| We looked into this quite a bit when our child was born because we grew very skeptical of much of the guidelines we were reading. Sleep in particular was difficult for our child for various reasons and at some point we realized that following certain guidelines resulted in more risk than violating them (e.g., it became an issue of following guidelines and neither us or our child sleeping or violating guidelines prudently and getting sleep). We did not cosleep with our child. But in the process of reviewing many sleep guidelines we reviewed the literature and found it's more complicated than it seems. The NPR article doesn't summarize the complexity as well as it could. The problem is that studies of risk of cosleeping generally do not control for confounding variables very well at all, and when you do control for these confounds, the risk of cosleeping disappear. For example, in the US many cosleeping parents tend to be minority, immigrant, lower SES, etc. which is associated with other risk factors. When you control for those trends, cosleeping isn't associated with increased risk. This has lead to many sleep scientists to conclude that cosleeping research has largely been sociodemographically (e.g., ethnically) biased in design and analysis. There's a big rift between sleep scientists and pediatrics in this regard. The NPR piece proceeds along the lines of "humans have been doing this for 200000 years so it must be fine" but it's more like "people who can afford separate beds for their children tend to have a lot of money, globally speaking, and that's associated with decreased risk of infant death for a multitude of reasons having nothing to do with cosleeping." |