Six months ago, Melissa Nichols brought her baby girl, Arlo, home from the hospital. And she immediately had a secret.
“I just felt guilty and like I didn’t want to tell anyone,” says Nichols, who lives in San Francisco. “It feels like you’re a bad mom. The mom guilt starts early, I guess.”
Across town, first-time mom Candyce Hubbell has the same secret — and she hides it from her pediatrician. “I don’t really want to be lectured,” she says. “I know what her stance will be on it.”
The way these moms talk about their secret, you might think they’re putting their babies in extreme danger. Perhaps drinking and driving with the baby in the car? Or smoking around the baby?
But no. What they’re hiding is this: They hold the baby at night while they sleep together in the bed.
Here in the U.S., this is a growing trend among families. More moms are choosing to share a bed with their infants. Since 1993, the practice in the U.S. has grown from about 6 percent of parents to 24 percent in 2015.
But the practice goes against medical advice in the U.S. The American Academy of Pediatrics is opposed to bed-sharing: It “should be avoided at all times” with a “[full-]term normal-weight infant younger than 4 months,” the AAP writes in its 2016 recommendations for pediatricians. The organization says the practice puts babies at risk for sleep-related deaths, including sudden infant death syndrome, accidental suffocation and accidental strangulation. About 3,700 babies die each year in the U.S. from sleep-related causes.
AAP cites seven studies to support its recommendation against bed-sharing.
But a close look at these studies — and an independent analysis from statisticians — reveals a different picture. And some researchers say it might be time for the U.S. to reassess its recommendation and its strategy to stop SIDS.
Instinct and tradition, but is it safe?
There is no question that many moms have an instinct to sleep with their babies. And many babies have strong opinions about wanting to sleep with their moms. Demanding to be held is a newborn’s forte.
There is good reason for this mutual pull toward each other, says James McKenna, an anthropologist at Notre Dame who has been studying infant sleep for 40 years.
“Human babies are contact seekers. What they need the most is their mother’s and father’s bodies,” McKenna says. “This is what’s good for their physiology. This is what their survival depends on.
What’s more, the practice of bed-sharing is as old as our species itself. Homo sapien moms and their newborns have been sleeping together for more than 200,000 years, says anthropologist Mel Konner at Emory University.
Modern hunter-gatherer cultures provide our best insight into the behaviors of our early ancestors, and bed-sharing is universal across these groups, he says.
The practice continues to be widespread around the world. Bed-sharing is a tradition in at least 40 percent of all documented cultures, Konner says, citing evidence from Yale University’s Human Relations Area Files. Some cultures even think it’s cruel to separate a mom and baby at night. In one study, Mayan moms in Guatemala responded with shock — and pity — when they heard that some American babies sleep away from their mom. To read more from MICHAELEEN DOUCLEFF, click here.