Burning Ones

Posts from April 30, 2009

• True or False: Cosleeping risks your infant’s life

  From April 30, 2009 @ 2:42 pm

  BBC recently published an article entitled: Bed Sharing ‘Risks Babies’ Lives.’ And I hope to debunk this article in the following post:

  The article claims that bed sharing is the cause for about half of “cot deaths.”Here are the statistics they use:

  Data from Dr Marta Cohen, pediatric pathologist at Sheffield Children’s Hospital, showed that of the 50 cases she investigated between 2004 and 2007, 31 were found to have been sharing a bed or sofa with a parent.

  Dr Chris Wright, consultant perinatal pathologist at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle, examined 15 cases of unexpected death in infants between 2008 and 2009 – seven were found in the parental bed and two had died on a sofa.

  In the London area between 2005 and 2008, 173 babies died suddenly and unexpectedly. And 85 of these infants were found dead after falling asleep in bed with an adult or on a sofa.

  First, the reason I’m going to discard the first and third statistic is because it uses the word OR. You could say (and still be grammatically correct) that 31 infants died having been found sharing a bed or sofa with parent if 30 of those deaths happened on a sofa. It’s bad logic.

  Secondly, there needs to be more information about these statistics. We don’t know the education level of these individuals, if they live in a poorer neighborhood, etc. Would you trust a study done on the schools systems in Philadelphia if they only conducted research in the city’s ghettos? I think not.

  Thirdly, how many parents in the UK cosleep? What if the number of cosleeping families was 50% in the UK? Then the fact that about half of these babies were found to be dead would say to me that WHERE they died doesn’t have anything to do with it; because doesn’t that make sense? Half of them were in beds (OR on a sofa), and half of them were in a separate cot.

  This article also makes it extremely poignant that if you smoke, or have been drinking or are “very tired” the chances of an infant death are much greater. That should be obvious but it still happens. I really want a study done where they track the amount of infant deaths when the parents were not drunk, not on drugs, not smoking, and not on a sofa. It pains me to see that healthy co-sleeping families, who are trying to do the best for their child by co-sleeping are grouped in with possibly negligent parents.

  Let me tell you why it is safter to sleep with your babe:

  • A mother’s body knows how to regulate the rate at which her baby breaths even while she sleeps. If something happens to the child that causes the breathing to change, the mom will wake. This is proven.
  • The infant is held throughout the night. It’s common knowledge that infants (as in days and weeks old) should be held. I’m not going to go into the studies. If they should be held throughout the day, then they should be held throughout the night. It doesn’t make sense to hold the babe half of a 24 hour day (or even less with naps) if you think that fresh babies should be held. Transitioning from the womb is very difficult and sleeping with your child eases the transition since they have some constant variables that were present in the womb: mom’s breathing and mom’s heart rate (and maybe even dad’s snoring). Thus the child’s body can focus on growing and developing and doesn’t have to be sent into a state of emergency.
  • It further strengthens the bond between parents and child. This is done through touch. The more you are with your baby the stronger the bond is. This is how mothers know what their child’s cry means, or what they’re going to do before anyone else does. The sooner this happens the better the child thrives.
  It’d be near impossible to conduct a study on this but how many infant’s lives’ were saved by co-sleeping? Scenario: you’re breast feeding, which means you’re feeding every two hours, so you’re tired, very tired. The baby is across the room and it starts to have apnea (suspension of external breathing- what they think might be the cause of SIDS). How in the WORLD are you supposed to hear that? Let alone over a baby monitor in another room in the middle of the night. If baby is with mom, mom’s system is regulated to the breathing of her infant. She will wake up if there is irregularity in her baby’s breathing and will be able to either arouse her baby to get them breathing again or get immediate medical help.

  Let me say this though: some parents are very nervous about sleeping with their child and I’m not trying to condemn them.  I would just highly recommend a sleeper that sits next to the bed.

  And when co-sleeping please do the research to find out how to make it at safe as possible.

  Conclusion: this article was very biased. I feel like it’s pretty obvious that if the parent is not in a right state of mind (like due to drugs or alcohol) or is sleeping on something like a sofa, then it puts the child at risk. I think they stretched the implications of such a fact (for whateve reason) and thus put together some rough statistics in order to scare individuals.