Narvaez (Notre Dame): The Evolved Developmental Niche

Darcia Narvaez is a developmental psychologist at the University of Notre Dame whose work develops a framework called the "evolved developmental niche." The framework identifies the specific kinds of caregiving infants have evolved to expect across human history, including responsive caregiving to distress, breastfeeding, frequent physical contact, multiple consistent caregivers, free play, positive social support, and natural birth. Sleep training violates at least the first of these by design.

Her published work argues that extinction-based sleep training represents a failure of co-regulation, the early process by which an infant's nervous system learns to manage states of arousal by being met by a regulated adult nervous system. Co-regulation that does not happen, according to her framework, sets up adult patterns of dysregulation, anxiety, and impaired stress response. The framework is conceptual rather than experimental, but it pulls together a wide literature.