A recent news article in the Daily Mail has just reported a case in Great Britain. According to an article in Pediactrics, accidental suffocation is a leading cause of infant deaths. According to the conclusions:
The American Pediatrics Association recommends against bed sharing with young infants.
The likelihood may be rare, but it shouldn’t be summarily dismissed as merely some sort of biblical tale.
I feel like someone should point out that this doesn’t even rise to the level of “biblical tale” because the book in question doesn’t actually tell how the baby died. It only tells us what the woman said. The story goes that a woman told King Solomon that her roommate’s baby was dead and she (the plaintiff) inferred that it died from being smothered accidentally. According to her own testimony, she did not witness the event. Even if we assume that the woman wasn’t fictional, or lying, it’s quite possible that the baby died some other way and the woman merely ASSUMED that it was smothered accidentally.
However, the existence of the story itself is evidence that the person who recorded the story found it to be a plausible explanation, from which we can infer that the fear of accidentally smothering an infant is not a recent invention.
Human beings evolved under conditions of mother-infant bedsharing. What is not being considered here are the benefits of bedsharing in infancy, which are many, including facilitation of breast-feeding and infant nervous system development through coordinated infant-mother sleep/arousal patterns. Indeed, parent-infant bedsharing can help prevent SIDS events. There is a large medical literature on this. Death due to overlaying and bedsharing-related SIDS events happen under specific, predictable conditions–namely parent obesity, parent substance abuse, and parent smoking. Remove these variables and infant-parent bedsharing is not only safe, but beneficial. Remove these variables and it is the practice of putting infants in cribs in their own room that becomes the more dangerous practice.
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Death due to overlaying and bedsharing-related SIDS events happen under specific, predictable conditions–namely parent obesity, parent substance abuse, and parent smoking. Remove these variables and infant-parent bedsharing is not only safe, but beneficial.
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Thanks, Shodan. I’m not a fan of that article at all, mostly for aesthetic reasons, but it’s a place to start. If I have some time later on today I’ll see if I can dig up the BMJO study and some of the others noted (but not fully cited) in that article.
The findings on comparative safety of bedsharing vs. solitary sleep, as well as general benefits of bedsharing are nicely summarized in this article from Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics (full disclosure: I wrote the article): http://www.thefpr.org/private/pdf/Bedsharing_fulltext.pdf
Also, the Fox News article posted earlier mentions James McKenna as the “world’s foremost authority” on bedsharing, and he fully supports our findings in the Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics article (Full disclosure: We were going to work on a book together, never happened). The Fox News article also mentions many benefits of bedsharing in addition to describing the negative results from the Open medical journal. BTW, I haven’t seen that article but I seriously doubt that they adequately controlled (or controlled at all) for obesity and the issue of smoking is not confined to actually smoking a cigarette at the time of death by SIDS–it’s more complicated.
Here’s the study. They didn’t control for obesity, but they did not confine “smoking” to actually smoking a cigarette at the time of death. Also note that the study is a combination of five SIDS datasets.
This study, for instance, that SIDS deaths are more likely if the parent is large, but occurs with parents of normal weight as well. IOW even when the “specific, predictable conditions” of parental obesity, substance abuse, and smoking are not present, bedsharing-relating SIDS events do occur.
Of course SIDS deaths may occur in behsharing in the absence of obesity, substance use, smoking, etc. However–statistics that stand alone are meaningless. In order to get a handle on the safety or lack thereof of bedsharing, we need good estimates of deaths due to SIDS, fire, smothering in inappropriate bedding, etc. in the practice of placing infants in solitary sleep situations in cribs in their own rooms. If I recall my own work correctly (and this is not guaranteed), the Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics article uses data to demonstrate that solitary sleep is likely more dangerous than bedsharing if only one of these variables–fire–is considered.