Every new parent wishes they were getting more sleep or better sleep. Co-sleeping can be advantageous for the mother, baby, and the rest of the family. I know I felt much more rested and had more energy for my other child, my house, and my husband when I was co-sleeping. There are many benefits to co-sleeping and some key safety tips as well.
When you consider how helpless babies are at birth co-sleeping just makes sense. Babies are biologically made to stay close to their mothers! They are predesigned to survive, grow, and thrive on human milk. Infants are also born with very tiny tummies that require frequent feedings. All of these needs are much easier to attend to if baby is sleeping next to his mother. Also, from an evolutionary perspective, across all mammals humans are born very helpless and mature slowly. Thousands of years ago a baby left to sleep alone was not likely to survive very long. Keep in mind co-sleeping is still done in many parts or the world, especially in eastern countries. The western movement to push babies to sleep alone and toward independence as a whole, I believe, is a sign of our shift from a collectivist culture to an individualist one.
There are many things said about co-sleeping to the general public. We have been warned that it is dangerous. We know babies die from SIDS and they have been looking high and low for a cause. Everyone seems to want a neat and tidy answer for what has happened to these babies and I understand why. I believe co-sleeping has been given a bad reputation because people need something to blame and not based on actual scientific evidence.
Dr. William Sears suggests that, “In those infants at risk for SIDS, natural mothering [unrestricted breastfeeding and sharing sleep...
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... help us to lengthen the duration. Our babies, our bodies and our families can reap the benefits of a happier and better rested mother-baby pair.
Works Cited
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McKenna, James J. “Safe Cosleeping Guidelines.” Mother-Baby Behavioral Laboratory, University of Notre Dame. N.d. Web. 22 March 2014
McKenna, James J. Joyce, Edmund P. "Cosleeping and Biological Imperatives: Why Human Babies Do Not and Should Not Sleep Alone." Neuroanthropology.net. n.p. 21 December 2008. Web. 8 March 2014
Sears, William. Nighttime Parenting How to Get Your Baby and Child to Sleep. Franklin Park Illinois. Le Leche League International, 1990. Print.
Quattlebaum, Amy. Personal Interview. 17 March 2014.
Sara believed that it was important for the infant to establish a sense of security by sleeping in the same room as the parents early on, so that in the future when the child becomes old enough to sleep in a different room, the child will feel secure and be calm even when she is alone by knowing that her parents are just in the other room. One way to understand the link between Sara’s sleeping arrangements and her goal of making the infant feel more secure is to consider Erik Erikson’s psychosocial stages of development (Erikson, 1963) The first stage of Erikson’s (1963) theory is trust versus mistrust, during which babies come to trust that their caregivers and other people will meet their physical and emotional needs or start to mistrust that the parents and other people will not take care of them. Sara hoped that by sleeping near her infant so that she could let her child see her when the child goes to sleep or wakes up in the middle of the night, the infant could feel more safe, or “trust,” that the infant’s needs would be tended to whenever necessary. The “trust” would then impact the child’s future development and especially when the time comes for the child to move to a separate room. The child, having received reliable
Imagine you just had a baby and you are taking him/her home today. It comes to bed time; would you have your child sleep with you in the bed or in a crib? Co-sleeping is an important decision when it comes to parenting. Co-sleeping is when a baby, from birth to age two, sleeps with their parents in the same bed. It is also a big discussion if co-sleeping is a good idea or not. Many people have different opinions. I have a couple of sources that look at both sides of the issue. Three of the sources are blogs. Two out of the three shows advantages of co-sleeping and the other is against co-sleeping. My mother, who is another source, is against co-sleeping due to some experience with me when I was a baby. One study that is very interesting looks
Another point of contention about co-sleeping is the age of the baby or child at which parents can allow them to share their bed. Again, with this matter, opinions differ, with some experts warning parents about the danger of suffocating their babies in bed while asleep. It has been reported that the rate of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is higher for infants who sleep in an adult bed than in a crib. It is also estimated that about 100 infant deaths occur each year in the US due to parents accidentally laying over and suffocating their babies while sleeping. Oth...
In many cultures it is customary for newborns to sleep in the same room as their mother, if not sleep in the same bed (Morelli, Rogoff, Oppenheim, & Goldsmith, 1992). The Mayan mothers slept in the same bed as their infants, also known as cosleeping following Lozoff et al.’s 1984 definition) (as cited in Morelli et al., 1992). Most of U.S. families in the study temporarily shared a room with their newborn. The newborns slept in a bassinet or crib near the parents’ bed. None slept with their newborns consistently (Morelli et al., 1992). A survey found that of 100 societies American parents were the only ones to keep separate rooms for their infants (as cited in Morelli et al., 1992). Previous research indicates that in middle- to upper-class U.S. families cosleeping is an uncommon practice (as cited in Morelli et al., 1992). Aside from the sleeping arrangements, U.S. and Mayan mothers differ in practices regarding feeding. Mayan mothers nursed their child on demand until the child was about 2 or 3 years old and did not have to actively think about feeding their infant in the middle of night. In contrast, 17 of the 18 U.S. mothers reported staying awake during night feedings, which lasted roughly 6 months. The method of feeding for U.S. mothers varied with some breastfeeding and some bottle-feeding their child (Morelli et al., 1992). Mayan mothers did not have bedtime routines and their infants would often fall asleep with the rest of the family. In the United States, bedtime routines were influential in the families’ nighttime activities (Morelli et al., 1992). While there are variations in the child rearing practices amongst cultures, the excitement and happiness a child brings is
This routine can cause chronic sleep deprivation for mothers, who may decide it is best to night wean their babies. Even if other mothers continue to nurse or bottle-feed their babies at night, babies usually give up feeding at night and sleep longer hours on their own.
Co-sleeping is a standard nurturing decision in many cultures and is the norm in various countries. Co-sleeping is described as an infant sleeping near or on the surface space to his
Child experts agree that newborn babies are too young to train to sleep on their own. Although many pediatricians and other experts have their own opinions on how to sleep-train a baby, everyone agrees that this process should start when the baby is a little older. Sleep-training is a process where the parent or care giver either allows a baby to cry it out or a parent to sit it out until the baby is asleep. The baby is being trained in these methods to put herself to sleep and to sleep longer at night. However, babies who are below three months old are not able to stop crying or soothe themselves to sleep unless their needs are met. These include the need for feeding and frequent change of diapers, which occur more often compared to older babies.
To know for sure if co-sleeping is a bad idea, we must look past what we think is dangerous and find facts supporting our cause. There has been many cases in which, an infant gets trapped or wedged between a headboards. Infants are not supposed to sleep with bedding, such as; pillows, or blankets. There are many different scenarios when co-sleeping is okay. When you are napping, when you’re not actually in a deep sleep, and when the baby in sleeping and you’re just resting.
Silberman, Stephanie A. The Insomnia Workbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Getting the Sleep You Need. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, 2014. Print.
In the United Kingdom alone, about one-third of the population is sleep deprived (Cho, n.d.). What more when it pertains to the world statistic? From different cultures and beliefs from around the world, people are bounded by an increasing commonality- sleep deprivation. Unfortunately, most of these cases are untreated. In present times, sleeping has been taken for granted to the point that millions are sleeping below the suggested amount. It is a growing concern as people who neglect the proper amount of sleep now start at a very early age. People assume that sleeping is simply a regenerative process in which hours of present sleep can be gained from hours lost.
There has been a constant debate of whether co-sleeping is beneficial or detrimental to infants development. But studies have shown that co-sleeping with the parent influences emotional development between the parent and the infant. By co-sleeping with the parent the warmth from their body in addition, to the sense of protection allows for attachment between the two. The infant is able to follow the breathing rhythm of their parent while co-sleeping as well. Exposing infants to toxins in parents’ breath also assist in development. Furthermore, co-sleeping has been seen to have prolonged effects on social interactions between the parent and child. The purpose of this paper is to review how co-sleeping is beneficial to infants development.
Much of society mistakenly believes that each individual needs eight hours of sleep in order to have a full night’s rest. This is untrue because the amount of sleep you need has a large dependence on the many factors that influence healthy energy. Age is a large indicator of how much sleep is relevant to an individual. Studies done by Milner (2008), “Benefits of napping and an extended duration of recovery sleep on alertness and immune cells after acute sleep restriction” show that an adult needs nine hours a day in order to carry out work productively, feel rejuvenated, and maintain contented moods. In contrast, infants tend to need more time to rest their bodies even though they are less active. A young baby spends 2/3rds of their day
Important public policy issues have arisen in our modern 24-hour society, where it is crucial to weigh the value of sleep versus wakefulness. Scientific knowledge about sleep is currently insufficient to resolve the political and academic debates raging about how much and when people should sleep. These issues affect almost everybody, from the shift worker to the international traveler, from the physician to the policy maker, from the anthropologist to the student preparing for an exam.
New parents often wonder when the best time is to train a baby to sleep through the night.
"Common Sleep Problems." KidsHealth - the Web's Most Visited Site about Children's Health. Ed. Mary L. Gavin. The Nemours Foundation, 01 Jan. 2011. Web. 08 Mar. 2014.