledge), I am trying to diagnose what our contemporary anxieties, preoccupations, and practices surrounding sleep tell us about subjectivity, especially when refracted through the lenses of gender and sexuality. The management of other basic bodily needs such as eating and excreting are a part of living as well as parenting, but managing sleep presents a distinctive challenge. Sleep is often imagined as a “natural,” solitary activity that just happens. The tautological truth of this claim is that everyone sleeps eventually if they are sufficiently tired—even if inadequately, or only in micro-sleeps. The only people who literally never sleep are the unfortunate sufferers of the genetic disease Fatal Familial Insomnia, who (as the name suggests) always die. The existential truth is that sleep requires us all to recede from the world as agents, suspending our subjectivity (at least insofar as what defines subjectivity is consciousness). In particular, when we sleep, we withdraw our will. Yet falling asleep and waking up often require the exercise of will. I might be so exhausted that can barely keep my eyes open on the train in the late afternoon. Or I might need an elaborate routine and rituals before I get into bed, and a period of practiced breathing to combat my insomnia. Even then I might wake up in the middle of the night, tired but unable to go back to sleep despite my best intentions; conversely, I could plan to wake early in the morning but sleep through the alarm. Sleep, in other words, is a site of agency increasingly managed (and over-managed, and micro-managed) that is nonetheless on some essential level unmanageable.
The paradoxes of managing sleep are profound enough when they appear to be only first-personal. When managing sleep involves oneself and another in tandem, the tensions heighten. Babies are the subjects who most incite anxiety about sleep: they usually sleep a lot more than adults, yet frequently refuse to conform their sleep to adult schedules. They cannot take responsibility for their own sleep, yet sleeping is not something another person can do for me. For most adults, their most significant and drawn-out experience of sleep deprivation will come if they are charged with parenting a new baby, and (for reasons that have everything to do with gender inequities within the nuclear family and in the various public worlds of paid work) across all class groups this labour falls overwhelmingly on mothers, most of whom have to negotiate many other chronological demands.
“Sleep training,” then, is now a major part of the parenting industry. Most people who’ve had a kid are familiar with the dilemma: do you let your baby “cry it out,” leaving them until they fall asleep alone, and hoping that they thereby learn to “sleep through the night”? Or do you lean toward “attachment parenting” (AP), where you keep the baby by your side, feed on demand (including at night), and live with whatever sleep schedule you get? This dilemma is a bit artificial: even ardent Ferberizers prefer his “graduated extinction” method, where you slowly extend the amount of time a baby is left to cry, while the most Searsian proponent of AP accepts that giving your baby constant nocturnal attention can become a mutually vicious cycle. The more feminist-inclined books of the 2000s prefer a sleep training middle ground in which the interplay of complex needs between mother and child are more fully—and more practically—realized. Despite voluminous medical research on pediatric sleep there remains no right answer, and most experts are casuistic, encouraging families to do “what is right for them” within a wide range of options.
There are 244 self-help books in print in English on children’s sleep. This massive incitement to discourse coincides with the decline of the welfare state and the growth of rhetorics of individual independence and resilience. The neoliberal fantasy of radical autonomy lives alongside responsibility for the wellbeing of “dependents” that is located away from the public sphere in all its forms, and devolves to women kin. Proponents of “independent sleep” in the 1980s emphasized the importance of detached self-soothing for young children as a metaphor and model for the kind of self-reliance they will need later, as worker-citizens. The 1990s AP backlash didn’t so much reverse this trend, as suggest that the space of the family as enduringly supportive, and a fallback for the citizen whose independence cannot be sustained, should be maintained through maternal labour. Paradoxically, but following a familiar patriarchal line, mothers must teach their children to be independent at the price of their own autonomy. Advice about sleep, in other words, can be re-read as a kind of subtextual political philosophy, reflecting the contradictions of our times. I’ve borrowed here the acerbic title of the 2011 parody children’s book “Go The F**k to Sleep.” The profane exasperation of this hugely popular take marks, perhaps, a later twenty-first century, Gen Y recognition that the earnest struggle to control our family’s sleep is as loaded and futile as other narratives of individualized striving.
Cressida Heyes
Dr. Cressida J. Heyes is Professor and HM Tory Chair at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is the author of three monographs, most recently Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge (Duke University Press, 2020), which starts from the social and political constitution of the category of “experience" to show how things we undergo that sit on the limn of experience/non-experience can be understood through a combination of phenomenological and genealogical methods. She is currently writing a fourth book for a more general audience called Sleep is The New Sex. www.cressidaheyes.com; Twitter @sleepisthenews1; FB: Sleep is The New Sex.
This is a really interesting project.