The Co-Sleepover

I have a friend who has a family sleepover almost every night. (Yes, it’s the same friend who doesn’t own a tv and yes, this friend also keeps chickens in our inner-ring suburb, but that’s neither here nor there). That’s four - two adults, two children - to her queen-sized bed. That may sound uncomfortable and almost crazy, but most parents I know end up sleeping at least three to a bed a couple of nights each week. The only real difference is, this friend saves herself from the disruption of bringing a little person into the bed in the middle of the night.

Co-sleeping - that’s the medical term for this kind of arrangement - has long been one of the most divisive issues among the great debates of parenting. Whether or not you’ll let baby into your bed is a decision akin to breast over bottle, nanny or not, and vaccinate or wait (strangely, oftentimes one’s leaning in one category is an excellent predictor of what side they’ll take on the other questions). The medical community continues to investigate the pros and cons of co-sleeping. I recently read a summary of just such a study (we know I don’t read the actual studies) on Slate.com.

Before I get to the study itself, let’s take a closer look at the issue. What’s the benefit of sleeping with baby? Well, as Sydney Speisel (pediatrician and summarizer) explains it "the people who favor bed sharing believe that it promotes successful breast feeding, strengthens mother-child bonding, and may even allow parents to detect and halt Sudden Infant Death Syndrome." On the downside (which is where most pediatricians come out on this issue), co-sleeping engenders significant risks such as strangulation and suffocation; baby can be trapped in pillows and blankets or tired parents may accidentally roll over baby. I’d like to add a few thoughts to the debate. While they may not have been explored scientifically, these points are so deeply rooted in anecdotal evidence and well, fact that they really should be seen as integral to any parents decision about co-sleeping. First, co-sleeping is perhaps the most potent and reliable form of birth control. Nobody is getting it on with junior in the bed. Baby-in-bed as insurance against any kind of late night action may not be a plus for most dads, but I can pretty much guarantee that it offers immeasurable bonuses for their wives. An even bigger plus for co-sleeping is the fact that it involves sleep. That’s right, co-sleeping allows many parents to get more rest than they would with baby tucked safely into his own crib (in his own room). And I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to argue that a well-rested parent is a much safer parent throughout the day than an exhausted one.

So when doctors looked at two decades worth of infant mortality patterns in the United States, they found that more and more babies were dying of accidental suffocation and strangulation in bed, and for a lot of those babies, death occurred in co-sleeping situations. Most of those babies died when sleeping mom or dad rolled over them. But, says Speisel, that’s pretty much all the study says, "it doesn’t really give us the answer about the safety or risk of co-sleeping - it just raises enough questions to make us very nervous" Or very tired.

So what should we do with this information? Speisel suggests that letting the baby sleep in an "outrigger" device might help (not a boat, one of those three sided bassinets that attaches to the bed). And warns that parents shouldn’t "even think of bed sharing if [they] have been taking any medication, including antihistamines, which might make [them] sleep more deeply, or if [they] have been drinking an alcoholic beverage.

That sounds reasonable, but it doesn’t tell us who wins, my friend who’s still sleeping with her kids, or me who strapped my firstborn into her infant carrier to sleep every night? Wait, that’s obvious right?

Except that my friend gets an uninterrupted seven hours of sleep on a regular basis and I am up every hour and a half shuffling between bedrooms trying to talk small people back into their own beds at least a couple of nights every week.

Herein lies the real problem with this study. It only accounts for the babies that didn’t survive co-sleeping. It tells us nothing about all the other infants, both the ones that snuggled with their parents every night and the ones that went to their own, lonely cribs. Except we don’t really need a study to tell us, that every single one of those kids winds up in mom and dad’s bed at some point… in the night.