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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

You sleep when the baby sleeps, that's how you survive.

Unless you already have a kid that needs your attention, too. Then you really feel yourself wither away.

My daughter (first child) would not sleep on her back. So, after the third week of each of us getting about 45 minutes of sleep at a time, and against current best practices, we let her sleep on her stomach. She slept, we slept in shifts so she wouldn't die on us, and we're all still here 13 years later.

My son (second child) slept from the start. Thankfully.

We tried to force the issue with both kids. Our first we kept in a rock'n'play (all of them recalled since then) for way too long, and then almost as soon as we put her in the crib she was on her belly.

Our second we used a Snoo, which helped, but she didn't actually get solid sleep until the day we moved her to her crib. We didn't even try to back sleep her at that point, she wanted to be on her belly so she was. That kid sleep trained herself, which was amazing.

> and against current best practices, we let her sleep on her stomach.

The thing about "best practices" is they always change. My mom told me that when I was a baby the "best practice" was for a baby to sleep on its stomach -- otherwise it might aspirate vomit. Both approaches are honestly probably equally fine...

The thing about SIDS is that it's basically a catch-all for every infant death that can't be explained otherwise. The relative risk is already very low and didn't really change after the back to sleep campaign started.[1]

If you look into the research there are a number of things that greatly elevate the relative risk of SIDS. Belly sleeping is, as far as I understand it, way down on the list but for parents that don't have any of the other risk factors going on it's really easy to point at and say "if you do this you will kill your baby because SIDS".

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3356149/

I don't think it's true that the relative risk didn't change. The Back-to-Sleep campaign cut down SIDS cases proper to something like a third, and the overall cases of unexpected infant death to almost half. (https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/13...)

The paper you cite seems consistent with that also: although the number of discrete risk factors was unchanged, the number of SIDS deaths per year fell to less than half after the BTS campaign, so probably not all the risk factors are equally risky...

I'm not convinced that BTS had anything to do with the drop in SIDS. The BTS campaign occurred at a time in the US when smoking rates started falling off a cliff. Between 1990 and 2018 smoking has dropped 42% [1]. Between 1992 and 2017 the rate of SUID (includes SIDS and a handful of other things that used to be commonly lumped in with SIDS) has dropped... 42% [2].

Yes, correlation does not equal causation. That said, by definition SIDS has no known cause and smoking has been identified as one of the biggest risk factors.

Edit to add: one other thing that I think is hard to track. As a parent that tried to sleep two kids on their backs, they slept terribly. In the middle of the night, in sleep deprivation fueled desperation, the two options we saw were to put them on their belly or bring them into bed with us. Cosleeping is a far greater risk factor of SUID than belly sleeping but people make that choice every day because of the shaming that doctors and nurses put on belly sleeping.

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/07/26/poll-u...

[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/sids/data.htm

By 6 months the incidence of SIDS is almost nil. This is what we learned with our kids, so it helped us tremendously because our son also sleeps on his belly.

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