Patricia writes:
>This Back to Sleep campaign is just too much.  I encourage a lot of skin to
>skin snuggling and sleeping and have had to start explaining that if the
>baby is asleep on mother or dad's chest they will not stop breathing and
>die.(the baby)

Dr. McKenna (the co-sleeping/SIDS researcher) has had at least one person
tell him after one of his talks that their breastfed baby died while asleep
on mom's chest.  It does happen.  One in a gazillion, maybe, but it *does*
happen.  We need to remember that all the babies' deaths classified as
"SIDS" represent a wide variety of true causes of death lumped as SIDS
because no one can figure out the cause.  Breastfeeding and co-sleeping
protect against some of the many causes of SIDS, not all.

>Another problem with babies NEVER being allowed to lie on their stomachs
>(some parents fear it even when the baby is awake) is that I see a lot of
>babies who aren't crawling. It is rather difficult to go from lying on
>one's back to being on all fours. A vast amount of leaping skills are required.

It may be of interest to LactNetters to know that crawling is not a human
universal.  In cultures where babies are held in arms or tied on backs, or
carried in slings on mom's hips, or in net bags on mom's front/side/back --
in other words, where babies are never or almost never put down on the
ground or floor on their stomachs, that they do not crawl.  They go from
sitting on someone's lap or sitting on the ground/floor to walking.
Crawling does not seem to be a necessary stage of human development.  In
Mali, babies do not crawl.  Yet they learn to walk just fine at the same
time as US babies (average age of 13 months) or even earlier.  And they
certainly develop immense upper arm strength, especially the little girls,
who can pound millet at age 4-5 years, something I could NOT do, even as an
adult.


Katherine A. Dettwyler, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Nutrition
Texas A&M University