![]() While bedsharing, infants have less deep sleep than when they sleep alone ( 13). According to the arousal deficiency theory, mother and infant bedsharing promotes infant arousals, which may be protective to infants at risk of SIDS ( 11, 12). The purpose of the present statement is to review the available scientific literature on the safety of various sleeping environments for infants and children, and to provide specific recommendations.īedsharing is different from solitary sleeping, especially for young infants, because of the complex auditory, visual, tactile, thermal and olfactory stimuli resulting from the close proximity of the parent. This information also needs to be conveyed to organizations that promote bedsharing (eg, for breastfeeding) so that all health care providers follow similar guidelines. It is therefore important for physicians to identify those families who will continue to bedshare despite these warnings and provide them with the evidence linking bedsharing with an increased risk of unexpected infant death. As of May 2004, the United Kingdom’s Department of Health has also advised against bedsharing, and instead recommended that babies sleep in their own crib in the parent’s room for the first six months of life ( 6). The association of these adverse outcomes with bedsharing practices prompted the CPSC in 1999 to recommend that the only safe place for babies to sleep is in a crib that meets current safety standards. These warnings come from a review of death certificates classifying the cause of death as suffocation or asphyxia. In recent years, following safety alerts from the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) in the United States ( 3– 5), there have been warnings against putting a baby in an adult bed. The North American emphasis has traditionally been on having children sleep in their own beds, which is thought to play an important role in the child’s ability to learn to separate from the parent and to see himself/herself as an independent individual. Mothers in nonwestern cultures who traditionally sleep with their children say that they do so to monitor them, keep them safe, facilitate breastfeeding and, simply, be near them. In traditional societies, babies are kept near their mother. ![]() The practice of bedsharing is not uncommon in our society and remains the routine sleeping arrangement in most of the world’s nonindustrialized cultures ( 1, 2). They should do so with an understanding of parental expectations and goals, while also taking into account the need to provide a secure physical and emotional sleeping environment for their children. Physicians should offer counsel on the relative risks of unexpected infant death for children sleeping alone or with their parents. The factors that influence the sleeping arrangements of infants and children are a combination of parental values, socioeconomic factors and cultural diversity.
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