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?
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 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.