Some things just have to wait

We all have stuff to do. And nap times are promoted as time out from parenting, a space in your day when you can get on with "Things". Important Things. Desired Things. Urgent Things. Necessary Things.

Things which are separate from our role as Parent.

Our lifestyles are evolving so rapidly that the Things my mother wanted to get on with are very different to those my daughter wants to get on with. But the continuum is that young children are just the same as they have always been: most children who have day time naps need parental contact as they fall and stay asleep. And most have an inbuilt sense of that adult moving too far away from them.

There's a reason a "successful transfer" is celebrated by parents in social media posts. Against the odds, they moved beyond the radar and the child stayed asleep! It's celebrated because it's rare. Mostly, contact naps involve constant touch.

But what about those other babies and toddlers who fall asleep alone in their own bed, in their own room? Don't they prove that #contactnapping is not necessary?

There are some unicorns out there who do drift off to sleep alone. They are a minority. There are many more who have been "trained" to fall asleep without support. By having their signals fail by being consistently ignored for increasingly long periods of time, they have learned to stop signalling. They no longer call for their mother. But falling asleep in isolation because nobody comes when you call is the very opposite of contact sleeping. Just because they can doesn't mean they should and we have no evidence to support this as normal or healthy. Switching off the natural instinct to sleep next to a trusted caregiver is experimental and without long-term research to back it up. Humans have held and touched their sleeping infants for tens of thousands of years.

So, for a couple of years some "Things" are either done when your child is awake, when they are asleep or when another adult is caring for them. Domestic tasks, work and study, community and family responsibilities, relationships, hobbies, social activities and all the other Things we do are harder to do when children are young.