Posted on 07/04/2007 4:19:23 PM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
Very sad. There is no reason for this.
Common sense is in short supply.
I slept with all my babies. It was a good way to wake up stiff and achy, because I would not bend an ankle before waking up and checking where they were.
Not that I trusted dh, a very sound sleeper - I made myself a wall around the baby.
Mrs VS
Let me guess...
But I also didn’t get drunk or do drugs while doing so.
No, I didn’t get a lot of deep, restfull sleep in the first year, but then again, I didn’t expect to do so....
People have been sleeping with their babies for a long time. It has to be something else.
Wow. I was almost afraid to admit I too slept with my baby. I mean, yeah, you can roll over on the baby but mothers just don’t do that. That is sober mothers not on a drug induced high. Babies will cry if you roll on them I would imagine and again, a mother, a REAL mother, would hear that infant at first whimper.
I just don’t buy that sleeping with an infant can kill the thing. There’s more to this story than meets the eye.
What am I not seeing or understanding here?
Please see my post CD. I had the same reaction but I posted before you.
Sleeping with babies just does NOT kill them. You’ll have to convince me.
You need a firm unsagging mattress, pillows well out of the way, and light covers only. We also took the foam pad off the mattress. The most successful arrangement was taking one side rail off the crib, and wedging it against the bed with NO gaps - wired the frames together. The crib mattress was half an inch lower than the bed mattress. I could keep an arm around the baby, pull him/her in to nurse, not worry about dh rolling over, and have a little more room to sleep in.
Mrs VS
I’m not questioning the number of deaths, but as to the “confirmed” cause, I call BS.
IMO, there are allot of people getting away with infanticide or as the Liberals would say “forth trimester abortions”.
Although I slept with mine, it’s not for everybody. I was a very light sleeper and rarely moved an inch all night long. Which by the way is a difficult habit to break. :(
As for people not being able to afford a crib, that’s baloney. If a person hasn’t the brains to find a free crib, they can put the baby where they were sleeping, and sleep on the floor. Or put the baby in a box. According to my mother, that was not uncommon when she was little, and no shame either. (Unlike accepting welfare.)
I slept with my baby because that made it so easy to nurse him at night. Mothers have done this safely for 10,000+ years.
One possible hypothesis on the SIDS cases:
Maybe it’s one of those correlated-but-not-causal things. Like for instance, African-American women tend to have higher rates of gestational diabetes, pregnancy-related hypertension, and premature delivery. That may contribute to the SIDS deaths (that would be the causal part.)
But those same women may have been more likely to co-sleep with their babies because they felt the baby was a little frail and they felt co-sleeping would be more responsive and protective. To keep him cuddled-close and warm, etc.
Which is a mother’s natural and beneficial instinct to do: to stay as close to a very frail baby as she can.
So there’s a correlation, but the SIDS isn’t caused by the co-sleeping, it’s caused by the pregnancy risk-factors and prematurity.
Of course, if the baby has actually been laid-on and smothered, it could be because the mother has a drinking or drug problem which would cause the mother to pass out on the bed and not realize she’s overlaid the baby.
Heartbreaking.
I agree with all of your first-hand experiences. There’s got to be more to this story because people cannot be THIS stupid. Well, one would at least hope so!
I was never blessed with an infant...my son was nearly four when he came into my life, well on his way to independence already. But fourteen nephews and nieces later, I’ve had plenty of “baby fixes” over the years. :)
I don't know when that changed--but I continue to tell my kids to put their kids on their tummies to sleep. It just makes better sense to me.
I don’t get it. My babies all slept on their tummies and survived. They had fitted bed sheets. But they all were able to raise their heads from that position practically from birth. I would think it would be easier for them to choke if on their backs.
That’s what I was taught too — put the babay to sleep on his/her tummy. But that has changed in recent years. Some people think the baby is going to smother that way, but all my babies were able to lift their heads almost from the beginninng. We had a bassinet for the first one until we could get the crib refinished. My husband used to call her “Little Turtle Head” because she was always trying to craneher neck to see over the side.
I think the baby feels more secureon his/her tummy. Have you ever wakened suddenly from sleep andnotknown where you are for an instant — had the feeling that you werefalling? I imagine that infants feel that way when they waken on their backs — nothing to hang on to.
Nonsense. Our baby arrived 10 days early, before the bassinet was delivered. She slept very nicely in a dresser drawer lined with a crib sheet . . . just like thousands of Southern farm babies before her!
I kept the bassinet right by my side of the bed, where I could stroke her back and just pick her up to nurse. When she slept through the night, she went into a drop-side crib in her own room, but if we hadn't had a bassinet or a crib, we could have just used the BOTTOM dresser drawer!
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