Clifford Nelson, a Multnomah County, Oregon, deputy medical examiner.
In an article posted on the Internet, September 1996, titled “Co-Sleeping
Deaths,” he notes, “The following unfortunate story is reported hundreds
of times in the United States each year.”
In a recent case a thirteen-day-old female infant was found dead
between her mother and father. “The baby was last breast-fed by her
mother at 2:00 A.M., at which time she was brought from her crib into the
parents’ bed. The exhausted mother had decided to keep the baby in bed
with her in case she awoke again needing to be fed,” said Nelson. Nelson
goes on to observe: “The social consequences of these cases [such as the
thirteen-day-old infant suffocation] are far reaching.”
Unfortunately, co-sleeping suffocations have become more difficult
to discern in recent years as more and more infant deaths have been
labeled as “SIDS” cases. Without a thorough autopsy, it is virtually
impossible for a medical examiner or coroner to distinguish between an
actual SIDS death and an infant suffocation death. Yet, as Dr. Nelson
pointed out, actual infant suffocations are in the hundreds to thousands a
year.
In addition to the potential for infant suffocation, there are other not-
so-obvious difficulties with infant or child cosleeping. According to Dr.
Sandra Kaplan, associate chairman of the Department of Psychiatry for
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at a hospital in New York, separate beds
for children “build a sense of competence.” She says the family bed can
be “used as a contraceptive by parents who should, instead, be dealing
with the issue between them in other ways.”^6
Dr. Laura Popper, a pediatrician and professor of clinical pediatrics at
Mt. Sinai Medical Hospital, views the family bed as “dangerous,” and has
found it is used by “the more insecure mothers.” And Dr. Richard Ferber,
director of the Center for Pediatric Sleep Disorders at Children’s
Hospital, Boston, notes, “It’s well documented that the more people there
are in a bed, the less soundly parents will sleep.”
Some countries discourage the practice. New Zealand, for example,
has cut down on infant death dramatically by educating young parents to