Co-sleeping
Throughout human history, co-sleeping has been the default sleeping method. Its most natural form is bed-sharing, in which the infant and his mother sleep together, with baby next to mother, or in her arms, or on her chest. It also includes the infant sleeping in a bassinet in the mother’s bedroom, but not in her bed. In this article the focus will be on bed-sharing.
Many people truly get fearful when they consider a mother sleeping in bed with her infant and with her body touching her baby’s during sleep. They assume that it is a dangerous practice, and go on to mention how many babies have died as a result of the mother lying on her baby, or suffocation. This fear is unrealistic and unfounded. Obviously babies have died in beds with their mothers in the same bed, but many more have died sleeping alone in cribs. There are no documented cases of a mother-infant pair co-sleeping safely in which the infant died as a direct result of a safe co-sleeping situation. When the mother is healthy (not on drugs, not drinking alcohol, not obese) and the bed is safe (blankets are not piled near baby, co-sleeping is not occurring on a couch, there are no spaces that baby can become entrapped between the bed and the wall), and the mother is nursing the infant, bed-sharing with an infant is very safe, and actually reduces the risk of SIDS.
All other mammals sleep with their infants. This is in part because sleeping with one’s baby is part of the natural course of breastfeeding. The biology of human infants also necessitates co-sleeping. Human beings are primates. We are biologically designed like the great apes (the gorilla, chimpanzee, and the orangutan). These primates carry their infants on their bodies during the day and sleep with them in-arms during the night. Human milk (and great ape milk) is low in fat and protein. This requires very frequent feedings for the baby to satisfy his caloric needs (breastfed infants are expected to receive at least 25% of their nutrition during the night).
The regulatory effect of co-sleeping is quite amazing. When babies are separated from their mothers (as during solitary sleep at night) studies have shown that these infants display a release of stress hormones, cardiac arrhythmias, loss of body heat, immunological compromises, and sleep disturbances. In recent years hospitals have employed the practice of ‘kangaroo care,’ in which parents hold their premature infants next to their skin to sleep, rather than keep the babies in incubators. These infants tend to maintain stable body temperatures much better with human bodily contact rather than in the incubator.
Human infants are born neurologically immature. This is because of our bipedal nature- in order to support the upright posture the outlet of the pelvis is much smaller. This puts restriction on the size of the infant’s head (and brain) so that it can fit through the bony pelvis during childbirth. Because of this, human infants continue their gestation for quite some time after birth and thus need continuous support in the form of constant close contact with their mothers. Sleeping next to the warm body of his mother, a baby must do nothing but rest and grow as his mother regulates his conditions and can help him to her breast, and keeps him comforted, clean, warm, and safe during the night.
Co-sleeping helps immensely with night-time care of the baby. Parents who leave their babies in cribs in another room (or even in the parents’ room) have to get up during the night to tend to the baby. It is so much easier to simply roll over to the baby and help him latch. Then the mother can fall back to sleep if she so chooses, while the baby continues to nurse. This helps the mother get much more sleep than she would if she had to get up with the baby.
If mother is practicing elimination communication then tending to the baby’s elimination needs truly requires sleeping in bed with the baby. It is difficult to be attentive to the baby’s need to urinate during the night and to meet that need quickly if the baby is someplace other than right next to the mother. All one has to do is simply lift baby and hold him over the receptacle, allow him to urinate, and then lay down and nurse him back to sleep.
Bed-sharing has been shown to reduce the risk of SIDS. Since the majority of bed-sharing pairs breastfeed, the infants tend to sleep either on their sides or backs. These positions favor easy latching-on of the breast during the night and are known to reduce the risk of SIDS (as opposed to sleeping prone). When sleeping in close proximity to his mother, an infant’s breathing and sleep patterns are regulated. The mother and infant actually share sleep patterns, with both rousing at approximately the same time. The mother’s own breath helps to maintain a steady breathing pattern in the infant, and a heavy sigh by the mother stimulates a deep breath in the infant, which can restore proper breathing after a period of apnea.
Co-sleeping infants spend less time in deep sleep and wake more frequently. At first this may seem like a negative thing, but when one realizes that SIDS occurs most often during these periods of deep sleep it can be seen how co-sleeping actually is a biological necessity. Solitary sleep actually may lead to the infant spending more time in deep sleep before the baby is physiologically mature enough to arouse himself should an episode of apnea occur. In traditional cultures where co-sleeping is the norm, SIDS is unheard of. Western culture has the highest rate of SIDS, and it also has the lowest rate of co-sleeping.
Human infants are born into this world neurologically immature, and thus need constant support in order to have their physiological and emotional needs met. Co-sleeping provides this continuity of care throughout the night that the baby expects. Western culture has pushed early independence in the form of solitary sleeping, but this condition is quite new on the human species time scale, and does not fit into the spectrum of care that infants require. There is so much money to be made in products that attempt to mimic the conditions of care an infant expects, but they all fall short, and the problem could be solved simply by mothers taking their babies into their beds at night and tending to them there.
