Sleeping With Baby

12/12/06

The NYT writes ('For Getting Baby to Sleep, Sticking to a Plan is What Counts,' December 12, 2006) that a team of researchers examining various methods for getting babies and children to fall asleep on their own 'could find no scientific studies' on co-sleeping. This is not the case.

Fortunately, several studies have addressed the risks and benefit of bedsharing and other arrangements in which mothers (or other caregivers) sleep with babies. In Japan, for example, SIDS decreased as co-sleeping increased. Clear benefits of sleeping with your baby include enhanced breastfeeding, longer and better sleep for mother and baby, and reduced infant stress, as measured by crying and limb movement. These are among the reasons I sleep with Julian, who was born October 24, 2006. (I also enjoy his company.)

Several well-established conditions, however, make bedsharing risky: maternal smoking during pregnancy; obesity; maternal impairment due to drugs or alcohol; and excessively soft bedding and pillows. All are preventable.

For parents and researchers alike, I highly recommend the review of relevant studies in the co-sleeping reprint from Mothering Magazine.

The Simian Way

Anna McPherson Parr added this on December 12, 2006:

As devoted co-sleeping parents of two, we take great interest in the Great Ape approach to holding and sleeping with infants - that is, Mom or Dad lying on back or propped up on pillows, with baby tummy-down on parent's chest. It is what the gorillas do and it seems obvious to us that there is an amazing respiratory synergy at work between parent and baby during sleep. Putting a baby tummy-down on an unliving and unrespiring surface makes zero sense once you've done it The Simian Way. (Putting babies back-down in cribs doesn't make much sense to us either.)