Attachment parenting: stop the madness
Posted by Dalton48 on 05 Jun 2007 at 08:05 am | Tagged as: Current Events, Small people
You’re literally smothering your children to death:
Of 30 infant deaths in 2006 and the first months of 2007, Cairns said that 20 were caused by “co-sleeping” with adults or other unsafe sleeping environments.
Just last Friday, a review of 10 autopsy reports from the Hospital for Sick Children showed that eight were the result of unsafe sleeping accommodations.
(I realize I’m preaching to the converted here. But you never know who may stumble across the site.)
That’s actually very misleading. Data on this typically show that co-sleeping babies die when very fat and/or drunk/high people roll over on them, not during typical sleeping arrangements. Another high-risk “co-sleeping” arrangement typically involves mom & baby sleeping on a couch in an overcrowded apartment. They also did not provide sufficient data for an adequate risk comparison, e.g. numbers of kids that died in cribs (getting stuck between mattress & bars, getting clothing caught on something, getting tied up in the sheet, etc.).
Also, in the printed version there were the two utterly inaccurate and moderately dangerous bits of advice packed into this one sentence: “The baby should be placed face down and the blanket should be tucked in.” I notice that the online version corrected it to “face up” but they did not remove the reference to the blanket. There should be no blanket, as is mentioned further along in the article.
Yeah, Cairns had to put out a press release today to point out that his report specifically recommends putting babies to bed on their backs:
Unfortunately some media outlets have been reporting that the coroners’
office is recommending that children be laid on their stomachs. “This is
absolutely not correct,” emphasizes Dr. Cairns. “Babies should be put to sleep
on their backs and not on their stomachs.”
I know that *typically* these deaths have been because parents have been drunk or high, but I’m not sure that’s the case here. This report apparently says that for every death of a child in a crib between 2003-2006, 3-4 died in a co-sleeping arrangement. However, since the report isn’t actually posted anywhere there’s no way of checking this… until tomorrow when I’m at work and can probably look at it.