>His tummy had to be in
>contact with something, or he would startle himself awake.
I've had enormous fun, lately, pondering why we think the human infant is the only mammal that is and ought to be comfortable on its back - a position of instability and/or insecurity for every other mammal newborn that I've been able to come up with.
So I took to wondering how we're "designed" to sleep at night. There's a cool article about hunter-gatherer sleep in a 1999 Science News: http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arc99/9_25_99/bob2.htm. "Adult sleepers in traditional societies recline on skins, mats, wooden platforms, the ground, or just about anything except a thick, springy mattress. Pillows or head supports are rare..."
But maybe hunter gatherer is still too modern. How did the earliest Homo sapiens sleep? First of all, it appears that hunter gatherer (and earlier) sleep is bimodal - a period of sleep, a few hours of quiet wakefulness, another bout of sleep. It seems to me (with no anthropology background) that whatever surface we might have scraped or shaped for sleep would have been deemed too prickly or twiggy or harsh to lay an infant on, back or front. Wouldn't the baby have slept draped on our arm and chest or in our lap, in positions that shifted frequently through the long night? Isn't that what other higher primates do? Maybe not the most physically comfortable arrangement - not as comfortable as baby lying at arm's length in a co-sleeper - but entirely workable given that the time spent "in bed" was long and leisurely and partially wakeful anyway.
So I'm wondering if perhaps *all* our models are skewed. That maybe our babies are entirely built for spending at least some of their sleep on their chests, but with their chests in contact with adults, and with frequent shifting of position either because they rouse to nurse or because the adults rouse with cramped arms.
As I understand it, there have been SIDS deaths in every setting, including parental arms. It isn't 100 percent preventable. But we certainly know that gobs of separate sleep on their backs on a firm surface isn't what babies are built for, because we're developing this whole generation of kids in little head-protecting helmets. I look at the baby carried in-arms or carried on a hunter gatherer's back or bobbling along in a modern "colic hold" and see no continuous pressure on the head, *but generally some sort of significant and continuous chest pressure against the adult*. All those babies at the mall who won't sit in their strollers? They've been picked up so that they can feel the parent's body *on their chest*.
Back-sleeping is clearly the safest position for a baby who is unphysiologically separated from all adult contact. But I'd really hesitate to condemn the mother who has worked out close-contact tummy sleep for bits and pieces of the night. Who knows? She may have the safest baby of all.
Diane Wiessinger, MS, IBCLC Ithaca, NY USA
www.wiessinger.baka.com
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