Children's sleep in different cultures

[Convergent]

So 11-month-old DD can't "self-soothe" to save her life, and I spend a lot of time feeding/cuddling her to sleep. I feel like friends/relatives are constantly judging me for failing to teach her to get to sleep on her own, and I always feel like telling them that their method (put child down in darkened room on their own, close the door, and let them cry) is a mere blip in the history of humankind. However, I have no idea whether that's really true or whether I've just been brainwashed by Californian parenting gurus into thinking it is .

Has anyone got any first hand experience / good evidence of how people currently get their children to sleep in different cultures? I know lots of people all sleep together in the same room, or cosleep at least while their children are young, but there must also be lots of people who do things differently. Please share your cross-cultural experiences!

Only other culture I have any experience of is in Albania where it seems babies are swaddled to a rocker and rocked like crazy...

For what it's worth I don't and won't leave my babies to cry but they do go in their own comfy beds, in their nice bedrooms, with full bellies, clean nappy and then lights out! DD sleeps like a dream.. Baby boy not so much yet.

Co-sleeping isn't the only loving option but do what works best for you and ignore comments!

Sorry, no first hand experience of a radically different culture.

We co slept with all of ours, and were very happy with how it worked for us.

When mine were babies, I just found myself watching my cat with her kittens and repeatedly thinking that ALL mammals (except modern Western humans) sleep with their newborns. It felt instinctively right to me, (perhaps based on my cross-species experience).

DD never learnt to self soothe either - and I felt immense pressure to get her to do so - but just couldn't do it. So I read alot about different cultures sleeping to reassure myself - there's a lovely book called 'how do Eskimos keep their babies warm' it talks about different sleep habits - and in Buenos aires kids stay up all hours especially if there's a fiesta going on! In Asia baby doesn't tend to leave mothers side for at least a year. But they do use different techniques like acupressure to help baby fall quickly into a deep soporific sleep - here's my blog post on it if you're interested - mydaughterwontsleep.com/2013/12/27/the-sleep-inducing-power-of-acupressure/