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In 1955 Margaret S. Mahler introduced a panel on sleep disturbances in children with the statement "that research in child development and child analysis, just as in physiology, affords little knowledge of the normal patterns of the sleep cycle or of its individual variations at various ages. She emphasized that except for pavor nocturnus and sleep phobias we do not know … whether we are dealing with disturbances of sleep or variations of the sleep pattern" (see Friend, 1956, pp. 514-515).
Although the amount of research on sleep has vastly increased since this statement was made, the study of the sleep patterns of infants has remained a comparatively neglected field. As a consequence we still know relatively little about the sleep disturbances of children, especially in the first year of life.