Is Sleeping with Your Baby as Dangerous as Doctors Say? | Hacker News Reader

Is Sleeping with Your Baby as Dangerous as Doctors Say?

npr.org

49 pointsjdnier79 comments

The constant skin to skin contact between baby and mom from cosleeping and breastfeeding is believed by some psychologists to contribute to baby's healthy psychological development. Humans are highly social animals. I'm amazed and sad it's common practice to isolate babies for such a large portion of the day.

We coslept with our first and are now doing it with our 2nd who is still a newborn. We're 3 weeks in and are already close to getting enough sleep each night.

> Humans are highly social animals. I'm amazed and sad it's common practice to isolate babies for such a large portion of the day.

It's fun to watch my 1 year old son roll around in his sleep and check to see if mom is there and then roll around around or do an arm swing and feel if I am there all without waking up too much. At first it seemed random and then I noticed the pattern. He was checking if we are still there, it's like a background task running in "low power mode", probably baked in by evolution a long long time ago.

My wife and I did that, sandwiching our little guy between us, but we put a down comforter over ourselves so his fat little arms would go flumpf in the down as he verified our presence. That allowed us to replace ourselves with big pillows after he fell asleep. He would whack those comforter-covered pillows flumpf, flumpf to make sure we were still there, and we'd be downstairs watching a movie!

My 2 year old does this too every night, uses his arms and legs to feel us. And if it gets a bit cold, tries to cozy up into one of us - feels super awesome.

In the morning, he remains asleep till at least one of us is in bed, as soon as we both are out of the bed, he wakes up.

When he finds you does he squeeze you a bit? That's my son's thing. Waves the arm, makes contact, squeezes and pinches for a while... Then back to sleep. It's nice.

Yap, but mostly when he was younger, now at 1 it is more of a slap.

We have a 2 year old and 6 month old twins. Been co-sleeping since our oldest was 3 or 4 months old. We tried doing the separate room thing with the twins and it was just a nightmare of sleepless nights. Moved them into our bed after Christmas and things got much better. So much easier to just roll over half-awake to calm a baby down.

Also ditto on the oddness of wanting to isolate babies in a different room when everyone is sleeping. One of the things I look forward to most is getting to sleep next to my kids every night, even if I'm busy during the day and don't get to spend as much time with them as I'd like to.

That's very weird. Thanks for sharing. Also, you absolutely cannot lump cosleeping with a toddler in with cosleeping in with cosleeping with a baby. The baby people do it because they want to avoid waking up and walking into another room to feed many times per night. With a toddler, there is no good reason.

> With a toddler, there is no good reason.

Um, where are you getting that from? It makes the toddler happier and more comforted, and in this case (and probably most cases) the parent also.

And, even though a toddler or young child won't tend to wake up as much as a baby, they still do a lot — bad dreams, loud noises, earthquakes, etc. — and having a parent right there next to them is a lot different than not. It can be the difference between them going right back to sleep or sitting up and screaming and then being wide awake for an hour.

See all the studies linked in this thread. The only reason people do it is to try to get past the hard phase of sleep training your child. Those who give up end up co-sleeping, and will regret it later.

Sorry, that's nuts. That might be why many Americans do it, but most of the world does it by choice, and virtually nobody regrets it. And once your children are beyond the infant stage where there is some (as TFA notes, sub-lightning-strike) danger, there is none.

It sounds shitty when you don't actually have kids, but once you have them and try it, it's just kind of like oh, I see. It is self-evidently great for the kids, and it also doesn't really limit your adult life much (you can just get up when they are asleep, and come back when you're sleepy).

Anyway, avoiding training babies to sleep alone certainly not "the only reason people do it", or even a reason most people do it (although it does have that benefit).

I have kids. It's still shitty. Many people who have tried both agree. You are trying to justify how it's not that bad to artificially pretend to sleep until they fall asleep, at which point you continue to go about your business. That's a huge nuisance, and describing it as anything but doesn't make sense.

The rest of the world does it because living conditions typically dictate it, since you aren't living in a large house in the backgroundt area.

I get it, you don't like putting your kids to bed. That's fine, but most parents really don't find it to be a "huge nuisance", and certainly not when measured against the backdrop of all the other crap you have to do when you have kids.

So I really doubt that most parents, even in America, would find it "very weird" that war1025 sleeps with his young children. (You don't have to "artificially pretend to sleep", by the way, you can just tell them a story or read your own stuff, or whatever... even just tell them goodnight and you'll be back later).

It's actually very normal, in a lot of the world, and also objectively less annoying than many things most parents do every day. (For instance, I certainly find driving my kids to school in the morning a hell of a lot more annoying than anything bedtime/sleep related.)

I'm not saying you personally have to do it, or enjoy it, just that it comes off pretty strange to characterize such a routine parental activity as going to bed with your baby/kids as a "very weird, shitty, huge nuisance"...

An oddly condescending comment. If you read my post again, you will see that we are both types of terrible co-sleeping parents. Both lazy and without good reason.

Maybe you missed it, but we also have 6 month old twins who are co-sleeping with us. We sleep on a futon-style floor bed, and the toddler moved herself to another floor bed next to ours of her own accord just a week or two ago.

Anyway, we're used to people thinking our parenting tactics are odd. Works for us.

In Japan, co-sleeping is extremelly common, even until the kids are 6 or 7.

The fact that families tend to sleep in futon instead of beds make it even more convenient, because you can just lay out a bunch of futon on the floor at night for all the kids.

We do this too. Two giant mattresses on the floor! Great to know I’m not a pioneer.

Another cosleeper here. Besides the benefit to the child, it was also amazing to get a full night’s sleep. When the baby was hungry my wife just had to roll over and help it latch on, then go right back to sleep while feeding. That might not be “sleeping through the night”, technically, but it was just as good from our perspective.

> I'm amazed and sad it's common practice to isolate babies for such a large portion of the day.

Frankly my wife and I were glad of sleeping apart from our baby. Humans might be social but that doesn't mean we want to spend 24 hours a day with baby or toddler.

Co-slept with both kids here. Full nights sleep every night. Nobody harmed.

> "Any women who kept an infant less than 1 year old in her bed ... is ipso facto excommunicated," the church declared in Milan in 1576.

I can find no source confirming this. Ipso facto means "automatically", so this can't be done by a bishop, but only declared as canonical law by either a Council or a pope. No trace of a Council in Milan in 1576 - the previous one was in Trent. So this would have to be Gregory XIII visiting Milan for some reason. I'm curious to find out who really did it and why. And whether it was actually the church (i.e. the pope/council) or just a local bishop.

OK, so it looks like there actually was a Fourth Provincial Council held in Milan in 1576. Eleven bishops were present: https://archive.org/details/amanualofcouncil01landuoft - although I'm not sure how binding the decisions of this Council are (if you live in Rome, are you excommunicated, too?). The references lead to Richard Trexler's article "Infanticide in Florence" in Dependence in Context in Renaissance Florence which is out of print.

We've used sidecar crib* for both our children. (first 8 months for the first child, and then 1.5 years for the second- /our first child was a better sleeper/).

And we've found it to be a very good compromise. Both children have slept mostly in their crib, but occasionally if they needed, could spend some time between us. My wife liked that she did not have to wake up for breastfeeding...

* https://www.google.com/search?q=sidecar+crib&tbm=isch

> What's more, the practice of bed-sharing is as old as our species itself. Homo sapien moms and their newborns have been sleeping together for more than 200,000 years, says anthropologist Mel Konner at Emory University.

Hard to argue with the stats and reasoning in this article.

I think I detect a tone of sarcasm, but just in case:

For the first ~99.95% of that time range, infant mortality was very high, and then it sort of dropped like a rock. A lot of the change is attributable to breaking with tradition.

I don't mention this by way of suggesting that everything traditional is dangerous, so much as to say that this is one of those spots where we should regard a simple appeal to tradition as being particularly unconvincing.

>A lot of the change is attributable to breaking with tradition.

Is it? I thought it was due to modern medicine. Do you have a reference?

Modern medicine is a result of one of those breaks with tradition - specifically, a change in mindset from using received wisdom such as, "this is how we've always done it" to a more experimental, evidence-based approach to deciding how to do things.

In the spirit of modern medicine, I'd suggest that that article was chock full of stats that should get much higher billing than a line of reasoning that's of a kind with one of the main ones that people use to promote acupuncture.

My line of reasoning was "it must have been within acceptable ranges of risk because otherwise the species would be extinct or doing something differently," not a pure appeal to tradition. The statistics back this up, hence my mentioning them first.

I think it's a bit extreme to suggest that the standard for an acceptable range of risk is anything that doesn't cause our species to go extinct.

We tend to put a greater value on human life than that, even (or especially), traditionally.

Infant mortality was not primarily from “SIDS”, but rather from disease and poor nutrition.

Nobody is suggesting getting rid of indoor plumbing, water treatment, antibiotics, vaccines, hospitals, or large-scale agriculture.

For 200000 years (or at least 10000 since the agrarian revolution) humans had to accept 1 out of 5 children would die before age 5.

There is real risk here, and while we can deal with it in a smarter manner (the New Zealand example with the Moses baskets and identifying high risk babies for example), in bed sleeping significantly increases the mortality risk, even for low risk groups. The info graphic indicates the risk of in bed sleeping from 1/46000 to 1/16000. At 4M live births per year, that’s a difference of roughly 89 children dying versus 250 children dying. What’s more, those numbers are cited for SIDS, it’s not clear where a death where the cause is known (like rolling over and suffocating the baby) would count as in these studies.

In short, I’m unconvinced we should be encouraging in bed cosleeping

We looked into this quite a bit when our child was born because we grew very skeptical of much of the guidelines we were reading. Sleep in particular was difficult for our child for various reasons and at some point we realized that following certain guidelines resulted in more risk than violating them (e.g., it became an issue of following guidelines and neither us or our child sleeping or violating guidelines prudently and getting sleep).

We did not cosleep with our child. But in the process of reviewing many sleep guidelines we reviewed the literature and found it's more complicated than it seems. The NPR article doesn't summarize the complexity as well as it could.

The problem is that studies of risk of cosleeping generally do not control for confounding variables very well at all, and when you do control for these confounds, the risk of cosleeping disappear.

For example, in the US many cosleeping parents tend to be minority, immigrant, lower SES, etc. which is associated with other risk factors. When you control for those trends, cosleeping isn't associated with increased risk.

This has lead to many sleep scientists to conclude that cosleeping research has largely been sociodemographically (e.g., ethnically) biased in design and analysis. There's a big rift between sleep scientists and pediatrics in this regard.

The NPR piece proceeds along the lines of "humans have been doing this for 200000 years so it must be fine" but it's more like "people who can afford separate beds for their children tend to have a lot of money, globally speaking, and that's associated with decreased risk of infant death for a multitude of reasons having nothing to do with cosleeping."

What I got from the article was less "everyone should do this" than "people are going to do it anyway, and educating them about the various risk factors is better than an 'abstinence-only' model"

That is presuming these risk factors are real and not an artefact of a poor study design.

Welcome to sociology, the home of bad research practices.

This is a good article that challenges what I have heard. An interesting pondering is whether or not the adoption of new bedding makes this problematic.

Yeah well the vast majority of all those folks from the past 200,000 years are DEAD!

I'm a restless sleeper. I tend to turn around a lot, and move the covers. Would I be right in thinking this may make me as risky (or more) as a smoker or a drinker?

I'm assuming the risk is that those groups are more likely to toss and turn.

My understanding is that the risk is that they're more insensate to the world while asleep, and may not notice that they've rolled onto their child.

Oh I see. The risk isn't crushing the baby, the risk is being on top of it long enough to suffocate.

There is also the additional risk of your child getting trapped between the bed and the wall, or getting wrapped up in blankets, pillows, etc.

Doesn't smoking & drinking also correlate to obesity?

> Over the past few decades, the U.K. has also seen a large drop in SIDS. Since 2003, total SIDS deaths has fallen by 40 percent, from about 350 deaths per year to about 200 deaths per year, the nonprofit Lullaby Trust reports. At the same time, the SIDS rate in U.S. has nearly plateaued at about 90 deaths per 100,000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.

If this paragraph is accurate, why is the incidence around 200 times lower in the UK?

> 350 deaths per year to about 200 deaths per year

It's correct but their numbers are presented in a confusing manner. The UK figure is total deaths for the whole country, but the US figure is given per 100,000. There were 774,835 live births in the UK in 2016. So that's 350/774835*100000 = 45 per 100,000 vs. 90 per 100,000 in the US. So 50% lower.

Ah, that makes sense, I didn't realize the per 100,000 was per 100,000 live births. Thanks.

Less immigrants? Drop in drug use perhaps? Some other extraneous factor got fixed? (Say crib and pillow materials.)

There's a lot of different approaches to raising children. That's ok and people should feel good making their own choices. Chances are, it will turn out fine.

The only way to have an objective, public conversation about infant sleeping is: what solution presents the least risk to the infants' lives in aggregate?

Straying from that approach should be a decision taken only once the parents are fully informed about the risk to the life of the infant.

Strictly focusing on minimizing risk to life imo leads to practices that neglect quality of life. Imagine if keeping your baby isolated at night meant that later in her life she would have trouble trusting the world and would as a result be handicapped when it comes to making and keeping healthy relationships. That's what some folks believe will happen.

The strictures against bed sharing are crazy, IMO.

For the first year, my wife and infant son could both be completely asleep while he was eating (I was the only person kept awake by the activity).

I hear stories from new parents about how they can’t get any sleep because their crib-bound baby keeps fussing and waking them up many times a night.... sounds like a nightmare.

Same here. My son was born perfectly healthy etc. We tried the whole crib next to the bed. Didn't work very well, so we co-slept. They both got a full 8 hours sleep a night together. It was great.

I've never ever slept so still in my life. (tho, he was on his mums side.)

When we transitioned him from sleeping with Mum to his own crib, it went perfectly. We just moved him one night and that was it.

Our doctor was very supportive. Told us never to use drugs/alcohol and co-sleep. To be very careful and so on (basically echoing the article) - and it worked out for us. I guess if he was born premature or something, they'd probably say "don't do it".

Remember these statistics capture the full cross section of society. Everyone from addicts to the hyper-protective.

Babies are all different, and coping is difficult, especially for inexperienced parent(s). A lot of these strict protocols are there because they are a “right answer” for the baby’s safety in any situation.

It depends heavily on the child too.

Our first wouldn't settle in cot on her own, to the extent that we co-slept (at least in a cot attached to our bed for ~2 years).

Our second, he wouldn't settle in a co-sleeping siutation at all, and has actually ended up being much better at sleeping in his own cot in the room with his sister.

My hunch is that its the noise, going into your own room with nobody else, complete silence. That's scary. Sharing a room with others and hearing their breathing and moving and such is calming.

Get a white noise machine.

Alternatively, get one of those bluetooth speaker. Get a free recording of a vacuum cleaner / AC unit / any kind of white noise.

I used it to put my son to sleep (with a timer to fade out the volume) with great success.

It certainly seems like a scientific approach to parenting gone a bit too far.

My parents number among those. I wouldn't sleep - at all - if I wasn't being rocked. So they'd take turns; half the night mom would rock me, half the night dad would rock me.

I don't know if they tried co-sleeping. They probably tried everything.

One thing they most likely had not tried is called “sleep training”.

"Thank you" for your conjecture.

Google it, you'll be surprised.

Cry it out works well. One night, and done. The alternative is you sleep next to a kid every single night, dictating your bedtime, and never getting alone time with spouse. One of those sounds worse to me.

I did that by accident, and I regret it.

My daughter was 2 or 3. Every night, she would fetch me for bed. One night, I was busy on the computer, and refused to come. She walked away sadly. She never called me again. Forever afterward, she has been cold toward me. The relationship changed in an instant.

So I believe you that "cry it out" works, "one night and done". The result will last forever. This is the problem.

That is complete nonsense, and all recognized studies back up that there are no behavioral changes in kids due to that. I've done it for two of our kids, and many friends have done it for theirs, and there are no changes before or after. In fact, studies show the exact opposite. Kids who sleep in their own rooms get more sleep than kids who don't. It's a win-win for everyone.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3146354/

https://www.verywellfamily.com/co-sleeping-with-a-toddler-41...

Your sources are complete nonsense. The first study you linked actually concludes

> There seem to be no negative associations between bed-sharing in toddlerhood and children's behavior and cognition at age 5 years.

And also only samples low-income families, which already show negative behavioral trends from the more difficult living.

And the second source only vaguely concludes that co-sleeping can > negatively affect a mother's mental health and cause her to get less sleep.

Finally, none of these studies focus on the long term effects, which the OP is talking about.

That's so sad :( was it so long ago? Or maybe you can still recover from it

It was a decade ago. It gets worse: she didn't like seeing her sisters have a good relationship with me. She's the most socially skilled of them by far. She set out to turn the others against me, and mostly this has worked. She'd diminish my positives, magnify my negatives, and make a good sister-sister relationship conditional on a bad father-daughter relationship. Being the social leader, she created an "us vs. him" situation.

Talk about revenge... I had no idea that such a seemingly insignificant event could have such long-lasting and extensive harm.

One thing I don't see mentioned here is weight. Statistically people have gotten a lot heavier, and I wonder if being significantly overweight does not increase the risk either?

Very much so. I've seen sporadic news-reports of people suffocating their babies, by rolling over on top of them.

The mirror claims 133/year, in this piece, but I'd imagine true stats are harder to find:

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/133-babies-accidentall...

I was told that the biggest risk factors were alcohol, some kinds of medication and obesity when we got our first child. The official recommendation is to have the baby in their own bed.

The way it was presented was that we should try with a separate bed and if it didn't work use a baby nest with removable sides for breast feeding.

Study cited European ancestry. Americans would appear to be of a different breed, generally speaking.

http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/two-maps-and-one-graph-comp...

I have two responses to this article:

(1) My ancestors participated in a multitude of activities which I find misguided or dangerous. It is a logical fallacy to say: “a practice happened for a long time, therefore it’s positive.”

(2) If you drink or smoke (??) your odds jump from 1:16,000 to 1:150????? We need a better explanation of that jump. A LOT of people smoke or drink. This headline is dangerous by giving the impression that these studies were wrong. They weren’t wrong, it just might be an overstated risk for some demographics.

They give an analogy of dying in a car accident. I face less risk of dying in a car accident than some people for good reasons: I work from home, don’t drink much, good income, etc.

But I still wear a seatbelt! It doesn’t make sense for me to say that my instincts tell me not to wear a seatbelt and my demographics check out so it’s no big deal.

In short, come on NPR. This is shoddy and dangerous journalism, even if the premise ends up being validated.

Your seat belt analogy is invalid. Driving past a certain speed is always life threatening. Even if you driving on a non-life threatening speed, you share the road with other people that might be, worse, these people might be drunk even though your sober. Wearing a seat belt is a low cost highly effective way to reduce the risk of dying while in traffic. The reduction is significant.

Usually parents share beds with their infants in a low risk and controlled environment. If the parents get drunk one night, it is easy for them to postpone the practice that particular night. Always putting the baby to the crypt is a high cost low yield way of reducing the risk of SIDS. The risk reduction is puny.

A more apt analogy would be if you always drive on your own private road no faster then 15 km/h, except once a week where you drive 120 km/h on the motorway. Your car has a 5 point seat belt and is a pain to put on. A sensible person, and a sensible advice is to put the seat belt on that one time a week when you drive on the motorway.

Substantial drinking makes people sleep much more deeply, similar to severe sleep deprivation. (Someone who just pulled 2 all-nighters in a row should also probably not co-sleep with an infant.)

For example, people who fall asleep with their arm draped over the back of a chair, and remain asleep even though their nerve is pinched, can end up with severe damage to the radial nerve, in some cases requiring months for the nerve to heal. This gets the name “saturday night palsy” because of the association with alcohol use: the pain would ordinarily cause a sober and well rested person to wake up and shift around.

Basically, someone who is substantially drunk has a much higher chance of rolling over and crushing the infant without waking up. We’re talking about getting very drunk here though, not sipping a glass of wine with dinner.

> (Someone who just pulled 2 all-nighters in a row should also probably not co-sleep with an infant.)

Which is a cruel irony, given some infants' sleep habits - or lack thereof.

That is quite intuitive. What is the explanation for smokers though? As far as I’m aware there is no or limited impact on sleep for smokers, at least not in making sleep more deep (otherwise I suspect we may see more smokers!)

I've found this: http://www.irishhealth.com/article.html?id=18903

"babies who sleep with smoker parents suffer from ‘third hand smoke', in other words, the harmful smoke particles that impregnate their parents' skin, clothes and hair"

"According to Mitchell's data, bed-sharing raises her baby's risk of SIDS from about 1 in 46,000 to 1 in 16,400, or an increase of .004 percentage points."

(1/16400) - (1/46000) ~= 0.00004076, or about 0.004 percentage points. Reasonable on the face - so, are you instead arguing that percentage points are misleading?

I would say that they are an appropriate measure when evaluating risky alternatives. If you said, "it's three times more likely to kill by SIDS", that doesn't help if you also have a similar long tail stat such as "but it's also 10 times less likely to die of cancer due to cosmic radiation due to shielding by the mother's body!" Cool, but your baby doesn't actually have a 3x better chance of survival from the combination of the two effects. The thing that matters is death rates, and death rates are measured in percentage points, not ratios of percentages. Only with rates can we tell if we're going after low hanging fruit or making micro-optimisations that don't actually matter.

1 ÷ 46000 = 0.0000217391304348

1 ÷ 16400 = 0.0000609756097561

0.0000217391304348 – 0.0000609756097561 = -0.0000392364793213

-0.0000392364793213 x 100 = -0.00392364793213

.004 Percent

I'm no parent, but the act of separation during those early weeks of ones life may be necessary to prepare the person to be self-sufficient one day.

You should read some modern psychology book because this reasoning is false, especially for an infant. In French there's an amazing book by Catherine Gueguen, "pour une enfance heureuse" (For a happy childhood), it builds on the latest researches to offer guidelines. Its scientific take helped me overcome such unfounded traditional thinking as the one expressed. Sadly, I couldn' t find it in English, but there will be others.

It's completely premature preparation and many believe leads actually a much less independent person later, and on the extreme someone with severe anxieties. Imagine asking a toddler to cross the street by themself, do you just risk them getting hit by a car just so they know not to? No, more sensibly you'd be there with them to guide them until they're truly ready to do it alone.

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