OK I need to say this: to new parents

[I have WHAT in my yard?]

I worked for several years with an inter-disciplinary team for youth fatality review in a major city.

Please if you wish to co-sleep with your infant please please get a side car or bassinet. Do not sleep with an infant in your bed with you.

There is nothing I can say to comfort a woman who has smothered her own child with her breast. There is no other time in your life that you are more exhausted. Nurse in your bed certainly but please place your child back on a firm surface.

They do not need pillows or blankets or toys in their cribs. Use snuggli style sleepers. There really should not be anything in their crib until they are able to turn over independently.

Please. I had to quit this position because it simply broke my heart. But, this week's report (I still get them) just spit it out again. You have no idea how many children die this way..... And it is SO easy to prevent.

 

[alabamachick]

My daughter slept in her Arms Reach Co-Sleeper for the first 6 months. IIIII could NOT sleep if she slept in the bed with me... Not to mention the dangers of co-sleeping.

Now that she is in her own bed, and 7 months old, I'll try taking naps with her in my bed, and she doesnt WANT to touch me while trying to sleep (because she sweats maybe?).

IMO the Co-Sleeper is the way to go, makes BFing easy, and keeps baby close by! ALSO makes the transition from mommys bedroom to their own room MUCH easier!

 

[Mattemma]

I coslept with both kids,and agree that it is safer and easier to sleep with the side bed.If I could do it over again I would do it that way!

 

[HHandbasket]

Years ago, I had a friend who lost her 3-month-old son this way. It was just devastating for all of us who knew the family. The worst part was the CPS scrutiny and investigation that went on for months and months (as is the norm in these cases, just to be sure the mother didn't purposefully smother the child). Workers showed up at her house and regularly questioned her then-3-year-old daughter. Both of the baby's parents and all the grandparents had to undergo several series of questioning by investigators. This poor woman rolled over from exhaustion at night while nursing & her baby was tragically smothered and died. The investigators wouldn't even release the baby's body to be buried until a thorough autopsy had been done, along with a number of other "special tests"--took them almost 2 weeks to get the baby buried.

I want to die inside anytime I hear of this tragedy happening to someone because I remember what my friend "L" went through. What a nightmare.

 

[I have WHAT in my yard?]

It's a terrible tragedy whenever a child dies.

But, when a mother loses her child because she does not know or is told that co-sleeping is best, it just about kills me. The Del-Mar-Va region had 6 co-sleeping deaths LAST WEEK. That is 6 innocent babies and often innocent mothers who lost their child through mostly lack of awareness of the problem. And sadly some BF advocates wrongly tell mothers co-sleeping is best without recommending a side car. I am a HUGE advocate of breast feeding, but not co-sleeping.

Back when I was working with this group I attended many autopsies and it never ceased to tear me up for days. When I was pregnant I resigned. I am grateful for the people who do this. If you think your friend suffered from the investigation, but after watching the Caylee Anthony trial do you blame them?? There was a woman in Philadelphia ten years ago who lost baby after baby to SIDS (or so it seemed) until the pattern for one thing and renewed investigation showed that the baby always died soon after the boyfriend left.... There would be this tragedy he would come back she would have another child and it would start all over again.....

 

[ChickenfootDuckbutt]

ok, I'm not meaning to ruffle anyones feathers the wrong way here, but I must contridict.

my(soon to be ex) wife and I co-slept with our DD since she was a week old, and my wife is a rather large chested woman, and breastfeeds too.


we would sleep, either DD in the middle,wife next to the wall and myself at the side of the bed facing the floor, or baby next to the wall, wife beside her and myself beside wife.

now, niether of us were light sleepers before DD was born, we could sleep like rocks, but after we started to co-sleep (which was actually my idea), I was a feather-light sleeper and so wasn't my wife, if DD woke up, or moved, one of the other would feel it.

DD will be two in september and her mother still co-sleeps with her, she has been fine, she has her own toddler bed now, and will take naps in it, but she sleeps with her mom at night.

so long as the parent(s) are careful and don't take sleeping meds or do drugs or drink which may keep them from being aware of their baby, then most mothers have an awereness about them.


saying that co-sleeping is ALL bad and people SHOULN'T do it, isn't right IMO, sure if you don't FEEL like you can be safe with a sleeping baby in your bed, don't for the safety of your child, but otherwise there is no reason NOT to, that is the way it should be anyway, mother and baby should be together, not across the room, where IF something were to happene to the baby in it's sleep, the parents would never know.

I've heard far more stories of babies suffocating in cribs, or falling inbetween the bars and matress then babies who have died while co-sleeping,

case and point the ONE time we put DD in her crib to nap when she was just over a year, we came to check on her, she had CHEWED a strip of paint off the side of the crib!, and had swollowed it, this crib is "one of the best" and cost 400$!!!!!, but yet a 14 month old baby could chew wood and PAINT off?, and swollowed it?, yeah i don't think so

took DD to the doc as soon as we saw that, btw she was fine obviously, but still we swore off cribs forever.


again, I don't mean to ruffle feathers, everyone has their own parenting styles, do what you will as my grandfather says,I'm staying out of it

 

[The Burg Peeps]

I am with ChickenfootDuckbutt on this one.

I co-slept with both of my children from the day they were born up to a year... and would do it again. My children slept against my body with me on my side and I never once rolled on them or put them in any danger. People who have a glass of wine with dinner and co-sleep, have mattresses that sit away from their bed frame, have sleeping disorders, or take ANY TYPE of medication while co-sleeping, waterbed co-sleeping and sleeping with more than one child in the bed are the problem. To say Co-sleeping is outright unsafe is pretty silly, IMO. I can give you a few things to read that may help one understand the benefits as well as the risks with both co-sleeping and crib sleeping. It is a family decision and parents who chose either sleeping arrangement should not be judged! What is right for one may not be right for another. Much of southern Europe, Asia, Africa and Central and South America practice co-sleeping over cribs. In 1998, 60% of parents said they practiced bedsharing in Japan and Japan, another industrialized country, not only has one of the lowest infant mortality rates (less than 3 infants per 1000 live births compared with around 7 for the United States), but one of the lowest SIDS rates in the world (between .2 and .3 babies per 1000 live births compared with approximately .5 per 1000 infants for the US). Just FYI!

Whatever one's choice... no judgement shall come from me!
Peace!

http://www.naturalchild.org/james_mckenna/cosleeping_world.html
http://www.askdrsears.com/topics/sleep-problems/faqs-about-sleep-problems/safe-co-sleeping-research
http://www.phdinparenting.com/2009/01/09/cosleeping-benefits/
Yhttp://www.phdinparenting.com/2009/01/11/co-sleeping-safety/
http://kidshealth.org/parent/general/sleep/cosleeping.html#

 

[dewey]

Tragically, crib sleeping has more than double the death rate of bedsharing with an adult.

Quote: "Data from the Consumer Product Safety Commission on unintentional infant suffocations from 1980 to 1997 shows that where the sleeping location was known, four times as many deaths happened in cribs as in adult beds. Mothering magazine took bedsharing rates from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System and calculated that by the government’s own numbers, crib sleeping may actually be more than twice as dangerous as bedsharing. Better studies need to be done, but clearly there is cause to question the assumption that crib sleeping is safest...

Second, and perhaps more important, anti- bedsharing studies, public health campaigns, and even coroner reports rarely distinguish between unsafe bedsharing with multiple risk factors (see sidebar), and bedsharing that follows accepted safety rules. If a baby dies sleeping on the same surface with an adult—even if there were multiple known risk factors, from an intoxicated caregiver to being on a sofa or waterbed—it is almost always blamed on bedsharing as a practice. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, for example, after detailing how entrapment in bed frames or inappropriate bedding accounts for the majority of deaths in adult beds, concludes that adult beds are always bad places for infants to sleep...

A double standard, however, is applied to crib sleeping: If a baby dies in a recalled crib or in a crib with an ill-fitting mattress or large fluffy pillows or a dangling blind cord, or while sleeping on its stomach, the death is blamed on the practices and not crib sleeping itself...

Colleen Olney, director of Services for Oneida County Child and Adult Welfare, says that her agency investigates “reports of cosleeping.” If parents say that the baby sleeps in bed with them, or cannot show a separate sleeping location for the baby, then she says the agency educates them about the dangers of bedsharing and helps them get a crib and appropriate bedding for it.

If a family was found to have continued cosleeping after that, Olney says, her agency would file formal child-welfare charges against them.

Olney says they consider all bedsharing to be unacceptable, regardless of context.

They do not, however, tell parents that babies should not be in cribs in a room by themselves because that raises SIDS risk.

“That wouldn’t be a CPS issue per se,” explains Olney. “That issue is more public educational. CPS is related to imminent risk.” When asked if that meant she had evidence that bedsharing risks were higher than a doubled SIDS risk, Olney said she couldn’t comment." Entire article: http://metroland.net/back_issues/vol31_no41/features.html

Following safety guidlines and safe sleeping practices no matter where an infant sleeps seems to be key. One of my best friends, tragically, lost a child to a crib.

 

[EweSheep]

I do this for our daughter and never had a problem. I was a very light sleeper and I slept in the middle, hubby next to my back and dd next to me, and I did have a bassinett next to our bed. I didn't want to get up and bf her so I let her snuggle next to me. Not once a problem. Nor did the doctors said otherwise.

From what my doc said SIDS and infant deaths, were caused from overfluff items in bed, wrong crib bar sizes, sleeping on stomach or vomiting in their own food/overfull and put to bed. So many factors play into this and it is each and every parent decision how they want to sleep with their children. Overseas do it much more often and not very many deaths. Drinking or doing drugs or having medications that makes you less aware would jeopardize the life of the child.

As far as I know, two cousins of mine had near deaths in cribs, getting hung up or sleep apnea.

 

[CluckyJay]

I must say, I breastfed until my son was 18 months old--and we co-slept as well. He couldn't so much as hiccup without me waking up.

I think the majority of these deaths can probably be linked to some sort of medication or alcohol use. That and some people just sleep too hard or to violently to co-sleep. If we ever have another baby, I will breastfeed and co-sleep with him/her too.

My sister is quite busty, was like triple J or some such stuff. She breastfed and co-slept with her babies/husband ...

My main concern is I am such a paranoid person that even though he falls asleep in his own bed at night now ...I bring him to my room when his daddy gets back from hunting. LOL