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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, an

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."

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."