To all who are agog about the new Auckland co-sleeping study.

I have a little story to share.  This is of 
course purely anecdotal and I have nothing to 
back it up.  But in the early Nineties one of my 
friends, who was a midwife and antenatal teacher, 
invited me to spend an evening with one of the 
researchers who had worked on the original New 
Zealand SIDS studies - the one where they found 
that prone sleeping was so dangerous, and it was 
stopped early because the intervention of 
sleeping on the back was found to halve the rate 
of SIDS.  At the time, apparently New Zealand had 
the highest rate of SIDS in the world, and this 
is why the study had been conducted there.

The researcher was a man, a white Zimbabwean, I 
think he was a doctor, and he talked to several 
of us around my friend's kitchen table about his 
experiences living and working in NZ.  The thing 
that stuck in my mind was when he said that his 
own two young children had been born in New 
Zealand while they were there.  And the village 
women advised his wife to put the baby in the 
pram in the kitchen and then go to bed at the 
other end of the house, closing all the 
intervening doors so that they wouldn't be able 
to hear the baby.  Good grief!  I'm sorry, 
perhaps it was only true of this village or this 
group of women, but I've always pondered - if 
this was the normal culture at the time - no 
wonder cot death rates were so high in NZ.

So now we have this latest study, where Auckland 
women are reported to feel conflicted about 
bed-sharing, may have problems with 
maternal-infant bonding, and bed-sharing mothers 
score higher in terms of being annoyed or 
irritated by their baby.... \I have to 
wonder.  Could it be that it's still pretty 
normal to not sleep with your baby because the 
older women still advise putting babies in the kitchen at night??

I hope we're moved on since then, and my 
apologies to all our lovely New Zealand 
colleagues - this is just the story I heard....

Pamela Morrison IBCLC
now in Rustington, England
----------------------
Mitchell EA, Hutchison BL, Thompson JM, et 
al.Exploratory study of bed-sharing and 
maternal-infant bonding.J Paediatr Child Health 2015;doi: 10.1111/jpc.12833.
AIM: Bed-sharing with an infant is controversial 
due to the increased risk of sudden unexpected 
death in infancy versus postulated benefits of 
the practice such as enhanced breastfeeding and 
maternal-infant bonding. This study evaluated 
the association between bed-sharing and 
maternal-infant bonding. METHODS: Four hundred 
randomly selected mothers who had delivered in a 
large maternity unit in Auckland and whose 
infants were between the ages of 6 weeks and 4 
months were sent a postal questionnaire asking 
about their bed-sharing practices last night, 
usually, and in the last 2 weeks. Included in 
the questionnaire were factors 1 and 2 questions 
from the Postpartum Bonding Questionnaire to assess maternal-infant bonding.
RESULTS: Responders totalled 172 (43%), and 
infants were a mean age of 11 weeks. Fourteen 
per cent of infants slept in a bed-sharing 
situation last night, 8% usually, and 41% had 
slept with an adult in the last 2 weeks. Nine 
per cent of mothers scored above the cut-off for 
factor 1 for impaired maternal-infant bonding. 
Infants of these mothers were more likely to 
bed-share last night, usually, and in the last 2 
weeks, and were less likely to use a pacifier and 
to breastfeed. Bed-sharing mothers scored more 
highly on individual questions relating to being 
annoyed or irritated by their baby. CONCLUSION: 
There is an inverse association between 
bed-sharing and maternal-infant bonding, which 
is contrary to the often expressed belief that 
bed-sharing enhances maternal-infant bonding.
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