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 andÂ
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-sharingÂ
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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