The CDC has published a report on the dangers of infant co-sleeping, noting that between 2/3 and 3/4 of infant "SIDS" deaths occur when the infant is sleeping in an adult bed or with an adult. Interestingly, though, these numbers are far less than the 4-7000 deaths annually that were stated when my first children were young, and then I decided to take a look and see what percentage of parents sleep with their infant children.
The answer? 81% of infants below 3 months of age, and 63% of infants up to 6 months of age. In other words, infant co-sleeping deaths are roughly proportional to the rate of infants sharing beds with their parents, and there does not appear to be a significant relative risk to co-sleeping.
It's also remarkable how much SIDS deaths have dropped in the past few decades, from around 7000 annually to 1500 or less. I'm guessing a huge portion of this is because infants are sleeping on their backs or sides instead of on their stomachs, as used to be customary.
It doesn't mean we don't need to be careful--there is still a lot of bedding that doesn't need to be there with a child, and certainly it doesn't mean that it's OK to come to bed with a child while intoxicated--but it does mean that we've made tremendous progress, and we're at a point where the things we're looking for are far more subtle than they used to be.
2 comments:
I remember sleeping with my babies for the first few weeks. You'd have to be intoxicated to roll over your baby (at least as a mom). I never dropped into a deep enough sleep to not be aware of them.
(FWIW, sleeping with a baby means you are in reach of said baby, which is awesome if you are recovering from a C/S and it takes you too much time to get up and get to them).
Mrs. Bubba and I actually put a teddy bear between us to see if we could sleep with a little one. When it hadn't moved the next morning, we figured we might be OK.
Agreed on the Ceasarean. Mrs. Bubba had five, and we joked about putting velcro down there to make the obstetrician's job easier.
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