Issues Surrounding Cosleeping and SIDS Risk
Victoria Fisher
Glendale AZ USA
Report from 2001 LLLI Conference
From: NEW BEGINNINGS, Vol. 18 No. 5, September-October 2001, p. 175
James McKenna, PhD, and Lawrence
Gartner, MD, spoke on "Issues Surrounding Cosleeping and SIDS Risk."
The talk covered a huge amount of material and explained different recent
studies on the subject.
McKenna discussed the US
Consumer Product Safety Commissions's (CPSC) recommendation that parents
never sleep with their children. The CPSC report made headlines in newspapers
and on television stations across the United States when it was released
three years ago. McKenna explained how the commission's data was obtained
and how this influenced its conclusions. The CPSC's conclusion that
cosleeping is dangerous to infants was drawn from summations of information
from death certificates, many of which provided insufficient information
about the environment in which the baby died and possible causes.
McKenna pointed out that
the commission did not account for where the cosleeping took place (some
of the deaths occurred when adults and infants were sleeping on couches),
or whether the parent was under the influence of drugs or alcohol. McKenna
said that proper research techniques were not used to gather data to
support the recommendation that the only safe place for a baby to sleep
was in a CPSC-approved crib.
Gartner and Lawrence agreed
that sleeping with infants promotes breastfeeding. They both said it
is inappropriate for agencies to recommend against cosleeping.
The session blended information
and humor. The audience was surprisingly alert and lively even though
this session took place at the end of a hectic day, possibly because
this topic was of such intense interest.
Last updated Friday, September 29, 2006 by njb.
Page last edited Sun Oct 14 09:30:27 UTC 2007.
