Pandora II
Ideal_Rock
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2006
- Messages
- 9,613
Exactly. Research was done in the UK on this and the results were than co-sleeping is no more dangerous than putting a baby in a cot when you take out the contra-indications and when the mother is also breastfeeding, it was safer because of the way in which a breastfeeding mother sleeps - facing towards child, arm above head prevent child moving up the bed etc - which is very different from the position a bottle feeding mother will use.Date: 10/21/2009 10:54:30 AM
Author: kennedy
My understanding is that the co-sleeping statistics you're referring to don't take into account HOW the parents were sharing their bed. That means that parents who were drunk, on drugs, obese, sleeping on an unsafe surface like a couch or chair are all included in the statistics, thus making it look like co-sleeping is dangerous. I would be much more interested in statistics that separate out parents who consciously and safely choose to co-sleep from those who co-sleep irresponsibly. The AAP guidelines on co-sleeping are tantamount to throwing out the baby with the bath water -- rather than educating parents on safe ways to share their bed, they come out with a single uniform message that all co-sleeping is all bad. As Pandora points out, there is some compelling research to suggest that safe co-sleeping actually reduces the risk of SIDS. Dr James Mckenna, who has been leading federally funded research on sleep and SIDS at the University of Notre Dame for 25 years, says that societies with the highest incidence of co-sleeping actually have the lowest rate of SIDS.
I also wanted to add that 4 months old seems awfully young to cut off an infant from all night feedings. It seems like a bit of a leap to say that nursing a very young baby at night will teach him/her to use food as comfort later in life. Has anyone done any research on this? Seems to me breastfeeding and comfort go hand in hand -- just watch a distraught baby begin to nurse: does the baby calm down solely because of the nutrition or because both the milk and the closeness to mom is comforting? I have no doubts my daughter still very much needed to night nurse at 4 months and beyond. Was it only because she needed the calories? Probably not -- it was likely a combination of being hungry and wanting to be close -- but I don't have any worries that this will result in some kind of eating disorder when she's older.
I really do appreciate your expertise as a pediatrician, but I just wanted to comment on these two points.
For breastfeeding mothers we are encouraged to bed-share in hospital. Even on ICU the baby slept in my bed with me.
My understanding is that the USA and UK have different guidelines.