The baby also feels the mom's warm breath, which creates little clouds of carbon dioxide around the baby's face. It's no wonder nearly every culture uses a swooshing sound to soothe a crying baby." "It contains that 'swoosh, swoosh' sound," McKenna says, "which in turns sounds like, 'hush, hush little baby.'. The baby also hears the mom's breathing, which has a rhythm similar to the sounds the baby heard in the womb. Inside this shell, the baby hears the mom's heartbeat and, in turn, changes her own heart rate. "She pulls up her knees just enough to touch the baby's feet." "The mother naturally arches her body around her baby," McKenna says. When the mom is breastfeeding, she essentially creates a little shell around the baby. "We measured heart rate, breathing patterns, chest movement, body temperatures, brain waves - even the carbon dioxide levels between the moms' and babies' faces." They even had infrared cameras to watch how the babies moved around at night. McKenna and his colleagues transformed his laboratory into an apartment, recruited dozens of moms and babies, and analyzed their bodies while they slept. is ipso facto excommunicated," the church declared in Milan in 1576.īack in the early 1990s, Notre Dame's McKenna decided to do what seemed almost impossible: Figure out just what happens at night when a mom sleeps with a baby. "Any women who kept an infant less than 1 year old in her bed. By the 10th century, the Catholic Church began "banning" infants from the parental bed to prevent poor women from intentionally suffocating an infant whom they didn't have resources to care for. Wealthy Roman families had rocking cradles and bassinets by the bed, historians have noted. Western culture, on the other hand, has a long history of separating moms and babies at night. The shorter line represents the child, sleeping between the mother and father, represented by the longer lines. And in Japan, the most common sleeping arrangement is referred to as kawa no ji or the character for river: 川. "But there's someone else with them there, isn't there?" one mom asked.īalinese babies are generally held almost every moment - day and night, anthropologists have noted. In one study, Mayan moms in Guatemala responded with shock - and pity - when they heard that some American babies sleep away from their mom. Some cultures even think it's cruel to separate a mom and baby at night. Bed-sharing is a tradition in at least 40 percent of all documented cultures, Konner says, citing evidence from Yale University's Human Relations Area Files. The practice continues to be widespread around the world. Modern hunter-gatherer cultures provide our best insight into the behaviors of our early ancestors, and bed-sharing is universal across these groups, he says. Homo sapien moms and their newborns have been sleeping together for more than 200,000 years, says anthropologist Mel Konner at Emory University. What's more, the practice of bed-sharing is as old as our species itself. "This is what's good for their physiology. What they need the most is their mother's and father's bodies," McKenna says. There is good reason for this mutual pull toward each other, says James McKenna, an anthropologist at Notre Dame who has been studying infant sleep for 40 years. to reassess its recommendation and its strategy to stop SIDS. And some researchers say it might be time for the U.S. from sleep-related causes.ĪAP cites seven studies to support its recommendation against bed-sharing.īut a close look at these studies - and an independent analysis from statisticians - reveals a different picture. About 3,700 babies die each year in the U.S. The organization says the practice puts babies at risk for sleep-related deaths, including sudden infant death syndrome, accidental suffocation and accidental strangulation. The American Academy of Pediatrics is opposed to bed-sharing: It "should be avoided at all times" with a "term normal-weight infant younger than 4 months," the AAP writes in its 2016 recommendations for pediatricians. has grown from about 6 percent of parents to 24 percent in 2015.īut the practice goes against medical advice in the U.S. More moms are choosing to share a bed with their infants. Here in the U.S., this is a growing trend among families. What they're hiding is this: They hold the baby at night while they sleep together in the bed. Perhaps drinking and driving with the baby in the car? Or smoking around the baby?īut no. The way these moms talk about their secret, you might think they're putting their babies in extreme danger. Sign up for NPR Health's newsletter to get the stories delivered to your inbox. Does raising kids have to be stressful? Is it really dangerous for babies to sleep with mom? Do chores have to be a fight? Over the next month, NPR travels around the world for ideas to make parenting easier.
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