To be honest, we’ve never used a bassinet or crib – they’ve always slept with us – because we’re believers in Dr Sears’ work which says that it’s good for babies to have that experience. We’ve never minded it, and only moved them to their own bed when they were ready.

Here’s Dr Sears:

“Every family goes through nocturnal juggling acts at different stages of children’s development. Sharing sleep reflects an attitude of acceptance of your baby as a little person with big needs. Your infant trusts that you, his parents, will continually be available during the night, as you are during the day. Sharing sleep in our culture also requires that you trust your intuition about parenting your individual baby instead of unquestionably accepting the norms of American society. Accepting and respecting your baby’s needs can help you recognize that you are not spoiling your baby or letting him manipulate you when you welcome him into your bed.”

And it’s certainly easier than the mom waking up and having to go into another room to breastfeed in the middle of the night.

I think that in our modern age, having kids that are more connected to us, not less, is a good thing.

@NaturalPapa thanks for posting this…

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Awesome post! RT @NaturalPapa: Co-Sleepers – comments here please – balance out the alarmist! [link to post]

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@jason_sgtski -> Co-Sleeping with Baby: Attachment Parenting for Dads – [link to post] (via @naturalpapa) (via @cindyambrose)

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I am a firm believer in co-sleeping. And my kids are bigger now 14 and 10 – while we no longer share beds – we are closer than a knit sweater and they are more courageous and confident than Batman, Superman and Spidey combined.

Yeah sure I lost a few nights sleep, but heck that is what parenting is all about – giving the confidence away.

Plus, letting a baby cry himself/herself to sleep is rather brutal.

Spread the love – and show it to the kinder.

It isn’t common – and your first link, to Lawyers dot com, is a legal article, not a medical one, so I’ll throw that one out first.

I love how you only quoted the parts that you wanted to from the Dallas News article (second link). Let me help you out with that:

“The deaths haven’t been ruled definitively to be caused by bed sharing, said CPS spokesman Patrick Crimmins.

“It’s not a cause of death, it’s a sleeping circumstance,” he said.

The statistics include deaths while young children shared sofas, couches, cots, futons and waterbeds with family members. “

And:

“James McKenna, director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Lab at the University of Notre Dame, says bed sharing can be done safely and is beneficial. But he says the pediatricians’ group and government agencies routinely misuse science by claiming babies sleep safest alone. “

And from the News-medical.net article:

“The investigation into four infant deaths in 2005 and 2006, found that three died from sudden infant death syndrome where the cause of death given was bronchopneumonia in circumstances of bed sharing or an unsafe sleeping environment and the fourth was killed when a parent accidentally rolled on to the baby and smothered it. … Nine deaths occurred after the infant had been put to sleep in their own cot, but on their stomach or side.”

I leave you with this, from Dr. Sears, a pediatrician with 30 years of practice:

“One popular research study came out in 1999 from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission that showed 515 cases of accidental infant deaths occurred in an adult bed over an 8-year period between 1990 and 1997. That’s about 65 deaths per year.

The conclusion that the researchers drew from this study was that sleeping with an infant in an adult bed is dangerous and should never be done. This sounds like a reasonable conclusion, until you consider the epidemic of SIDS as a whole. During the 8-year period of this study, about 34,000 total cases of SIDS occurred in the U.S. (around 4250 per year). If 65 cases of non-SIDS accidental death occurred each year in a bed, and about 4250 cases of actual SIDS occurred overall each year, then the number of accidental deaths in an adult bed is only 1.5% of the total cases of SIDS.“

160 Texas infants die a year while co-sleeping . Do you call that rare?
During a two year period in Philadelphia, 57 babies were smothered by their sleeping parents.
Do some real research.

http://child-abuse-and-neglect.lawyers.com/Co-Sleeping-Can-Mean-Danger-for-Babies-and-Parents.html

It happens way more then we hear on the nightly or national news

“In August, two-month-old baby Lailanni Amkha died sleeping with her dad on the couch. She was the sixth Milwaukee baby killed this year sleeping with an adult.”

“During a two-year period in Philadelphia, 57 babies died co-sleeping with adults. The city responded by launching a media campaign telling parents to never sleep with their babies. ”

“A person can be charged with manslaughter or criminal negligence for disregarding a substantial risk of causing death or serious bodily harm. A Georgia court of appeals found that this legal test was met in a case where a baby was smothered when sleeping between her drunken parents. Even though it was the father who rolled onto the baby, the mother was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for bringing the baby into their bed.”
(all from above link)

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/healthscience/stories/111009dntexcosleeping.3eadba1.html

“More than 160 Texas infants die each year while sleeping in bed with family members, state statistics show, and officials are starting a campaign to warn parents of the dangers.”

Sgt. Brenda Nichols, head of the Dallas police department’s child abuse squad, said bed-sharing advocates are foolish to claim mothers and breast-fed infants will doze and wake up simultaneously throughout the night, so there’s little risk of a fatal rollover.

Just an adult arm alone can smother babies, Nichols said. An infant’s neck, shoulders and arms aren’t strong enough to push away, she said.

“For someone to say that while they’re in a dead sleep, ‘Well, I would wake up and I would know,’ well, no, you don’t,” she said. “That’s the reason we have so many of these deaths.”

It is insane to me that with these statistics people still co-sleep.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/43271902.html

http://www.news-medical.net/news/2008/07/01/39617.aspx