It seems like the most natural thing in the world to bring your baby into bed with you and give this tiny scrap of humanity all the closeness, comfort and reassurance you can. Mothers who do it know it quietens a fretful baby, and allows them to breast-feed without having to stumble out of bed into the shocking chill of the early hours in a half-dazed, sleep-deprived state of resentment.
But we must not do it, say authoritative bodies including the UK’s Department of Health and a leading charity. We must go against our instincts because we are risking our baby’s lives. Bed-sharing is a risk for cot death.
The Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths and the department say categorically that the safest place for a baby is in a cot in the parents’ bedroom. Babies must sleep alone. Breast-feeding mothers should wake up, get up in the cold gray dawn, pick them up, settle in a comfortable armchair, feed them and then put them back in the cot and hope they won’t wail piteously for long.
This message was strongly repeated by the foundation on the publication of a study this week by the British Medical Journal, which the foundation itself funded. “Latest findings by researchers from Bristol University ... confirm that ‘the safest place for a baby to sleep is in its own cot.’ This four-year study ... found that in half of all unexpected deaths of children in the southwest of England, babies had died sleeping with a parent or carer,” said the foundation’s press release.
What is worrying, the release went on, is that 25 percent of mothers in a survey “were not persuaded that bed-sharing can increase the risk of cot death.”
But anyone who read the full paper, by a very experienced and well-respected team from Bristol and Warwick universities, would be hard pushed to believe it either.
Yes, the study found that 54 percent of cot deaths occurred while the baby was co-sleeping with a parent. But although the risk was strong if they had crashed out on the sofa, it was only significant among those in a bed if the parent had drunk more than two units of alcohol or had been taking drugs.
This is a serious, heavyweight piece of research by a team with impeccable credentials who have been working in this field for 20 years. They looked at all sudden unexplained infant deaths (SIDS — often referred to as cot deaths) in the southwest of England between the start of 2003 and the end of 2006. After campaigns in the 1990s on the dangers of putting babies to sleep on their fronts, the number of cot deaths has dropped dramatically — by half.
But there were still enough deaths (79) in this study to make their conclusions valid.
Peter Fleming, professor of infant health and developmental physiology at Bristol University, one of the study authors, was appalled by the misinterpretation, as he sees it, of the paper in the media last week. “I really felt quite uncomfortable about it,” he said to this reporter on Thursday.
“My view is that the positive message of this study is that it says don’t drink or take drugs and don’t smoke, particularly for breast-feeding mothers. We did not find any increased risk from bed-sharing. It is a very different message from the one the media picked up.”
You can say that half the deaths occurred while babies slept with their parents. You could also say that half the deaths occurred while babies were alone in their cots, he says, but: “I don’t see anybody saying, ‘Don’t put your baby in a cot.’”
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