I don’t mean to say “according to my sources, you are WRONG MR. SMARTY PANTS!!!”, but I’m not quite sure how to phrase an intro for this that doesnt sound exceedingly snooty and like I’m trying to one up a person I hold in great respect. At any rate, I’m 19 and in an intro to psychology class at UM. My psychology book uses this as an example of how your concious mind retains some degree of control over your body during sleep. When you sleep, a lot of people talk to themselves, thrash, and perhaps seem to be embroiled in a nightmare, but when woken up don’t recall anything at all. Theyre called “night terrors”, and during them you actually arent dreaming. Thruthfully you are far from it, and actually in your deepest state of sleep (bear with the long explanation and backround, I have an exam thursday!) My book (Psychology, David G Meyers, 16th edition) points out that while you thrash, you seldom do yourself serious harm nor (what would and should obviously happen) fall out of bed. Furthermore, has any married couple out there ever bumped into your partner on the other side of bed while moving around? If not, how could you feasably roll on top of your baby?
I quote:
“Even when you are deeply asleep, your brain somehow processes the meaning of certain stimuli. You move around on your bed, but you manage not to fall out of it. If you sleep with your babies, you will not roll over and suffocate them (assuming you are not intoxicated). The occasional roar of passing vehicles may leave deep sleep undisturbed, but a cry from a baby’s nursery quickly interrupts it. So does the sound of your name - a stimulus our selective attention is ever alert for.” (Page 250, Chapter 7. Published by Worth Publishers)
When you think about it, this concept seems to be basic evolutionary common sense. Where are you going to keep a baby while you are sleeping out in the wild? Obviously not an arms length away, where you would never roll over it but also would never be able to protect it.
I guess it depends on how much you thrash in your sleep, and if you hold him/her when you fall asleep. I mean, if you fall asleep with the sucker tucked beneath your armpit, you are asking for trouble. But if he/she is next to you and (as most newborns are) relatively immobile, I think you’re fine. I think the real problem might be getting them not to sleep with you once they got older. I used to sleep with my parents until I was about 6, and my dad wound up leading me back to my bed at midnight (late for a tyke) in a kind of half daze. One night, he thought I was awake and supporting myself when he turned to do something and I fell forward, smack flat on my face. That was the only bloody nose I’ve ever had and the last time I ever slept in my parents bed.
I’d like to hear other opinions, other than that of the Bible.
Maybe I’m reading it wrong, but it seemed to me that Cecil was saying that its not a real threat.
The way I read that is he’s saying that since he doesn’t accept the Bible as gospel, this whole supposed phenomenom also shouldn’t be accepted as true. But thats just my interpratation, so YMMV.
I have been reading Cecil for several years, having been first exposed to him via his first book, which caught my eye in a used bookstore. I have to say that this column was the most inane, pointless, poorly answered one he has ever done. Someone asks if there is a danger of killing their child thru suffocation, and he answers with a FRIGGING BIBLE QUOTE? Of all the possibe studies done on Crib death syndrome, all the medical journals, references, and such that are available to he who makes himself out to be the Research King, and he goes to the BIBLE?!?! And he makes it worse yet by quoting a verse that seems to indicate that there is a danger, but then he muddies the issue by making the gosple comment. It’s like he/they aren’t even trying anymore. Whoever got Cecil duty at the Reader for that one should be fired. Assuming that Cecil IS a fiction. If not, he should go get checked for a stroke, because there was no brain activity shown in that article.
The only cases I have heard of involve mothers who are unable to waken when their babies begin to cry and squirm. The mother-in-law of a family friend smothered one of her babies, and a neighbor of my mother’s did the same. But both women were terrible drunks, and both cases happened when the husband was away.
The belief in overlying, causing the death of an infant by accidentally rolling over him in bed, is widespread and deep. You’ll even find medical personell who should know better telling breastfeeding mothers never to nurse lying down, in case they doze off and put the baby in danger. But thornz has got it exactly right - a healthy, sober parent won’t roll over on a baby for the same reason you don’t roll over on your partner or fall out of bed.
But overlying was frequently used as an explanation for a baby’s death in the past, when babies generally slept with their parents. Sometimes this was simply an explanation for an unexpected death, for instance from what we would call SIDS today. It was certainly also used as a cover for infanticide sometimes. (It’s easy to forget that we’re not that far removed from times and places when birth control was unavailable and many families lived from hand-to-mouth, when infanticide was often an act of desparation rather than deliberate cruelty!)
I have two kids, the younger is not quite eight months old. I am a real advocate of The Greatest Sleep For The Greatest Number. So… if you want to take the baby into your bed, go ahead, you won’t crush him. If you find everyone sleeps better with the baby in his own bed, then go ahead with that, too, an otherwise loved and cared-for baby won’t grow up psychologically scarred. Just grab all the sleep you can, and remember the mantra: This too shall pass. This too shall pass. This too…
Although the American Society of Pediatricians (don’t know the exact acronym) has recently come out against co-sleeping, I’ve always heard it was quite safe if you followed a few common sense rules. For example, sleeping in a waterbed is definately out, as is sleeping with an infant while drunk or under the influence of drugs. Also, you are not supposed to sleep with an infant if you are a smoker, but I’m not sure if that is because of the risk of falling asleep with a cigarette or because the smoke clings to you.
We slept with TinyTot until he was eight months old, no ill effects. It was so handy to have him right there when he wanted to nurse, I barely had to wake up. Plus, our sleep cycles synchronized, so that I would be slightly awake just before he started to cry. We slept with him in the middle (so he wouldn’t slip between the bed and the wall or fall off the edge), with me spooned around him so that his father would not roll over him. Although, that was just me being paranoid, since his father has never slept on top of me even when drunk.
I think in more cultures than not babies co-sleep with at least their mothers. In fact, my mother is Korean and all of us slept with her (except me, who hates sleeping with others) until we were 6 or 7. Apparently this is quite normal in that culture.
To elaborate on tatertot’s common sense rules, don’t sleep with the kid in the middle of the bed if the bed happens to be two mattresses pushed together. The kid can get wedged in between the two mattresses. My mom tells me this is what happened to me-- my parents both felt so awful about it that after that, they got me a bed of my own. Obviously, I didn’t suffocate, but I could have, easily.
Also, I’ve read that sleeping with the child on a couch is more dangerous than the bed. Dang, I wish I remembered where I read that so I could have a cite. Makes sense to me, I’ve heard of babies falling asleep on top of a parent on the couch and rolling off. Since the couch is narrower than a bed, they fall on the floor instead of the bed. I could also see a child slipping between the parent and the couch and suffocating that way, though I’ve never heard of it.
As far as Cecil’s answer goes (and this might belong in another thread), there are two kinds of “Straight Dope” columns (written, I suspect, by two different Cecils).
No. 1 is the rather dry, informative answer, usually involving a number of statistics and soruces.
No. 2 is the wise-ass “humor column” version like this week’s and a few other recent columns. Dismissive, vague—may or may not be funny, but meant more as a cheap laff than an informational column.
It seems to be a roll of the dice as to which “Cecil” you get. 'Course, it could be one writer with multiple-personality disorder, or one writer with two dueling editors . . .
Probably the most recent data regarding bed sharing with an infant is from the medical journal Pediatrics from March 2000; volume 105:pages650-656. “The Changing Concepts of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: Implications for Infant Sleeping Environment and Sleep Position”. The following exerpt addresses this issue.
"Bed Sharing
There are some reports of infants being suffocated by overlying by an adult, particularly when the adult is in an unnaturally depressed state of consciousness, such as from alcohol or mind-altering drugs. Co-sleeping on sofas has emerged as a major risk factor in 1 study (Peter J. Fleming, Department for Child Health, Bristol, UK, unpublished data presented at a meeting convened by US Consumer Product Safety Commission, Bethesda, MD, December 9, 1998). Others [n52] have shown bed sharing with multiple family members in an adult bed to be particularly hazardous for the infant. Although overlying may be the mechanism in some of these cases, soft sleep surfaces, entrapment, and the likelihood of rolling to the prone position in such circumstances also may have a role. The risk of SIDS associated with co-sleeping is significantly greater among smokers. [n11,n53-n55] Some behavioral studies have demonstrated that infants have more arousals and less slow-wave sleep during bed sharing, [n56,n57] but no epidemiologic evidence exists that bed sharing is protective against SIDS."
So, as a scientist myself, I get this information out of the preceeding statement: Don’t sleep with your infant! If there is only the slightest risk of your child dying, either due to entrapment, smothering on soft sleeping surfaces, or rolling into the prone (face down position) why risk it? You’ll be awfully sorry if you child died and you knew the risks before hand! Keep that baby in the basinet or crib. Don’t put your baby ar risk for your own deisre to share the bed with your baby. It’s time to start putting your baby’s safety and well being before your own desires.
Though I love this site, I too was very disappointed by this ambiguous answer. Since it was originally written in 1996, it doesn’t acknowledge the debate on this question that’s come up after Consumer Product Safety Commission widely publicized warning about placing babies on adult beds. (This is a hair-raising site, almost worthy of Wierd Earl’s – you can find out how many people are killed every year while using lawn-care equipment.)
Yet in human history, and in most of the world today, that’s where babies have slept. As a survival mechanism, babies are hard-wired to want to stay close to a familiar adult all the time. The CPSC, instead of helping parents take some sensible safety precautions with modern bedding (nature didn’t envision coil springs, water beds or people being drunk, any more than it anticipated the above-mentioned lawn-care equipment) it came up with this edict. (Rats, the CPSC didn’t say “don’t mow your lawn.”)
While I do partially agree with the assessment by Evan that any risk is something to avoid, I tend to feel that if it is dangerous to sleep with your infant, it is probably due to special circumstances or cooincidence. The main reason I think this is because of some TV program I saw about an isolated tribe in the Amazon region.
As I remember, anthropologists were studying them in several different aspects of their lives, one of them being their sleeping habits. What asserted after some study was that this tribe’s habits of sleeping all together, whenever they were tired and for shorter periods of time than we’re used to is actually closer to the human norm than how we sleep. We confine ourselves to schedules and whatnot – but that’s a different thread.
Anyway, to condense the point a little, people have been sleeping with their entire families for thousands of years, if these anthropologists are to be believed (and I don’t see why not), so why is it suddenly dangerous to sleep with your babies?
Welcome to the SDMB, and thank you for posting your comment.
Please include a link to Cecil’s column if it’s on the straight dope web site.
To include a link, it can be as simple as including the web page location in your post (make sure there is a space before and after the text of the URL).
Ayway, Eclipsee, the point the is that the Amazonian Tribes, as Pearl pointed out, don’t have big fluffy quilts, coil spring matresses, and don’t go to bed rip roaring drunk with a baby in their arms. In addition, parents smoking tobacco (a major risk factor in SIDS related deaths) isn’t as prevalent or nearly as heavy in Amazon tribes. Also, the risk of a child slipping inbetween mattresses, pillows, or other inanimate objects poses a huge threat. The risk to babies sleeping in bed with their parents is not so much that they will be crushed by the parents, but that somehow they will be covered with blankets, will turn over on soft sheets or blankets, or will slip between bedding which will obstruct their airway, suffocating them. The same concerns apply to sleeping on the couch with your infant, by the way. The American Academy of Pedatrics recommends firm mattresses, tight fitting sheets and no blankets for sleeping infants for the first 12 months. See URL below). NO amount of parental watchfulness, short of staying up all night to watch a baby in bed with a parent, can alert a parent to such situations.
Thus, it is not a matter of human nature but of societal customs and modern “luxuries” that pose the threat.
Eclipsee, I forgot to address yor last comment. Its not that it has all of a sudden become “dangerous” to sleep with your baby. It’s been so for a long time. But like many things that impact our health, The risks wasn’t assesed and studied closely until recently. Infant bed deaths have been occuring since babies have been around, but no one had any hard evidence or statistics of the risks until studies were conducted.
Ev
A humorous, frivoulous answer is well-suited to a question about a trivial matter or when there is a common-sense answer which would be known to most of the Teeming Millions.
A question about a serious health issue (we’re talking about parents accidentally killing their babies, for crying out loud!) is best served by the rigorous, exhaustive research and insightful commentary with which Cecil distinguishes himself.
I was very disappointed by the tone chosen to answer this question, and I congratulate the Dopers who have come forth with useful information on this topic.
You can probably come up with statistics to support an opposing point of view, but even the slightest risk exists that one child’s life might be lost, that’s a risk not worth taking.
