William Bragg

Abstract:

This paper contributes to very nascent geographies of sleep. The paper is situated in the context of academic, media and policy debates regarding the health and well-being of children in Anglophone cultures. Drawing upon an extensive survey of websites dedicated to children’s sleep, it explores the ways in which bedtime and sleeping practices are represented by experts. Expert advice is aimed at parents (especially mothers) who are deemed to be involved in intimate but non-reciprocal relationships of care with their children. The paper highlights how expert advice is characterised by guidance around three key themes: detailed routines; intimate, bodily practices; material-environmental strategies. Our analysis of these themes extends contemporary human geographical research regarding everydayness, embodiment and material spaces. In particular, we argue that the geographies of young children’s sleep might develop and even challenge geographers’ extant interest in diverse but related issues such as care, domesticity, childhood and inter-generational relations and responsibilities.

It gets better:

Introduction

Our intentions in this paper are threefold. First, we seek to frame sleep (particularly, in what follows, children’s sleep) as salient, significant and problematic for Social/Cultural Geographers. Second, we propound contemporary, discursive representations of sleep as themselves significant, affecting, efficacious and problematic.

As one example, we will suggest that the manifold extant mass-mediated ‘expert’ recommendations for young children’s sleep – such as the prefatory examples: see Section 3 below – are key sites for the (re)production of contemporary norms, anxieties, and thus spatial-temporal-bodily practices. Third, we query the absence, by and large, of such discourses, practices and spaces of/for sleep in the work of most Social/Cultural Geographers.

To these ends, we proceed as follows. In Section 2, by way of introduction, the paper is situated in relation to precedents, and emerging demands, for Social Scientific research and enquiry regarding sleep. Section 3 presents an introduction to the more specific context of younger children’s sleep. It does so via consideration of our three prefatory quotations, and in relation to Social Scientists’ efforts to understand much broader contemporary Anglo-American cultural complexes, discourses, norms and anxieties relaying a ‘crisis of childhood’. Following a methodological orientation (Section 4), the main body of the paper focuses upon ‘expert’ knowledges, which make diverse recommendations for how children’s sleep should be enabled, managed and controlled. Drawing upon a survey of Anglophone parenting websites, we demonstrate how such expert knowledges represent children (and sleep) in certain ways, often implicitly relying upon discourses of ‘medicalisation’ and ‘commercialisation’. In particular, we find that they espouse strategies which can be grouped around three, broad, inter-locking ideas: bodies, rituals and material environments. As such, they articulate topics of considerable import in much recent Social/Cultural Geography; in conclusion, with this in mind, we reflect upon the broader implications of this paper for research in Social/Cultural Geography.

Thanks, Chris! (the person who sent me this shall remain anonymous to protect his academic career)