Co-Sleeping

I posted this quick little dittie on my facebook page today and felt compared to cross post it here as well.  Enjoy.

So Debbie asked:  “What exactly do you tell your families about co-sleeping”

I tell my families a lot of things.  Elizabeth Johnston and I once wrote an editorial on the topic (“On Co-sleeping”, JOGNN 2008).  In that piece we point out that 75% of North American mothers sleep with their babies and lie to their pediatricians about it (about 10% more don’t bother to lie).  That means that more babies sleep with their parents than the “sleep alone” crowd will admit to and that more babies die alone in cribs every year than die sleeping wrapped in the loving arms of their mother, despite the fact that fewer sleep alone in cribs.

  I tell them that there are four rules to safe sleeping, and they are the rules of James McKenna:

1)      Only Mommy and Daddy sleep with babies.  No aunts, uncles, brothers or sisters.

2)      No one sleeps with baby if they have drugs or alcohol on board, and I’m not a big fan of smoking either, as that also significantly increases the risk that your baby will die in his sleep.

3)      No one in the bed can weight more than 300 lbs.

4)      Only sleep on a firm, flat, familiar sleep surface.  Not on a couch, a recliner, a waterbed, a hospital bed, etc…

I add one more, and that is breastfeed.  Over and over again we see that formula feeding increases the risk of infant death and yet that is nowhere in the AAP safe sleep guidelines (or at least it wasn’t until very recently).

I point out that in the last two versions of the AAP policy on the Use of Human Milk, in which they recommend “Baby should sleep ‘in close proximity’ to the mother”, they studies that they use to point to that major change in parenting styles is based on CO-SLEEPING studies.  It isn’t based on research where mothers put a crib in their bedrooms at night, no.  The studies were using bed sharing and side car sleepers vs. separate sleep surfaces.  So they admit that bed sharing is the better option, but they refuse to accept that their theories are wrong and insist that babies sleep alone.  They use co-sleeping studies to suggest that it is better and safer and then tell you not to co-sleep with your infant.  If we want to save lives, we have to admit that our theories may not be correct and our core beliefs may be flawed.  If we haven’t the courage to explore our sacred cows, we won’t ever be able to advance.