8 ms·

Is Sleeping with Your Baby as Dangerous as Doctors Say?

49 points by jdnier 8y ago

faitswulff 8y ago
> What's more, the practice of bed-sharing is as old as our species itself. Homo sapien moms and their newborns have been sleeping together for more than 200,000 years, says anthropologist Mel Konner at Emory University. Hard to argue with the stats and reasoning in this article.
- mathgladiator 8y ago
  This is a good article that challenges what I have heard. An interesting pondering is whether or not the adoption of new bedding makes this problematic.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  I think I detect a tone of sarcasm, but just in case: For the first ~99.95% of that time range, infant mortality was very high, and then it sort of dropped like a rock. A lot of the change is attributable to breaking with tradition. I don't mention this by way of suggesting that everything traditional is dangerous, so much as to say that this is one of those spots where we should regard a simple appeal to tradition as being particularly unconvincing.
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    Infant mortality was not primarily from “SIDS”, but rather from disease and poor nutrition. Nobody is suggesting getting rid of indoor plumbing, water treatment, antibiotics, vaccines, hospitals, or large-scale agriculture.
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    >A lot of the change is attributable to breaking with tradition. Is it? I thought it was due to modern medicine. Do you have a reference?
    - bunderbunder 8y ago
      Modern medicine is a result of one of those breaks with tradition - specifically, a change in mindset from using received wisdom such as, "this is how we've always done it" to a more experimental, evidence-based approach to deciding how to do things. In the spirit of modern medicine, I'd suggest that that article was chock full of stats that should get much higher billing than a line of reasoning that's of a kind with one of the main ones that people use to promote acupuncture.
      - faitswulff 8y ago
        My line of reasoning was "it must have been within acceptable ranges of risk because otherwise the species would be extinct or doing something differently," not a pure appeal to tradition. The statistics back this up, hence my mentioning them first.
        mmt 8y ago
        I think it's a bit extreme to suggest that the standard for an acceptable range of risk is anything that doesn't cause our species to go extinct. We tend to put a greater value on human life than that, even (or especially), traditionally.
- topkai22 8y ago
  For 200000 years (or at least 10000 since the agrarian revolution) humans had to accept 1 out of 5 children would die before age 5. There is real risk here, and while we can deal with it in a smarter manner (the New Zealand example with the Moses baskets and identifying high risk babies for example), in bed sleeping significantly increases the mortality risk, even for low risk groups. The info graphic indicates the risk of in bed sleeping from 1/46000 to 1/16000. At 4M live births per year, that’s a difference of roughly 89 children dying versus 250 children dying. What’s more, those numbers are cited for SIDS, it’s not clear where a death where the cause is known (like rolling over and suffocating the baby) would count as in these studies. In short, I’m unconvinced we should be encouraging in bed cosleeping
  - war1025 8y ago
    What I got from the article was less "everyone should do this" than "people are going to do it anyway, and educating them about the various risk factors is better than an 'abstinence-only' model"
    - AstralStorm 8y ago
      That is presuming these risk factors are real and not an artefact of a poor study design. Welcome to sociology, the home of bad research practices.
  - neuxenian 8y ago
    We looked into this quite a bit when our child was born because we grew very skeptical of much of the guidelines we were reading. Sleep in particular was difficult for our child for various reasons and at some point we realized that following certain guidelines resulted in more risk than violating them (e.g., it became an issue of following guidelines and neither us or our child sleeping or violating guidelines prudently and getting sleep). We did not cosleep with our child. But in the process of reviewing many sleep guidelines we reviewed the literature and found it's more complicated than it seems. The NPR article doesn't summarize the complexity as well as it could. The problem is that studies of risk of cosleeping generally do not control for confounding variables very well at all, and when you do control for these confounds, the risk of cosleeping disappear. For example, in the US many cosleeping parents tend to be minority, immigrant, lower SES, etc. which is associated with other risk factors. When you control for those trends, cosleeping isn't associated with increased risk. This has lead to many sleep scientists to conclude that cosleeping research has largely been sociodemographically (e.g., ethnically) biased in design and analysis. There's a big rift between sleep scientists and pediatrics in this regard. The NPR piece proceeds along the lines of "humans have been doing this for 200000 years so it must be fine" but it's more like "people who can afford separate beds for their children tend to have a lot of money, globally speaking, and that's associated with decreased risk of infant death for a multitude of reasons having nothing to do with cosleeping."
- duxup 8y ago
  Yeah well the vast majority of all those folks from the past 200,000 years are DEAD!
jacobolus 8y ago
The strictures against bed sharing are crazy, IMO. For the first year, my wife and infant son could both be completely asleep while he was eating (I was the only person kept awake by the activity). I hear stories from new parents about how they can’t get any sleep because their crib-bound baby keeps fussing and waking them up many times a night.... sounds like a nightmare.
- veb 8y ago
  Same here. My son was born perfectly healthy etc. We tried the whole crib next to the bed. Didn't work very well, so we co-slept. They both got a full 8 hours sleep a night together. It was great. I've never ever slept so still in my life. (tho, he was on his mums side.) When we transitioned him from sleeping with Mum to his own crib, it went perfectly. We just moved him one night and that was it. Our doctor was very supportive. Told us never to use drugs/alcohol and co-sleep. To be very careful and so on (basically echoing the article) - and it worked out for us. I guess if he was born premature or something, they'd probably say "don't do it".
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  My parents number among those. I wouldn't sleep - at all - if I wasn't being rocked. So they'd take turns; half the night mom would rock me, half the night dad would rock me. I don't know if they tried co-sleeping. They probably tried everything.
  - p1esk 8y ago
    One thing they most likely had not tried is called “sleep training”.
    - pavel_lishin 8y ago
      "Thank you" for your conjecture.
      - p1esk 8y ago
        Google it, you'll be surprised.
iambateman 8y ago
I have two responses to this article: (1) My ancestors participated in a multitude of activities which I find misguided or dangerous. It is a logical fallacy to say: “a practice happened for a long time, therefore it’s positive.” (2) If you drink or smoke (??) your odds jump from 1:16,000 to 1:150????? We need a better explanation of that jump. A LOT of people smoke or drink. This headline is dangerous by giving the impression that these studies were wrong. They weren’t wrong, it just might be an overstated risk for some demographics. They give an analogy of dying in a car accident. I face less risk of dying in a car accident than some people for good reasons: I work from home, don’t drink much, good income, etc. But I still wear a seatbelt! It doesn’t make sense for me to say that my instincts tell me not to wear a seatbelt and my demographics check out so it’s no big deal. In short, come on NPR. This is shoddy and dangerous journalism, even if the premise ends up being validated.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  Substantial drinking makes people sleep much more deeply, similar to severe sleep deprivation. (Someone who just pulled 2 all-nighters in a row should also probably not co-sleep with an infant.) For example, people who fall asleep with their arm draped over the back of a chair, and remain asleep even though their nerve is pinched, can end up with severe damage to the radial nerve, in some cases requiring months for the nerve to heal. This gets the name “saturday night palsy” because of the association with alcohol use: the pain would ordinarily cause a sober and well rested person to wake up and shift around. Basically, someone who is substantially drunk has a much higher chance of rolling over and crushing the infant without waking up. We’re talking about getting very drunk here though, not sipping a glass of wine with dinner.
  - pavel_lishin 8y ago
    > (Someone who just pulled 2 all-nighters in a row should also probably not co-sleep with an infant.) Which is a cruel irony, given some infants' sleep habits - or lack thereof.
  - joshschreuder 8y ago
    That is quite intuitive. What is the explanation for smokers though? As far as I’m aware there is no or limited impact on sleep for smokers, at least not in making sleep more deep (otherwise I suspect we may see more smokers!)
graeme 8y ago
I'm a restless sleeper. I tend to turn around a lot, and move the covers. Would I be right in thinking this may make me as risky (or more) as a smoker or a drinker? I'm assuming the risk is that those groups are more likely to toss and turn.
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  My understanding is that the risk is that they're more insensate to the world while asleep, and may not notice that they've rolled onto their child.
  - graeme 8y ago
    Oh I see. The risk isn't crushing the baby, the risk is being on top of it long enough to suffocate.
    - pavel_lishin 8y ago
      There is also the additional risk of your child getting trapped between the bed and the wall, or getting wrapped up in blankets, pillows, etc.
- Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
  Doesn't smoking & drinking also correlate to obesity?
kapauldo 8y ago
Yes, yes it is.
git_rancher 8y ago
The constant skin to skin contact between baby and mom from cosleeping and breastfeeding is believed by some psychologists to contribute to baby's healthy psychological development. Humans are highly social animals. I'm amazed and sad it's common practice to isolate babies for such a large portion of the day. We coslept with our first and are now doing it with our 2nd who is still a newborn. We're 3 weeks in and are already close to getting enough sleep each night.
- garmaine 8y ago
  Another cosleeper here. Besides the benefit to the child, it was also amazing to get a full night’s sleep. When the baby was hungry my wife just had to roll over and help it latch on, then go right back to sleep while feeding. That might not be “sleeping through the night”, technically, but it was just as good from our perspective.
- war1025 8y ago
  We have a 2 year old and 6 month old twins. Been co-sleeping since our oldest was 3 or 4 months old. We tried doing the separate room thing with the twins and it was just a nightmare of sleepless nights. Moved them into our bed after Christmas and things got much better. So much easier to just roll over half-awake to calm a baby down. Also ditto on the oddness of wanting to isolate babies in a different room when everyone is sleeping. One of the things I look forward to most is getting to sleep next to my kids every night, even if I'm busy during the day and don't get to spend as much time with them as I'd like to.
  - shaklee3 8y ago
    That's very weird. Thanks for sharing. Also, you absolutely cannot lump cosleeping with a toddler in with cosleeping in with cosleeping with a baby. The baby people do it because they want to avoid waking up and walking into another room to feed many times per night. With a toddler, there is no good reason.
    - veidr 8y ago
la6470 8y ago
Almost in all culture babies sleep with moms. Why only is USA scared of SIDS? This culture only alienates people and still we wonder why people are killing people?
mattnewport 8y ago
> Over the past few decades, the U.K. has also seen a large drop in SIDS. Since 2003, total SIDS deaths has fallen by 40 percent, from about 350 deaths per year to about 200 deaths per year, the nonprofit Lullaby Trust reports. At the same time, the SIDS rate in U.S. has nearly plateaued at about 90 deaths per 100,000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. If this paragraph is accurate, why is the incidence around 200 times lower in the UK?
- jahewson 8y ago
  > 350 deaths per year to about 200 deaths per year It's correct but their numbers are presented in a confusing manner. The UK figure is total deaths for the whole country, but the US figure is given per 100,000. There were 774,835 live births in the UK in 2016. So that's 350/774835*100000 = 45 per 100,000 vs. 90 per 100,000 in the US. So 50% lower.
  - mattnewport 8y ago
    Ah, that makes sense, I didn't realize the per 100,000 was per 100,000 live births. Thanks.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  Less immigrants? Drop in drug use perhaps? Some other extraneous factor got fixed? (Say crib and pillow materials.)
loteck 8y ago
There's a lot of different approaches to raising children. That's ok and people should feel good making their own choices. Chances are, it will turn out fine. The only way to have an objective, public conversation about infant sleeping is: what solution presents the least risk to the infants' lives in aggregate? Straying from that approach should be a decision taken only once the parents are fully informed about the risk to the life of the infant.
- git_rancher 8y ago
  Strictly focusing on minimizing risk to life imo leads to practices that neglect quality of life. Imagine if keeping your baby isolated at night meant that later in her life she would have trouble trusting the world and would as a result be handicapped when it comes to making and keeping healthy relationships. That's what some folks believe will happen.
ramblerman 8y ago
One thing I don't see mentioned here is weight. Statistically people have gotten a lot heavier, and I wonder if being significantly overweight does not increase the risk either?
- stevekemp 8y ago
  Very much so. I've seen sporadic news-reports of people suffocating their babies, by rolling over on top of them. The mirror claims 133/year, in this piece, but I'd imagine true stats are harder to find: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/133-babies-accidentally-dying-every-11929780 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/133-babies-accidentall...
- sundvor 8y ago
  Study cited European ancestry. Americans would appear to be of a different breed, generally speaking. http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/two-maps-and-one-graph-comparing-obesity-in-america-and-europe http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/two-maps-and-one-graph-comp...
- bjoli 8y ago
  I was told that the biggest risk factors were alcohol, some kinds of medication and obesity when we got our first child. The official recommendation is to have the baby in their own bed. The way it was presented was that we should try with a separate bed and if it didn't work use a baby nest with removable sides for breast feeding.
_Codemonkeyism 8y ago
"According to Mitchell's data, bed-sharing raises her baby's risk of SIDS from about 1 in 46,000 to 1 in 16,400, or an increase of .004 percentage points." ?
- jaycroft 8y ago
  (1/16400) - (1/46000) ~= 0.00004076, or about 0.004 percentage points. Reasonable on the face - so, are you instead arguing that percentage points are misleading? I would say that they are an appropriate measure when evaluating risky alternatives. If you said, "it's three times more likely to kill by SIDS", that doesn't help if you also have a similar long tail stat such as "but it's also 10 times less likely to die of cancer due to cosmic radiation due to shielding by the mother's body!" Cool, but your baby doesn't actually have a 3x better chance of survival from the combination of the two effects. The thing that matters is death rates, and death rates are measured in percentage points, not ratios of percentages. Only with rates can we tell if we're going after low hanging fruit or making micro-optimisations that don't actually matter.
- Zhenya 8y ago
  1 ÷ 46000 = 0.0000217391304348 1 ÷ 16400 = 0.0000609756097561 0.0000217391304348 – 0.0000609756097561 = -0.0000392364793213 -0.0000392364793213 x 100 = -0.00392364793213 .004 Percent
moneytide1 8y ago
I'm no parent, but the act of separation during those early weeks of ones life may be necessary to prepare the person to be self-sufficient one day.
- feydaykyn 8y ago
  You should read some modern psychology book because this reasoning is false, especially for an infant. In French there's an amazing book by Catherine Gueguen, "pour une enfance heureuse" (For a happy childhood), it builds on the latest researches to offer guidelines. Its scientific take helped me overcome such unfounded traditional thinking as the one expressed. Sadly, I couldn' t find it in English, but there will be others.
- spraak 8y ago
  It's completely premature preparation and many believe leads actually a much less independent person later, and on the extreme someone with severe anxieties. Imagine asking a toddler to cross the street by themself, do you just risk them getting hit by a car just so they know not to? No, more sensibly you'd be there with them to guide them until they're truly ready to do it alone.
szemet 8y ago
We've used sidecar crib* for both our children. (first 8 months for the first child, and then 1.5 years for the second- /our first child was a better sleeper/). And we've found it to be a very good compromise. Both children have slept mostly in their crib, but occasionally if they needed, could spend some time between us. My wife liked that she did not have to wake up for breastfeeding... * https://www.google.com/search?q=sidecar+crib&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=sidecar+crib&tbm=isch
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
> "Any women who kept an infant less than 1 year old in her bed ... is ipso facto excommunicated," the church declared in Milan in 1576. I can find no source confirming this. Ipso facto means "automatically", so this can't be done by a bishop, but only declared as canonical law by either a Council or a pope. No trace of a Council in Milan in 1576 - the previous one was in Trent. So this would have to be Gregory XIII visiting Milan for some reason. I'm curious to find out who really did it and why. And whether it was actually the church (i.e. the pope/council) or just a local bishop.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  OK, so it looks like there actually was a Fourth Provincial Council held in Milan in 1576. Eleven bishops were present: https://archive.org/details/amanualofcouncil01landuoft https://archive.org/details/amanualofcouncil01landuoft - although I'm not sure how binding the decisions of this Council are (if you live in Rome, are you excommunicated, too?). The references lead to Richard Trexler's article "Infanticide in Florence" in Dependence in Context in Renaissance Florence which is out of print.

49 points by jdnier 8y ago

> What's more, the practice of bed-sharing is as old as our species itself. Homo sapien moms and their newborns have been sleeping together for more than 200,000 years, says anthropologist Mel Konner at Emory University. Hard to argue with the stats and reasoning in this article.

mathgladiator 8y ago
This is a good article that challenges what I have heard. An interesting pondering is whether or not the adoption of new bedding makes this problematic.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
bunderbunder 8y ago
I think I detect a tone of sarcasm, but just in case: For the first ~99.95% of that time range, infant mortality was very high, and then it sort of dropped like a rock. A lot of the change is attributable to breaking with tradition. I don't mention this by way of suggesting that everything traditional is dangerous, so much as to say that this is one of those spots where we should regard a simple appeal to tradition as being particularly unconvincing.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  Infant mortality was not primarily from “SIDS”, but rather from disease and poor nutrition. Nobody is suggesting getting rid of indoor plumbing, water treatment, antibiotics, vaccines, hospitals, or large-scale agriculture.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  >A lot of the change is attributable to breaking with tradition. Is it? I thought it was due to modern medicine. Do you have a reference?
  - bunderbunder 8y ago
    Modern medicine is a result of one of those breaks with tradition - specifically, a change in mindset from using received wisdom such as, "this is how we've always done it" to a more experimental, evidence-based approach to deciding how to do things. In the spirit of modern medicine, I'd suggest that that article was chock full of stats that should get much higher billing than a line of reasoning that's of a kind with one of the main ones that people use to promote acupuncture.
    - faitswulff 8y ago
      My line of reasoning was "it must have been within acceptable ranges of risk because otherwise the species would be extinct or doing something differently," not a pure appeal to tradition. The statistics back this up, hence my mentioning them first.
      - mmt 8y ago
        I think it's a bit extreme to suggest that the standard for an acceptable range of risk is anything that doesn't cause our species to go extinct. We tend to put a greater value on human life than that, even (or especially), traditionally.
topkai22 8y ago
For 200000 years (or at least 10000 since the agrarian revolution) humans had to accept 1 out of 5 children would die before age 5. There is real risk here, and while we can deal with it in a smarter manner (the New Zealand example with the Moses baskets and identifying high risk babies for example), in bed sleeping significantly increases the mortality risk, even for low risk groups. The info graphic indicates the risk of in bed sleeping from 1/46000 to 1/16000. At 4M live births per year, that’s a difference of roughly 89 children dying versus 250 children dying. What’s more, those numbers are cited for SIDS, it’s not clear where a death where the cause is known (like rolling over and suffocating the baby) would count as in these studies. In short, I’m unconvinced we should be encouraging in bed cosleeping
- war1025 8y ago
  What I got from the article was less "everyone should do this" than "people are going to do it anyway, and educating them about the various risk factors is better than an 'abstinence-only' model"
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    That is presuming these risk factors are real and not an artefact of a poor study design. Welcome to sociology, the home of bad research practices.
- neuxenian 8y ago
  We looked into this quite a bit when our child was born because we grew very skeptical of much of the guidelines we were reading. Sleep in particular was difficult for our child for various reasons and at some point we realized that following certain guidelines resulted in more risk than violating them (e.g., it became an issue of following guidelines and neither us or our child sleeping or violating guidelines prudently and getting sleep). We did not cosleep with our child. But in the process of reviewing many sleep guidelines we reviewed the literature and found it's more complicated than it seems. The NPR article doesn't summarize the complexity as well as it could. The problem is that studies of risk of cosleeping generally do not control for confounding variables very well at all, and when you do control for these confounds, the risk of cosleeping disappear. For example, in the US many cosleeping parents tend to be minority, immigrant, lower SES, etc. which is associated with other risk factors. When you control for those trends, cosleeping isn't associated with increased risk. This has lead to many sleep scientists to conclude that cosleeping research has largely been sociodemographically (e.g., ethnically) biased in design and analysis. There's a big rift between sleep scientists and pediatrics in this regard. The NPR piece proceeds along the lines of "humans have been doing this for 200000 years so it must be fine" but it's more like "people who can afford separate beds for their children tend to have a lot of money, globally speaking, and that's associated with decreased risk of infant death for a multitude of reasons having nothing to do with cosleeping."
duxup 8y ago
Yeah well the vast majority of all those folks from the past 200,000 years are DEAD!

jacobolus 8y ago

The strictures against bed sharing are crazy, IMO. For the first year, my wife and infant son could both be completely asleep while he was eating (I was the only person kept awake by the activity). I hear stories from new parents about how they can’t get any sleep because their crib-bound baby keeps fussing and waking them up many times a night.... sounds like a nightmare.

veb 8y ago
Same here. My son was born perfectly healthy etc. We tried the whole crib next to the bed. Didn't work very well, so we co-slept. They both got a full 8 hours sleep a night together. It was great. I've never ever slept so still in my life. (tho, he was on his mums side.) When we transitioned him from sleeping with Mum to his own crib, it went perfectly. We just moved him one night and that was it. Our doctor was very supportive. Told us never to use drugs/alcohol and co-sleep. To be very careful and so on (basically echoing the article) - and it worked out for us. I guess if he was born premature or something, they'd probably say "don't do it".
pavel_lishin 8y ago
My parents number among those. I wouldn't sleep - at all - if I wasn't being rocked. So they'd take turns; half the night mom would rock me, half the night dad would rock me. I don't know if they tried co-sleeping. They probably tried everything.
- p1esk 8y ago
  One thing they most likely had not tried is called “sleep training”.
  - pavel_lishin 8y ago
    "Thank you" for your conjecture.
    - p1esk 8y ago
      Google it, you'll be surprised.

iambateman 8y ago

I have two responses to this article: (1) My ancestors participated in a multitude of activities which I find misguided or dangerous. It is a logical fallacy to say: “a practice happened for a long time, therefore it’s positive.” (2) If you drink or smoke (??) your odds jump from 1:16,000 to 1:150????? We need a better explanation of that jump. A LOT of people smoke or drink. This headline is dangerous by giving the impression that these studies were wrong. They weren’t wrong, it just might be an overstated risk for some demographics. They give an analogy of dying in a car accident. I face less risk of dying in a car accident than some people for good reasons: I work from home, don’t drink much, good income, etc. But I still wear a seatbelt! It doesn’t make sense for me to say that my instincts tell me not to wear a seatbelt and my demographics check out so it’s no big deal. In short, come on NPR. This is shoddy and dangerous journalism, even if the premise ends up being validated.

jacobolus 8y ago
Substantial drinking makes people sleep much more deeply, similar to severe sleep deprivation. (Someone who just pulled 2 all-nighters in a row should also probably not co-sleep with an infant.) For example, people who fall asleep with their arm draped over the back of a chair, and remain asleep even though their nerve is pinched, can end up with severe damage to the radial nerve, in some cases requiring months for the nerve to heal. This gets the name “saturday night palsy” because of the association with alcohol use: the pain would ordinarily cause a sober and well rested person to wake up and shift around. Basically, someone who is substantially drunk has a much higher chance of rolling over and crushing the infant without waking up. We’re talking about getting very drunk here though, not sipping a glass of wine with dinner.
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  > (Someone who just pulled 2 all-nighters in a row should also probably not co-sleep with an infant.) Which is a cruel irony, given some infants' sleep habits - or lack thereof.
- joshschreuder 8y ago
  That is quite intuitive. What is the explanation for smokers though? As far as I’m aware there is no or limited impact on sleep for smokers, at least not in making sleep more deep (otherwise I suspect we may see more smokers!)

graeme 8y ago

I'm a restless sleeper. I tend to turn around a lot, and move the covers. Would I be right in thinking this may make me as risky (or more) as a smoker or a drinker? I'm assuming the risk is that those groups are more likely to toss and turn.

pavel_lishin 8y ago
My understanding is that the risk is that they're more insensate to the world while asleep, and may not notice that they've rolled onto their child.
- graeme 8y ago
  Oh I see. The risk isn't crushing the baby, the risk is being on top of it long enough to suffocate.
  - pavel_lishin 8y ago
    There is also the additional risk of your child getting trapped between the bed and the wall, or getting wrapped up in blankets, pillows, etc.
Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
Doesn't smoking & drinking also correlate to obesity?

kapauldo 8y ago

Yes, yes it is.

git_rancher 8y ago

The constant skin to skin contact between baby and mom from cosleeping and breastfeeding is believed by some psychologists to contribute to baby's healthy psychological development. Humans are highly social animals. I'm amazed and sad it's common practice to isolate babies for such a large portion of the day. We coslept with our first and are now doing it with our 2nd who is still a newborn. We're 3 weeks in and are already close to getting enough sleep each night.

garmaine 8y ago
Another cosleeper here. Besides the benefit to the child, it was also amazing to get a full night’s sleep. When the baby was hungry my wife just had to roll over and help it latch on, then go right back to sleep while feeding. That might not be “sleeping through the night”, technically, but it was just as good from our perspective.
war1025 8y ago
We have a 2 year old and 6 month old twins. Been co-sleeping since our oldest was 3 or 4 months old. We tried doing the separate room thing with the twins and it was just a nightmare of sleepless nights. Moved them into our bed after Christmas and things got much better. So much easier to just roll over half-awake to calm a baby down. Also ditto on the oddness of wanting to isolate babies in a different room when everyone is sleeping. One of the things I look forward to most is getting to sleep next to my kids every night, even if I'm busy during the day and don't get to spend as much time with them as I'd like to.
- shaklee3 8y ago
  That's very weird. Thanks for sharing. Also, you absolutely cannot lump cosleeping with a toddler in with cosleeping in with cosleeping with a baby. The baby people do it because they want to avoid waking up and walking into another room to feed many times per night. With a toddler, there is no good reason.
  - veidr 8y ago

la6470 8y ago

Almost in all culture babies sleep with moms. Why only is USA scared of SIDS? This culture only alienates people and still we wonder why people are killing people?

mattnewport 8y ago

> Over the past few decades, the U.K. has also seen a large drop in SIDS. Since 2003, total SIDS deaths has fallen by 40 percent, from about 350 deaths per year to about 200 deaths per year, the nonprofit Lullaby Trust reports. At the same time, the SIDS rate in U.S. has nearly plateaued at about 90 deaths per 100,000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. If this paragraph is accurate, why is the incidence around 200 times lower in the UK?

jahewson 8y ago
> 350 deaths per year to about 200 deaths per year It's correct but their numbers are presented in a confusing manner. The UK figure is total deaths for the whole country, but the US figure is given per 100,000. There were 774,835 live births in the UK in 2016. So that's 350/774835*100000 = 45 per 100,000 vs. 90 per 100,000 in the US. So 50% lower.
- mattnewport 8y ago
  Ah, that makes sense, I didn't realize the per 100,000 was per 100,000 live births. Thanks.
AstralStorm 8y ago
Less immigrants? Drop in drug use perhaps? Some other extraneous factor got fixed? (Say crib and pillow materials.)

loteck 8y ago

There's a lot of different approaches to raising children. That's ok and people should feel good making their own choices. Chances are, it will turn out fine. The only way to have an objective, public conversation about infant sleeping is: what solution presents the least risk to the infants' lives in aggregate? Straying from that approach should be a decision taken only once the parents are fully informed about the risk to the life of the infant.

git_rancher 8y ago
Strictly focusing on minimizing risk to life imo leads to practices that neglect quality of life. Imagine if keeping your baby isolated at night meant that later in her life she would have trouble trusting the world and would as a result be handicapped when it comes to making and keeping healthy relationships. That's what some folks believe will happen.

ramblerman 8y ago

One thing I don't see mentioned here is weight. Statistically people have gotten a lot heavier, and I wonder if being significantly overweight does not increase the risk either?

stevekemp 8y ago
Very much so. I've seen sporadic news-reports of people suffocating their babies, by rolling over on top of them. The mirror claims 133/year, in this piece, but I'd imagine true stats are harder to find: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/133-babies-accidentally-dying-every-11929780 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/133-babies-accidentall...
sundvor 8y ago
Study cited European ancestry. Americans would appear to be of a different breed, generally speaking. http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/two-maps-and-one-graph-comparing-obesity-in-america-and-europe http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/two-maps-and-one-graph-comp...
bjoli 8y ago
I was told that the biggest risk factors were alcohol, some kinds of medication and obesity when we got our first child. The official recommendation is to have the baby in their own bed. The way it was presented was that we should try with a separate bed and if it didn't work use a baby nest with removable sides for breast feeding.

_Codemonkeyism 8y ago

"According to Mitchell's data, bed-sharing raises her baby's risk of SIDS from about 1 in 46,000 to 1 in 16,400, or an increase of .004 percentage points." ?

jaycroft 8y ago
(1/16400) - (1/46000) ~= 0.00004076, or about 0.004 percentage points. Reasonable on the face - so, are you instead arguing that percentage points are misleading? I would say that they are an appropriate measure when evaluating risky alternatives. If you said, "it's three times more likely to kill by SIDS", that doesn't help if you also have a similar long tail stat such as "but it's also 10 times less likely to die of cancer due to cosmic radiation due to shielding by the mother's body!" Cool, but your baby doesn't actually have a 3x better chance of survival from the combination of the two effects. The thing that matters is death rates, and death rates are measured in percentage points, not ratios of percentages. Only with rates can we tell if we're going after low hanging fruit or making micro-optimisations that don't actually matter.
Zhenya 8y ago
1 ÷ 46000 = 0.0000217391304348 1 ÷ 16400 = 0.0000609756097561 0.0000217391304348 – 0.0000609756097561 = -0.0000392364793213 -0.0000392364793213 x 100 = -0.00392364793213 .004 Percent

moneytide1 8y ago

I'm no parent, but the act of separation during those early weeks of ones life may be necessary to prepare the person to be self-sufficient one day.

feydaykyn 8y ago
You should read some modern psychology book because this reasoning is false, especially for an infant. In French there's an amazing book by Catherine Gueguen, "pour une enfance heureuse" (For a happy childhood), it builds on the latest researches to offer guidelines. Its scientific take helped me overcome such unfounded traditional thinking as the one expressed. Sadly, I couldn' t find it in English, but there will be others.
spraak 8y ago
It's completely premature preparation and many believe leads actually a much less independent person later, and on the extreme someone with severe anxieties. Imagine asking a toddler to cross the street by themself, do you just risk them getting hit by a car just so they know not to? No, more sensibly you'd be there with them to guide them until they're truly ready to do it alone.

szemet 8y ago

We've used sidecar crib* for both our children. (first 8 months for the first child, and then 1.5 years for the second- /our first child was a better sleeper/). And we've found it to be a very good compromise. Both children have slept mostly in their crib, but occasionally if they needed, could spend some time between us. My wife liked that she did not have to wake up for breastfeeding... * https://www.google.com/search?q=sidecar+crib&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=sidecar+crib&tbm=isch

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago

> "Any women who kept an infant less than 1 year old in her bed ... is ipso facto excommunicated," the church declared in Milan in 1576. I can find no source confirming this. Ipso facto means "automatically", so this can't be done by a bishop, but only declared as canonical law by either a Council or a pope. No trace of a Council in Milan in 1576 - the previous one was in Trent. So this would have to be Gregory XIII visiting Milan for some reason. I'm curious to find out who really did it and why. And whether it was actually the church (i.e. the pope/council) or just a local bishop.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
OK, so it looks like there actually was a Fourth Provincial Council held in Milan in 1576. Eleven bishops were present: https://archive.org/details/amanualofcouncil01landuoft https://archive.org/details/amanualofcouncil01landuoft - although I'm not sure how binding the decisions of this Council are (if you live in Rome, are you excommunicated, too?). The references lead to Richard Trexler's article "Infanticide in Florence" in Dependence in Context in Renaissance Florence which is out of print.