(Photo above:  Not long after Felix was born.  Three sweethearts).

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Well well well.  In the recent paper “Bed-Sharing When Parents Do Not Smoke” (an overview or aggregate study of sorts, I believe), Bob Carpenter concludes that it is dangerous for mothers and parents to co-sleep (in the same bed) with their babies until the child reaches 3 months of age.  Another old white guy instructing me to go against biology, against my intuition, against what my babies clearly need, against attachment, against connection, and to outsource my mothering to a large plastic object that I can buy at ToysRUs for $300 (the crib).

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I find the study utterly preposterous, and verging on the insane; a mockery of humanity.  I cannot even believe that this kind of anti-mother, upside-down, opposite day whackness is given any credence in the media. I heard Bob Carpenter (the author of the “study”) being interviewed on CBC radio a couple of days ago.  His pompous, patronizing, paternalistic attitude was excruciating, and laughable–except for the fact that he was actually being given serious voice on a national broadcast.

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I won’t go into an attempt at analyzing the many ways in which the study fails to take into account confounding variables and pertinent specifics in detail, (drug use, prior health of the infant, birth experience and whether or not the baby was subjected to a high degree of interventions, parent intention, etc.).  Others can do that much better than I, but mostly I don’t even really care to dignify this idiotic study with even the pretence of seriousness.  I applaud those who have really gone into depth refuting the study, but I just can’t be bothered to scurry around defending a “practice” that is simply, in my view, an obvious and normal and evolutionary part of being a loving parent.  I don’t doubt whatsoever that the study is seriously flawed.  And I also strongly believe that there is no safer way to care for my children, from infancy onward, than the family bed.

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The biological design of birth, attachment and breastfeeding lead quite obviously, to bed-sharing, in my view.  In fact, I find it difficult to imagine that a mother who has received the full benefit of oxytocin, endorphins, prolactin, among the essential and magical birth hormones, who is high on adoration and that physical and psychic compulsion to be in close proximity with her baby, would even be able *not* to sleep next to her child to through the night.  For me, during the first 6 months (and especially the first 3) it is an absolute imperative, on a cellular level, for my babies to be on my body 24 hours a day.  For many people, this may be a major leap, but I suspect that in large part, the North American epidemic of babies being separated from their mothers and isolated in large open cages has much to do with the many rifts in normal attachment that occur during birth process, which sets the cultural stage for a parenting style that is really unique to our time in its cognitive and biological dissonance.

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The mother-baby dyad is a symbiotic relationship.  How on earth does one even go about breastfeeding a child if the expectation is that the mother is going to wake herself up every few hours to go and sit in a chair to nurse?  The very idea is preposterous, and a recipe for bottle-feeding, which goes along quite nicely with sleeping in a crib, playing in a playpen, and travelling in a chair with wheels.  Putting one’s baby in a crib to sleep also tends, I should think, to engender the use of disposable diapers.  Not only am I nursing Felix constantly through the night (while in a dream-state: aware that he is there, yet still asleep and restful), but the *very moment* he pees in his cloth diaper, I roll over and change him–because he lets me know with a little grunt, because, (and I am making another assumption here), he doesn’t find it comfortable to have wet, cold cloth strapped to his body.  Then again I hear that companies make diapers now that stay dry for *hours*, so we can just let our babies sit in their excrement all night long–easy peasy!

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The baby who sleeps in the crook of his mother’s arm, is constantly nursing, constantly safe, constantly responding to his mother’s body, constantly being responded to.   The mother who sleeps with her baby at her breast is constantly rested, constantly loved, constantly connected, constantly making milk.

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I suspect that isolating babies from their mother may well have even greater negative consequences for the emotional and psychological development of a child that far outweigh the so-called potential “risk” of dying from SIDS (the causes of which are still, for the most part, totally unknown when it comes down to individual cases) while being cared for in the normal mammalian fashion.  And considering that North America boasts the highest rates of SIDS in the developed world (much lower than countries in which bed-sharing is the norm, such as Japan, for example) I read shit like “Bed-Sharing When Parents Do Not Smoke” and I just shake my head.

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Please, don’t get me wrong.  I fully support the differing choices that parents make.  While I can’t relate to putting infants to sleep in a crib, if it works for you, if it feels good, if it gives you what you need, then great.

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But I’m getting really sick and tired of aging men, and sanctimonious professionals who leverage their academic accreditation and inflated egos to presume to tell me that it is somehow incorrect, or dangerous, to parent in a human way.

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I really hate to perpetuate our obsession with professionalism, especially in the area of parenting (we are all professionals in our families, thanks very much), but for those of who who are interested in a more academic defense of co-sleeping from my side, Dr. James McKenna is pretty good. 

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