Cuddling is risky, says New York

This is one of those stories that sets my outrage-o-meter climbing higher with each detail: New York and a number of other states have launched “Babies Sleep Safest Alone” campaign, claiming that “Co-sleeping is risky.” (In multiple languages, no less.)

There appears to be no science behind this claim. New York’s Office of Children and Families claims that co-sleeping is involved in approximately 20 percent of the child fatalities reported to the Statewide Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment, but as we used to say in graduate school, let’s unpack that statement. “Involved” is an exceedingly weak verb, eliding a lot of imprecision as to what the real causes of the deaths were.. The campaign notes that alcohol, drugs, obesity, and overcrowding of the bed with people, toys, or blankets also appear to have been “involved” in these deaths.

And what about the risks of not sleeping with your baby? Of the 80 percent of child fatalities reported to the register that didn't involve co-sleeping, what fraction were caused by sleeping alone? That is, by unsafe cribs, from SIDS—the risk of which has been shown to be reduced by co-sleeping—from smothering in blankets or toys in cribs, or more broadly from whatever went wrong that was unnoticed because the baby was far away from an attentive caregiver?

This campaign and previous ones like it don’t cite studies proving cribs are safer than co-sleeping. They simply assume it. In fact, the burden of proof rightly goes the other way; humans have been sleeping with their babies since before we became human (and in most countries they still do). It’s a practice that was part of our evolution, and it seems plausible that closeness to the breathing warmth of one’s mother helps regulate all sorts of functions in the unformed human newborn. SIDS studies bear this out.

And co-sleeping makes breastfeeding a heck of a lot easier.

I got even more irritated when I read what I assumed would be a rebuttal of the campaign from Mothering magazine. The author wrote that she had planned to participate in activism against it, then decided against it.

After some reflection, I realized that New York's campaign wasn't really directed at me…The recommendation…fails to differentiate between parents with limited resources who bed-share out of necessity, those who do so out of neglect, and those who intentionally bed-share in what they believe to be the best interests of their child.”

She goes on to detail the evidence in favor of co-sleeping, but that comment illuminated one of the creepiest aspects of the campaign: its not-so-subtle classism. It’s okay for well-to-parents to choose to bed-share (or better yet buy an expensive “co-sleeper” sidecar), but heaven forbid you should do so because you’ve got nowhere else for the child to sleep. Perhaps co-sleeping is okay if you’re sober and slim and so on, but we can’t expect stupid (read poor) parents to understand that nuance and act on it. And we well-to-do, educated parents shouldn’t oppose the campaign because it isn’t directed at us.

But we’re all in this together. Official campaigns that discourage breastfeeding affect all of us. Guilt-tripping mothers for doing the most natural thing in the world affects all of us.

This seems to me yet another installment in the official valuing of the parenting money can buy over what it can’t; rich parents can buy nurseries with fancy cribs and high-tech monitors, while poor ones can only cuddle. I for one think cuddling is the better deal.