University of South Alabama - Co-sleeping: parents, children, and musical beds

Co-Sleeping

Susan D. Stewart

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

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For Gwen

I would like to thank my husband, daughter, and family for their support during what turned out to be a four-year project. I also appreciate the support of Iowa State University for granting me a faculty professional development assignment that provided me with the time to conduct this research and write this book. I thank the Midwest Sociological Societys Research Grants Program for funding this research and my former PhD student and research assistant, Dr. Adrienne Riegle, for her work conducting interviews and contributing to conference presentations. I also thank my colleagues and conference participants for their valuable feedback. I am incredibly grateful to Rowman & Littlefield for their support and especially Sarah Stanton for seeing the value of this project. Lastly, I want to extend my sincere appreciation to the parents, and their children, who participated in the study, warmly welcomed me into their homes, and shared with me some of the most intimate aspects of their lives, and without whom this project would not have been possible.

Why Are We So Different?

Parents and children sleeping together is referred to as co-sleeping or, should they occupy the same bed, bedsharing. In 2011, a segment on the Today Show reported the results of a Columbia University study of 944 toddlers who regularly slept in the same bed as their mothers. Second, co-sleeping is not widely practiced in the United States and is generally disapproved of by Americans. Parents who co-sleep with their children are commonly thought of as new-age hippie types. Theyre those long-skirted moms who make their own baby food and breastfeed their school-aged children; theyre those babywearing, sandal-clad dads at the farmers market.

The initial Today Show story was followed up with another that focused on a public service advertisement created by the Milwaukee Health Department. In the ad, which was placed on billboards around the city, an infant is shown cuddled-up with a butcher knife. The tagline read, Your baby sleeping with you can be just as dangerous. Whereas the news of the first study did not create much of a splash, the second produced an immediate negative reaction and a flurry of activity on social media. Not surprisingly, a third set of stories soon followed: Bed-Sharing with a Toddler: Should Moms Feel Guilty?, Coming Out of the Bed-Sharing Closet, and Go Ahead, Let Your Kids Climb into Bed with Mom and Dad.

These stories and others like it create a quandary for parents. Engage in a practice that feels to some parents natural and good, and risk your children with what would seem like certain death. Prioritize your childrens safety, and suffer through sleepless nights of letting them cry it out.

Expectations for parents have never been higher. Some commentators have even referred to modern parenting as a new religion that is killing the American marriage. Well-meaning relatives and friends often feel the need to weigh in on the subject as well. In the end, as I discovered in the process of doing the research for Co-Sleeping: Parents, Children, and Musical Beds, parents who co-sleep with their children often keep their sleeping arrangement to themselves or limit their conversations to a few trusted friends and family members.

Americans ambivalence toward co-sleeping is interesting given that co-sleeping is practiced in the majority of countries around the world. Why then, in the United States, is co-sleeping so controversial? One possibility is Americas reverence for medicine and our medicalized approach to what most consider routine life course eventsmost notably, birth and death, but increasingly, parenting. The Columbia study cited above, published in the prominent medical journal Pediatrics, was conducted by specialists in public health and medicine. And as noted above, the medical community has historically taken a negative view of co-sleeping. Two years later, a study of co-sleeping conducted by researchers at the Yale School of Medicine was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In the United States and other places around the world, infant mortality steadily declined throughout the twentieth century. After a brief plateau between 2000 and 2005, the U.S. infant mortality rate declined another 12 percent between 2005 and 2011 and is now at an all-time low of six infant deaths per one thousand live births. Researchers attribute this difference to higher economic inequality in the United States and specifically to its greater number of premature births as a result of higher rates of smoking, substance use, poverty, and lack of prenatal care among lower income groups.

In 2013, 3,434 U.S. infants died suddenly and unexpectedly. This category of death, referred to as sudden unexpected infant deaths (SUID), was created by the National Center for Health Statistics to capture infants whose cause of death was not immediately obvious prior to investigation. In 2013, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) accounted for 45 percent of SUID deaths. The remainder was attributed to unknown causes (31 percent) and accidental suffocation and strangulation in bed (24 percent). Even so, worries about SIDS weigh heavily on the minds of parents and are, as I found in my research, the major reason why they hesitated to co-sleep.

Numerous studies have found that co-sleeping, specifically bedsharing, is a risk factor in infant death. However, sudden infant death syndrome is not well understood and the relationship between co-sleeping and SIDS is hotly debated, even among researchers. For example, a number of studies indicate that co-sleeping is dangerous to infants only in the presence of other risk factors, such as when the adults in the home smoke, are overweight, or use drugs. Other risk factors include young maternal age, not receiving adequate prenatal care, not breastfeeding, overbundling, and placing the child prone or belly down to sleep. Moreover, SIDS deaths have declined during a time of rising rates of co-sleeping.

Attitudes about co-sleeping are evolving, however. For example, The American Academy of Pediatrics recently updated their recommendations for what is considered a safe sleeping environment for infants. These new guidelines finally acknowledge the reality that despite the warnings, many babies sleep in their parents bed, either unintentionally (for example if the mother falls asleep breastfeeding) or by choice. Their recommendations continue to emphasize putting infants to sleep on their back; providing a firm sleep surface free of blankets, pillows, and stuffed animals; breastfeeding; avoidance of exposure to smoke, alcohol, and illicit drugs; and parents not putting their baby in bed with them. What is new is that they now recommend that infants sleep in their parents room, close to their parents bed, but on a separate surface designed for infants.