Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
(@): on cosleeping
this is a fascinating Blog entry... I find stuff like this infuriating, because it really is trying to scare people out of cosleeping:
==========
New York State Lies About Infant Sleep Dangers
"Babies sleep safest alone."
If you're in New York state, you've probably seen or heard the TV or radio ads put out by the Office of Children and Family Services declaring this. If you're elsewhere, chances aren't bad that your county has launched a similar effort, trying to warn everyone not to sleep next to their babies no matter what.
They're well intentioned, trying
to prevent tragic deaths of infants. But by applying a scientific
double standard and by refusing to differentiate between safe and
dangerous ways to cosleep these public health campaigns are promoting
distortions of the more complicated truth that may have the side effect
of increasing SIDS and accident deaths, both still much more common
causes of death.
As I write in today's Metroland article "Babies Sleep Safest Where?," here are two of the central problems with saying "babies sleep safest alone":
(1) Babies who actually sleep alone, as in without an adult sleeping in the same room, have twice the risk of SIDS, according to the 2006 Sudden Unexpected Deaths in Infancy study. Even the American Academy of Pediatrics specifically recommends against putting infants to sleep in their own room. (If asked, OCFS isn't against room sharing, but they don't mention that not doing it is dangerous, and it doesn't bother them that their campaign slogan could easily be misconstrued as being against it.)
(2) The "Babies Sleep Safest Alone"
campaign, and most of the other groups fighting bedsharing, are relying
on numbers that don't sort out drunk babysitters who smoke next to
infants face down on couches from breastfeeding mothers on a bed that
has been carefully set up to remove safety hazards (or, of course, any
of the shades of gray in between). They also don't have accurate
numbers for how many people bedshare, meaning they can't translate
numbers of deaths into meaningful, comparable death rates.
And yet, they insist that sleeping next to an adult is always more
dangerous than sleeping a crib, which is as silly as blaming crib
sleeping per se for the deaths of infants who strangle on badly made
cribs or suffocate on unsafe crib bedding. In fact, a case can be made that if done following all safety precautions,
bedsharing actually has a protective function against SIDS, by
regulating immature infant respiratory response. (In countries with low
smoking rates and high breastfeeding and cosleeping rates, SIDS is
nearly nonexistant.)
In the end, there are so many factors to weigh and so many different kinds of risks and benefits to balance that only parents can make the call. They should be helped with information about what makes infant sleep safe or not safe?in all locations?without being bullied into what what mother called "an uninformed choice." To be fair, campaigns like New York's do list some of these risk factors in their print materials, but on TV and radio and in headlines, they only say you shouldn't sleep next to your baby at all.
There are definitely times and contexts (a fair number of them even) when bedsharing isn't safe and a cosleeper crib or crib near the bed makes more sense. But there are also huge number of benefits to safe bedsharing, including increased breastfeeding success rates (which itself saves infant lives), so there are real losses to jumping to these extreme and inaccurate soundbites.
Unfortunately, the debate
is getting so polarized and oversimplified that some child protective
workers are being instructed to charge parents with neglect for
cosleeping, period?while not being taught anything else about sleep
risks, including SIDS. Way to drive bedsharing families underground and
away from safety information they could use.
To come down off my high horse for a moment: I understand the passion here. The prospect of smothering your baby with your body* is more distressing to think about than the knowledge that babies sometimes die quietly and mysteriously in the other room. It's like how it's scarier to contemplate being the victim of violence than to think about car crashes, even though car crashes are the much greater risk. But the thing is, basing safety behaviors and public health campaigns on what's more emotionally wrenching to contemplate doesn't actually save more lives. You need to actually look at all the facts for that.
(Image from Babies Sleep Safest Alone video PSA.)
For
more on the evolutionary history of human sleeping arrangements, and
the social history of our belief that babies should sleep alone, check
out the work of Dr. James McKenna.
I am the 99%.
Re: (@): on cosleeping
I'm totally getting a co-sleeper bassinet if I ever get KU.
My twins have slept with me and my husband since birth - first on our chests while we were propped up on the couch and now all of us sprawled out on the bed with the cat.
I can confidently say cosleeping only kills one thing: your sex life.
Thank God for creativity!
Geez, NYS is really over the top...
...some New York counties and individual CPS workers are already ready and willing to call bedsharing automatically neglectful.
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.?
?
We got the arm's reach cosleeper which seems like a good compromise between bed sharing and a crib. I'm looking forward to not crawling out of bed every single time the baby needs something at night.
If a family was found to have continued cosleeping after that, Olney says, her agency would file formal child-welfare charges against them.
Another piece of evidence as to why I am so pro gov't reform. This is how we are spending our tax dollars? Going after people being GOOD parents? Jesus.
*disclaimer: Not co-sleeping does not make one a bad parent
ditto!!!
I am the 99%.
That's horrible.?
We were definitely not planning on cosleeping, but just today I've discovered that she already sleeps MUCH better next to me in the bed than alone in her little bin/crib/bed even right next to my bed (as in, she actually sleeps when she's next to me instead of sleeping/quietly fussing). So I will not be surprised if we end up cosleeping after all, at least for a little while.?