THE INFANT SLEEP MYTH FEATURE
The goal was to make the latest information on infant sleep development, infant sleep safety, and night-time parenting freely available to anyone with access to the internet – and to raise the prominence of infants’ biological needs to help frame realistic expectations. With ESRC Follow-On Funding, the team
worked with research-users from three parent- support charities (UNICEF UK, La Leche League, and NCT) to establish the Infant Sleep Information Source website, launched in March 2012. The website, which has been accessed more
than two million times across the world, is endorsed by several parent-infant support charities and is signposted to parents by NHS Choices, a host of NHS Trusts, and the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence. User-research revealed the website was frequently read by parents using mobile phones (often while feeding/settling infants in the small hours), so funding was provided by Durham University to develop the Infant Sleep Info app
Initially most
parents implement strategies that minimise their own sleep disruption while meeting their baby’s night- time needs.
to make access to this information even easier. As knowledge of the website and app has grown the team has begun to offer workshops for health professionals who wish to support parents in managing their expectations and coping with normal infant-related sleep disruption. The Infant Sleep Information Source does not address clinical sleep problems, nor does it provide individual infant sleep advice. However, parents report finding the information provided to be ‘reassuring’, ‘life-altering’, and ‘sanity-saving’. Health professionals, meanwhile report that it gives them confidence to discuss infant sleep with parents and colleagues, and that it is an authoritative source of information to which they point new parents. In recognition of the success of the team’s
work, in February 2018, the Parent-Infant Sleep Lab team and Durham University received the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for ‘leading influential research on parent infant sleep with a widely-used public information service’. The team hopes that gradually the myth of the somnolent ‘good baby’ may be consigned to the past, and parents will receive the information and support they need to enjoy the start of their parenting journey without feeling compelled to lie about, or ‘fix’ their perfectly normal baby. n
i
Professor Helen Ball is Director of the Parent-Infant Sleep Lab in the Department of Anthropology at Durham University. The Infant Sleep Information Source website can be found at:
www.isisonline.org.uk or
www.infantsleepinfo.org.uk
The Infant Sleep Info app is available on Google Play and iTunes. Reviews for the Infant Sleep Information Source website can be found at:
facebook.com/pg/ISISonline/reviews/
More information about the Durham Parent-Infant Sleep Lab can be found at:
www.durham.ac.uk/sleep.lab/
WINTER 2018 SOCIETY NOW 19
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