“It Looked Like I Was Going Through a Breakup”: Extinction-Based Sleep Training and the Cultural Dilemmas of Mothering

Abstract

This article explores extinction-based sleep training as a case study of the lived tensions of contemporary motherhood in the United States. Extinction-based sleep training is an umbrella term for techniques used to teach an infant or young child to sleep without parental intervention, often by ignoring a child’s cries. On the one hand, extinction-based sleep training is sanctioned by medical institutions and has been commonly cited in parenting advice over the last century. On the other hand, mothering today is influenced by a culture that heralds “attachment” or “responsive” parenting as the best forms of mothering, often contradicting the very practice of extinction-based sleep training. Drawing on 30 interviews with mothers of children under the age of five, this research explores how mothers who engage in extinction-based sleep training grapple with this tension. First, mothers engage in emotion work to abide by the feeling rules of innate responsiveness. Second, mothers professionalize their sleep decisions, using expert permission, scientific language, and personal qualifications to justify their choices. Finally, mothers engage in a highly rationalized approach to sleep training, in which the practice is measurable and quantifiable.