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> 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 200,00

> 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!

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!