[opo]

>... Bed sharing for sleep when the parents do not smoke or take alcohol or drugs increases the risk of SIDS. Risks associated with bed sharing are greatly increased when combined with parental smoking, maternal alcohol consumption and/or drug use. A substantial reduction of SIDS rates could be achieved if parents avoided bed sharing.

http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/3/5/e002299.full.pdf+html?sid...

The risk is low, but it is an avoidable risk...

[ksdale]

Thanks for the link! That was an interesting read. For us it was sort of a balancing test. Our analysis went something like - the risk of SIDS is really low to start with, and we don't drink or smoke, we breastfeed, we sleep in a king bed and we're both light sleepers. In addition we take precautions to make sure there aren't pillows or blankets around the baby.

Towards the end the of paper it says, 'One has to ask whether it is worth taking the risk, however small, of losing a baby, when it can be so easily avoided.' I feel like that's the justification for a lot of safety precautions that each seem like a no-brainer individually, but add up to a sterile and unpleasant (and very low mortality rate) way to raise children. But I do think that's how a lot of people look at it, basically just sleep worse and bond less with your baby to take this risk from something like 1 in 5000 to 1 in 12000. But for us at least, it lowered our quality of life to not have the baby in the bed, so it wasn't really that low cost of a way to decrease the risk, especially given that 1 in 5000 starting point.

[toasterlovin]

Somebody who thinks about risk in a reasonable way!

The crazy thing about the scare culture around raising children is that you're expected to make all these sacrifices to your quality of life so that you can eke out minuscule gains in the mortality of your infant. But nobody wants to talk about how crazy it is to then strap your kid into a steel box and hurtle around town at 60+ mph.