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Safe Co-sleeping
by Jennifer Newton Reents
The clothes are folded, the diaper stacker is stocked and the bassinet is
put together, waiting to hold your peacefully sleeping baby.
But some parents-to-be never buy a bassinet or a crib, planning to co-sleep,
or share sleep, with their babies in their own bed. For them, it is a choice
made ahead of time. For many others, they often discover once they get their
little one home from the hospital, he or she won't sleep anywhere but with
Mom and Dad. Learn how you can co-sleep safely with your infant.
Be alert
Regardless if you plan to sleep with your infant or it just happens to work
once you get him or her home, there are some rules to make co-sleeping safe
for your baby.
"The most important safety factor to keep in mind while bedsharing is to be
alert to what could endanger the baby, and when you enter a bed, and when
asleep, keep in your mind the thought 'baby in bed,' just like that little
expression on bumpers of cars, 'baby on board,' says James McKenna, director
of the University of Notre Dame's Mother and Baby Behavioral Sleep
Laboratory, and renowned expert on co-sleeping.
The concept of co-sleeping, which families have been practicing for
centuries, came under fire by the Consumer Product Safety Commission in
1999. The CPSC published a report claiming that placing babies to sleep in
adult beds put them at risk for suffocation and strangulation and said an
average of 64 babies under age two died because they were placed to sleep in
adult beds.
The CPSC reviewed death certificates from 1990 to 1997 and found 515 deaths
of children younger than two years occurred after they were placed to sleep
on adult beds. Of those deaths, 121 were reported to be due to a parent,
caregiver or sibling rolling on top of or against the baby while sleeping,
the report states. The 394 other deaths were attributed to suffocation or
strangulation caused by entrapment of the child's head in various structures
of the bed, according to the report, such as between the mattress and the
wall, bed frame, headboard and other structures. More than 75 percent of the
deaths were to infants younger than three months.
However, proponents of shared sleep, including the well-known Dr William
Sears, author of numerous books on parenting, and McKenna refute the CPSC's
findings.
While Sears says in a column he published on www.askdrsears.com about
the CPSC report that the report actually brings an awareness to parents and
acts as a reminder for parents to co-sleep safely, he says it also created
an unnecessary fear in millions of parents who safely and responsively sleep
with their babies.
Mothers and babies designed to sleep together
Sears says co-sleeping alone is not inherently dangerous and that in fact
many more infants die when sleeping alone in a crib than when sleeping in
their parents' bed.
McKenna says while no infant sleep environment is risk free, what is known
to be true scientifically is that for nocturnal infant breastfeeding and
nurturing throughout the night both mothers and babies were designed
biologically and psychologically to sleep next to one another.
"In the worldwide ethnographic record, mothers accidentally suffocating
their babies during the night is virtually unheard of, except among western
industrialized nations, but here there are in the overwhelming number of
cases, explanations of the deaths that require reference to dangerous
circumstances and not to the act itself," he says.
A study by McKenna on co-sleeping revealed that babies who sleep alone are
at a significantly increased risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). He
also found that mothers and babies who slept together are extremely attuned
to one another even while asleep and infants learn safe sleep habits, such
as moving through various sleep-states and breathing patterns when sharing
sleep.
Read more on the next page!
Links, information and more for you
 Safe Sleep for Your Baby
Crying Baby, Sleepless Nights
What is Attachment Parenting?
Directory of family articles
Directory of all articles
About the author: Jennifer Newton Reents is a work-at-home freelance writer
and editor for GeoParent. She lives in Kansas with her husband and young
son.
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