Sleep Capitalism: Inside the Toxic Market for Baby Sleep
You don’t need a $2000 crib, you need a break.
Here is a list of things I bought when my daughter was a newborn in the hope they would get her to sleep:
A sound machine.
Black out curtains.
A very expensive pod crib insert.
A motorised swing.
A yoga ball to bounce on while holding her.
A rocking chair.
Multiple red-bulbed night lights.
Organic hemp swaddles.
Origami velcro swaddles.
One complex straightjacket-like swaddle that made her scream so much I thought she’d dislocated her shoulder.
Bed toys with dummies attached to their arms and legs.
Multiple books (that told me to buy multiple other things).
And finally a life-monitor to place under her mattress in the off chance she did fall asleep.
Here is a list of things I thought about buying if I had the energy or cash keep throwing at sleep “problems”:
A vibrating rocket for her pram.
A cry-activated, singing bed toy.
And finally, the purchase that stalks so many parents at 3AM–a $2000 smart crib to replace me all together.
That’s also not counting the sleep consultants I got quotes from – ranging from hundreds of dollars for info packs and tele-consultations to thousands for in-home help. Nor the cost of upgrading my health insurance to potentially cover sleep school (if I could get off the waiting list).
Looking back, it all seems unhinged. But in the first weeks of her life I remember watching the sunrise through my bedroom window thinking: I’d give up this house for her to sleep for an hour. I’d give up anything.
The most extreme part of that experience wasn’t the price though. It’s that it’s so universal. Earlier this year, ABC reported that “On average, new mums get just four hours and 44 minutes of sleep [a night] in their child's first year of life”. But we’ll try anything to extend that
“I have bought essential oils, lavender bath gel, those sleep stickers. I have a moisturising cream that has magnesium in it. I have bought magnesium spray for children. I have a humidifier, a white noise machine, and if all else fails–and everything has failed–I wrap a shirt I’ve been wearing around a pillow and put it next to her to trick her into thinking I’m lying next to her.” Laments Sarah, mum of 16-month old Holiday.
“I have tried everything on the market that could potentially help but nothing has worked.”
After almost a year and a half Holiday (and Sarah) are yet to sleep through the night. Sarah manages the multiple wakings and feedings with co-sleeping, but despite all those purchases she still hasn’t had more than three hours rest at a time since giving birth.
“The whole process of buying and being marketed to makes me feel pretty annoyed. I seem to have a child who just doesn’t take to any of these things. I don’t know if I just have the worst sleeper in the world, but I’ve spent a lot of time and money researching, so it’s frustrating.”
Like Sarah, none of my frantic spending paid off. In fact through all my research for this article I didn’t come across one parent who could point to a purchasable object that made a significant impact. But that lack of success hasn’t slowed the market for sleep.
With such a captive and desperate audience, scrolling for any new product at 1AM, it’s conservatively estimated to be worth an astounding $300 million a year.
Those profits are driven by an endless stream of “game changer” items that promise to “revolutionise bedtime”. These “must haves” vary, but all offer the impression that evenings (like ourselves) exist to be optimised, improved or disrupted. In this consumer reality, falling asleep is a “science” to be studied and mastered.
Even before she had her daughter Olive two years ago, Brigid had internalised that message. A self described “Type A, get shit done, problem solver” she remembers: “I had a list in my phone of ‘sleep goals’ or ‘sleep achievements’ that I wanted her to master…like independent sleep at three months old. Which is what I thought I was supposed to do. I thought that was a key of parenting.”
The baby sleep industrial complex is astounding, but it’s only one piece of the larger baby product economy which in 2021 was valued at $214.13 billion. And demand is only growing. Grand View Research predicts the market is “expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.7% from 2022 to 2030.”
The myth at the heart of that growth isn’t that these products work, but that there is a problem to be solved in the first place. A problem, that if mastered, will reward us with a blessed bebe who “sleeps through” and “sleeps independently”.
But reviewing what we know about baby sleep, the foundational goals that taunted Brigid and so many other parents start to feel like dreams. Reporting on a Finnish study looking at 5,700 children, the BCC wrote that researchers found: “three-month-olds woke and needed resettling an average of 2.2 times a night – though the range was anywhere between 0 and 15 times. This persisted throughout the baby's first year. Eight in 10 parents of both three-month-olds and eight-month-olds said their babies woke more than five nights a week.”
A similar contradiction exists around independent sleep. Brigid, Sarah and I all had babies who (at some point) could only sleep with us nearby. We were all made to believe that this was some kind of defect that needed to be fixed as soon as possible. But as neonatologist Professor David Woods, former head of Neonatal Medicine at the University of Cape Town (and my uncle!) reframes it: “The ‘problem’ is that babies are designed to be close to their mother day and night. Carried during the day and snuggled at night. Not placed in a cot, often far from parents.” The trick isn’t to purchase the perfect suit of sleep accessories, “The answer is to sleep together.”
His career has seen him work extensively in rural and developing communities where much of our Western sleep dogma is non-existent. Ironically in these areas–where sleep accessories, training and theories are unheard of–kids and parents are considerably less tormented by the pursuit of “good sleep”. Instead of focusing on routines and milestones, the maternity wards he works in go as far as removing cots altogether to focus on “Skin-to-skin (kangaroo) care...which promotes bonding, breastfeeding, reduces infection and increases survival in poor communities.”
I like talking to my uncle about this stuff. He got a lot of stressy calls from me in those early weeks, and he talked me out of buying a lot of shit. When he’d walk me through his global work I’d imagine a parallel version of myself who was less indoctrinated. Who peacefully held her child all night and enjoyed watching the sunrise together. A woman who napped when the baby napped, happily laid underneath her for hours, luxuriating in the fourth trimester as a time for stillness and connection. That woman was happy. That woman also didn’t have a job. I did, and I was expected back at work after six months.
I also had bills, responsibilities, a body that needed to be fed and bathed, and a support network that while loving, in practical day-to-day terms, consisted of a single partner who also had to maintain a home, body, life and career.
As it turns out, this disconnect is another sneaky driver of that booming sleep economy. Writing on the “Global Infant Sleep Monitoring Market”, Global Market Estimates predict that from 2020 to 2026 the market for infant sleep monitoring will experience a rise in value of 9.5%. They add: “The rising trend of nuclear families and parents/attendants/ mothers staying away from home for work will propel the demand for such innovative monitors and apps.”
“Babies and young children who do not sleep when we want them to are a huge problem in nuclear families living in the developed world.” Reflects Professor Woods AKA Uncle Dave. “It is socially inconvenient and plays havoc with routines. [But] Every effort to train babies to sleep at our convenience is doomed to fail.”
He’s right. Because the thing is, the babies aren’t broken. A world and lifestyle that needs a three-month-old to sleep through the night is.
When comparing the experiences of parents across the globe, you need to be conscious of sentimentalising the lives of individuals in non-western nations. But one other cultural variant between Uncle Dave’s world and mine, is the presence of multi-generational homes. In the West, a culture of individualism preaches that moving away from your core community marks you as a success. But in reality, it breeds isolation.
One of my all time favourite articles is David Brooks’s “The Nuclear Family was a Mistake”. In it he lays out how the modern, but recent, model of a “normal” family is out of step with what we, as humans and a society, need to live full and happy lives.
“If you want to summarise the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximise their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.”
I think about that all the time. I thought about it while watching my bank account dwindle and stressing about my job and income. Because Brooks and Uncle Dave are right. I didn’t need a $2000 crib to rock my newborn to sleep. I needed someone close by, to hold my baby so I could nap. I didn’t need to spend thousands on a sleep consultant. I needed government parental leave that extended beyond 18 weeks and paid a living wage so I wasn’t left wrestling with her natural sleep cycles because I needed to go back to work.
Once I had an editor who said: “The answer to a problem when reporting a story can’t be, ‘We need more time and more money’. Because that’s the answer to everything.” Well, here that’s half true.
Despite my prayers in the middle of the night, money can’t buy sleep. But time eventually delivers it. That Finnish study also found that “After 12 months, [sleep disruption] changed dramatically – almost two-thirds of 18-month-olds, and nearly three-quarters of two-year-olds, no longer needed resettling at night.”
With time parents also figure out their kids. Some need to be held, some need to be left to cry, some need a noise machine, some need to sleep on their stomach with their bum in the air in a way that would terrify a maternal child health nurse (spoiler alert, that’s my kid).
After all her research, and a stint at an expensive private sleep clinic, Brigid and her partner Paul gave up on the dream of a good sleeper. “We were both so deflated and we both felt like [advice from sleep specialists] was turning our intuition off. So we basically just looked at each other and thought, “Fuck that let’s just throw it all out the window and get back to tuning into our baby.”'
I want to pause and stress that if any of the aforementioned interventions worked for you, that’s so amazing and no judgement. It’s ok for your baby to not sleep. It’s also ok to be fed up and want to explore interventions to hurry nature along. The issue here isn’t about what we do or don’t buy. It’s about the myths we allow ourselves to be told. And what we believe they say about being good or bad parents with good or bad kids.
I didn’t start this newsletter to answer questions about how to raise babies. I’m interested in how the world views parents, how it peers into our brains and finds the tenderest parts to exploit and profit from. That process doesn’t just rob us of money, but of joy.
“I found anxiety around sleep to be the biggest thief of joy and confidence as a new parent,” says Brigid. “I became really, really obsessed with it at about the five month mark…I basically just lost the plot. I felt so terrible and stressed and sad.”
“One of the things I look forward to if we have a second kid is redoing that period with the comfort and confidence that I have now around sleep and not experiencing so much anxiety.”
I get it. Looking back, it’s not the wasted money that bothers me. It’s the lost time with my kid. All those sunrises I could have enjoyed with her if I had allowed myself to be present, to not focus on what she wasn’t doing, but enjoy just being together. The expectations taunted me more than the fatigue.
I used to do this thing during rough nights when I’d remind myself: “This is the only night 10 you have to get through.” It was a comfort to know it’s not permanent. I still do that. Sometimes I look at her and say, “This is our only day 457”. But now it’s not a comfort, it’s a reminder to be present, to try and hold onto her a little longer.
The perfect baby does not exist. It’s a waste to spend your time and money trying to create them. But my child exists, she is present, wild and uncontrolled. For this moment, awake or asleep. And if you’re still wishing your way through night 10, all I can say is, call me and I’ll come hold your baby for a couple of hours. Call anyone with a kid. I promise they’ll answer.
Thank you for reading all the way to the bottom! I’d love to hear how you’re navigating all of this. Leave a comment, or catch me on Instagram (or Threads?) Also, if you enjoyed this article, give it a share.
“I’m interested in how the world views parents, how it peers into our brains and finds the tenderest parts to exploit and profit from. That process doesn’t just rob us of money, but of joy.” This really resonates.
The desperation of a sleep deprived parent (myself include) knows no bounds. Such a great article and so true!