Nothing Wrong With the ‘Family Bed’
I know it’s a controversial subject and I may get some hate for it, but I’m just going to go ahead and let you all know that I’ve been co-sleeping with Charlie since his birth. It just feels right. I shouldn’t have to feel like I can’t tell people this. A National Institutes of Health, NIH, survey of 20,000 families published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA, shows the percentage of co-sleeping families rose from 7% in 1993 to 14% in 2010, while the increase was highest among African American infants: from 21% in 1993 to 39% in 2010. Co-sleeping has nearly doubled in the last twenty years. How could a culture be so educated in other things, yet be so misguided in parenting styles?”
Why is it taboo? I googled “Why are Americans so taboo about co-sleeping” and wasn’t surprised to see that exact question as been asked before. I discovered this after announcing I planned to have Charlie at home. I got emails from strangers convincing me that I was killing my baby and the same holds true when admitting you co-sleep. “You’re going to roll over on the baby and kill him, you know that, right?”
WHAT? Why is napping on the couch with your baby any different from sleeping? Still, experts insist it’s an extremely dangerous thing to do. “It just takes a second for you to lay an arm across a brand-new infant, whose lungs are so underdeveloped,” Katherine Ratcliffe, director of prevention services and the Center for Infant and Child Loss at Any Baby Can in San Antonio, tells the Chicago Tribune. ”We all like to think we sleep with one eye open, but if you’re sleep-deprived, you can roll over and not even realize it.”
I disagree. And so does sleep guru Dr. After being completely against the practice he now says co-sleeping might be suitable for some children and parents. Let’s face it. So, as CommonHealth noted last year, “…perhaps the time has come for the public health message to focus less on advising against it and more on advising how to do it more safely. Because despite all the finger-waggling, co-sleeping is, and will continue to be, extremely common.”
What about you? Where do you stand on co-sleeping?
