Shunning the Family Bed. Who Benefits Most?
According to Dr. Jay Gordon, babies sleeping on a safe surface with sober, nonsmoking parents respond to their parents, and the parents respond to them. The chance of SIDS occurring in this situation are close to zero. Babies in a crib or in a room away from their parents, on the other hand, will breastfeed less and are at greater risk of infections, including life-threatening ones. The medical profession, as it often does, is approaching the entire idea of the family bed backward. A baby in the same bed with his or her parents is surrounded by the best possible surveillance and safety system. It must be the responsibility of the manufacturers and proponents of cribs and separated sleep to prove that such disruption is safe, not the other way around. Newborn babies breathe in irregular rhythms and even stop breathing for a few seconds at a time. To put it simply, they are not designed to sleep alone. Dr. Mercola's Comments: Back in 2002, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and the Juvenile Product Manufacturers Association (JPMA, the crib manufacturers' lobby) launched a campaign to discourage parents from sleeping with their infants. They also warned about allowing babies to sleep alone in adult beds. Both warnings were based on data that, presumably, showed infants had a small risk of dying in adult beds. The Dangers Infants Face When Sleeping in an Adult Bed For example, an article in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine stated that, based on records from the CPSC dating from January 1990 to December 1997, there were a total of 515 deaths of children younger than 2 years who were placed to sleep on adult beds. Of those, 121 were caused by a parent or sibling lying on top of the child, and 394 were due to entrapment in the bed structure, causing suffocation or strangulation. In conclusion, the authors stated: “Placing children younger than 2 years to sleep in adult beds exposes them to potentially fatal hazards that are generally not recognized by the parent or caregiver. These hazards include overlying by a parent, sibling, or other adult sharing the bed; entrapment or wedging of the child between the mattress and another object; head entrapment in bed railings; and suffocation on waterbeds.” However, the recommendation to avoid co-sleeping with your infant has been heavily criticized by many child health experts who believe bedsharing is the healthiest alternative. And some who have taken the time to review the data further have come to an entirely different conclusion than the CPSC, raising the question whether perhaps this recommendation was more about benefitting the juvenile products industry than promoting the safest sleeping habits. Statistics Show Co-Sleeping is Likely Twice as Safe as Sleeping in a Crib! In an article for Mothering magazine, Tina Kimmel dissected the statistics from an 18 year period (1980-1997), showing how co-sleeping with your infant may actually be twice as safe as letting them sleep alone in a crib. Interestingly, the CPSC never actually presented the relative risk of each sleeping scenario, which may lead parents to think that letting their child sleep alongside them is the more dangerous alternative. However, when the relative risk of each is assessed by dividing the measure of danger for each situation by the prevalence of that situation, and then comparing them, it turns out that infants are more than twice as safe in adult beds as in cribs. In fact, using the CPSC’s own data for measuring the danger of each situation, and data from the CDC's Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) to ascertain the prevalence or frequency of each sleeping scenario, Kimmel found that crib sleeping had a relative risk of 2.37, compared with sleeping in an adult bed. Clearly, looking at the relative risk of each situation makes more sense than basing your decision on an arbitrary assumption that bedsharing is dangerous. Especially since it’s not necessarily true. Bedsharing May Be a Safer Option for Breastfed Infants Interestingly, in one British study, breastfeeding mothers who shared their bed with their infants were found to sleep in a characteristic manner that promotes safety for the child, whereas mothers who bottle-fed their babies did not. The researchers explained: “The mother spontaneously adopted a distinctive lateral position facing the infant, with her knees drawn up under the infant's feet and her upper arm positioned above the infant's head. This position facilitates the baby's easy access to mother's breasts, and babies orient themselves towards their mother's breasts for most of the night. It also provides several safety benefits: the baby is flat on the mattress, away from pillows the baby is constrained by the mother's knees and arm so that it can't move up or down the bed the mother controls the height of bed covers over the baby it is very difficult for the baby to b
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