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Sidebar: Confessions of a Bed Lizard

The Family Bed: It's Safe and Here's Why
Issue 98, January/February 2000

On September 29, 1999, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) issued a warning against placing babies in adult beds. This warning was based on a study by the Center for Injury Research and Policy at John Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. The researchers, Dorothy A. Drago, MA, MPH, and Andrew L. Dannenberg, MD, MPH, retrospectively reviewed 2,178 case summaries from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission’s Death Certificate File for the years 1980 to 1997. Their purpose was to look for specific patterns and products associated with mechanical suffocation among infants younger than 13 months of age.

CPSC Chairman Ann Brown sums up the "findings" of the study: "Don’t sleep with your baby or put the baby down to sleep in an adult bed. The only safe place for babies is in a crib that meets current safety standards and has a firm, tight-fitting mattress. Place babies to sleep on their backs and remove all soft bedding and pillow-like items from the crib."

The study was met with strong criticism from distinguished SIDS and infant sleep researchers, mother-infant experts, forensic scientists, infant sleep safety experts, pediatricians, journalists, and La Leche League International health professionals. James J. McKenna, PhD, director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame, and Lawrence M. Garter, MD, co-author of the American Academy of Pediatrics Statement on Breastfeeding and professor at the University of Chicago, sharply criticized the study in a letter to the journal Pediatrics.

The Drago and Dannenberg research was criticized for not adequately accounting for other risk factors, and for being a retrospective rather than a prospective study. Additionally, in their warning the CPSC ignored the considerable body of research on mother-infant sleep patterns, failed to collaborate with other experts in the medical community, and did not take into consideration how this recommendation might undermine efforts to breastfeed. Within days, satisfied that cosleeping families had all been duly frightened, the consumer "authorities" and the media alike, had already turned their attention to other issues. Yet the fact remains that the CPSC’s warning was a worrisome attack against the natural parenting community.

CPSC: Protecting Whose Interests?
The CPSC’s domain is cribs. Created in 1972 by Congress in the Consumer Product Safety Act, this independent federal regulatory agency has jurisdiction over 15,000 types of consumer products, including toys and cribs. Since the early ’90s, the CPSC has been successful in warning the public about the dangers of cribs that do not meet safety standards. Their September warning, however, went beyond product safety and made lifestyle recommendations.

The CPSC itself has been the subject of criticism for its current emphasis on products for children. In his book, The Rise of the Nanny State, author Tom Holt accuses the agency of being guided more by the political status of the alleged victims than by the number or degree of hazards a product poses. Of the 51 CPSC recalls since April 1999, all of the 21 that mentioned a specific age group stated that the recalls were being conducted to help children. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), elderly people are often at greater risk of injury than are children. Yet, critics point out, CPSC’s website—which lists virtually all of their studies and advice for the general public—contains only one article that is aimed at the elderly.

Families who are practicing safe cosleeping should not feel the need to change their practices. Over 100 studies have been published on this subject, and the majority show that cosleeping and bedsharing are beneficial to infants and mothers alike. Cosleeping can be a key component of the mother-child bond, and parents sleep with their infants in hundreds of societies all over the world.

In an effort to counter the adverse effects of this misguided warning by the CPSC, we present here a view of sleep as a normal part of family life. Shawn Nix’s "Confessions of a Bed Lizard" reminds us of the sheer languor of sleeping with our babies. Joylyn Fowler illustrates in "A Foot in Your Face" the crucial catch-up time that the family bed can provide for a working mother and her children. And "Three in a Bed" author, Deborah Jackson, points out that children do eventually leave the family bed. Finally, world-renowned sleep expert, James J. McKenna rebuts the CPSC study.

As parents, we are right to be indignant when others try to dictate what is "normal" or "preferable" for our families or attempt to inject a pathological subtext onto healthy family solutions. As loving mothers and fathers, we know to trust our inherent wisdom and to have faith in our own very personal decisions.