Parent Time

Certain experts are waging a war against the family bed. The American Academy of Pediatrics says it’s “hazardous” to let your baby sleep in your bed. And last June, as part of a report on deaths in children under the age of five, the assistant chief coroner of Ontario said the only safe place for an infant was a proper crib, no “ands, ifs or buts.”

This simplistic message is the single worst piece of expert advice foisted on parents since the 1950s, when doctors told mothers that formula was superior to breastmilk and that infants should be fed on schedules.

The campaign against co-sleeping has its origins in research on the causes of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). There are numerous risk factors associated with SIDS — the two most important are babies not sleeping on their backs and parental smoking. But bed sharing seems to get most of the attention. Co-sleeping comes in several forms, including sidecar infant beds and kids sleeping in their parents’ bed for part of the night. But the form most relevant to this discussion is an infant under six months in the parent’s bed, full- or part-time.

Co-sleeping can be risky, as is the case with any infant sleeping arrangement (including cribs). But under evolving criteria used by coroners and others who review infant deaths, it’s considered SIDS (that is, an unpreventable, mysterious tragedy) only when the baby dies in a proper crib with nothing in it but a little blanket. So a baby who dies in a family bed, even in the absence of other risk factors, would be presumed not to have died if she’d been alone in a crib. They would never think that a baby found dead in a crib might have survived if she’d been sleeping next to her mom and dad.

Originally published in Today's Parent, February 2008