Selling Sleep: A Qualitative Study of Infant Sleep Coaching in Western Canada

Abstract

This article theorizes the experience of using a coach to assist with a baby or young child’s sleep “training” as occurring at the intersection of three broader phenomena: the increasing use of paid experts to advise on intimate life; the porosity of the domestic sphere; and ideologies of mothering that impact sleep. It draws on the vernacular of a growing critical literature on children’s sleep, which understands its practice and representation as symptomatic of culturally and historically specific demands on the organization of space and time, as well as understandings of the child as a site of future potential and human capital. To do so, it draws on a qualitative study of sleep coaches and the mothers who hire them. The authors conducted semi-structured, open-ended interviews with thirty women in Western Canada. The interview data revealed that the sleep deprivation entailed in having a new baby is both a dramatic (and often under-estimated) feature of human facticity and a socially mediated crisis. Paradoxically, the overabundance of expert advice on children’s sleep made mothers more likely to recruit a coach for customized support. The advice coaches provided, and how mothers interpreted it, balanced the pragmatic and the ideological, among other things, revealing poorly evidenced but pervasive anxieties about attachment, independence, mental health, and future well-being.