sleep sharing

Apropos of the SIDS prevention discussion below, here is a collection of responses (including mine)to the recent CPSC warning against family bedding.

And here is something I wrote about SIDS and sleep sharing in 2002:

For decades, the foremost rule of family sleep, as promulgated by mainstream American parenting experts, has been that infants and children should never be allowed to sleep with their parents. Last week, the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) even got in on the act, warning us that the practice of parents sleeping with their babies is inherently dangerous and should be avoided. After giving birth to three children in six years, I can tell you that these parenting police are way off the mark: the family bed is a sanity and sleep saver for mothers and babies.

In anthropological surveys of families around the world, researchers have repeatedly noted that American and other western parents are unique in their practice of placing infants in separate sleep spaces rather than in a co-sleeping arrangement with one or both parents. In most cultures, the idea of leaving a tiny baby alone in a bed with bars, placed in a room separate from parents is considered as unsafe
and bizarre as if we left our napping baby alone to run out to the grocery store.


"... almost all human infants for the past million or so years have
slept in contact with an adult. And even today, in most places in the
world, infants spend their first year co-sleeping," writes
anthropologist Dr. Meredith Small in her best-selling book, Our Babies,
Ourselves; How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent (Doubleday,
1998)

In their statements to the press, officials from the CPSC -- a government agency that generally reviews product safety rather than cultural practices or parenting styles -- noted that in a review of death certificates dating between 1990 and 1997, researchers found 515 instances of American infants who died of suffocation or strangulation while sleeping in some type of "adult bed." What the CPSC failed to
note, however, is that more than 2,000 infants die each year while asleep in cribs, bassinets, and cradles. In many cases, these babies expire from the tragic and still poorly understood phenomenon of SIDS. In other instances, infants are put to sleep in baby beds with unsafe, outdated design features, or they suffocate from bedding that is too soft or in which they become entangled. Yet no one from the government
has come forward to offer a sweeping conclusion that solitary sleeping is de facto unsafe for babies and should always be avoided.

Perhaps not coincidentally, our solitary-sleeping American babies have the highest rates of "crib death" in the world. Intriguing data from a National Insitutes of Health researcher indicate that SIDS rates remain low among communities of co-sleeping Asian families who immigrate to the United States, but the number of deaths rises in relation to the amount of time these families live here, possibly due to the adoption of American-style customs such as crib-sleeping and bottle-feeding for
babies. Exclusive breastfeeding -- which has now been determined to significantly lower an infant's statistical risk for SIDS, along with a host of other potentially fatal maladies - is much more common among mothers and babies who sleep together, in the United States and elsewhere. Additionally, researchers have noted that breastfeeding, co-sleeping infants tend to settle onto their backs or sides alongside
their mothers rather than ending up in the risky face-down sleep position favored by many babies left to sleep by themselves.


In its recounting of the allegedly startling number of infant deaths which took place in adult beds, the CPSC's own statistics revealed that approximately 80% of the total number actually occurred as a result of factors unrelated to the fact that the baby was sleeping with another person. In these cases, babies were placed on bedding that was too soft, leading to suffocation, or they became trapped face-down on waterbeds, or wedged between a headboard and a mattress. Clearly, unsafe, poorly designed sleeping arrangements in which this type of fatal accident is liable to occur are inappropriate for infants, whether an adult is sharing the bed with them or not. In the remaining 20% of cases -- translating to 121 deaths over a seven year period out of 4 million live births in the U.S. annually -- at least some of the
deaths were attributable not to babies' parents, but to an unspecified "caregiver" or sibling rolling on top of the babies.

Again, families who sleep with their babies should be -- and generally are -- aware that young infants should only sleep beside a parent, usually a breastfeeding mother. But the idea that these demonstrably unsafe family bed arrangements are representative of the majority of co-sleeping family situations in the U.S. is as absurd as claiming that the existence of the occasional plane crash means that we should abandon air travel altogether.

As parenting "experts" have attempted to dissuade American mothers from sleeping with their babies in the past fifty years, a variety of arguments have been made. Parents have been warned that co-sleeping would ruin their marriages, create neurotic children, and now, according to the CSPC announcement, that it is likely to literally kill their infants. Yeah right. Personally, I’d prefer for the CPSC to stick to warning us about things like exploding gas tanks and lead paint. I
have no need for them to come into my bedroom and advise me on how I choose to raise my children.