The Detroit Free Press carries a warning for parents of infants: Babies need to sleep alone.
Wendy Wendland-Bowyer writes (excerpt):
“Children are not equipped physically to let their parents know” that they can’t breath, said Halushka. “They just don’t have that much strength at all. And a lot of times the parents are exhausted. It is just not worth taking the chance.”
Increasingly, research is supporting this. In the October issue of the journal Pediatrics, researchers published a study that showed babies who are put to sleep in an adult bed are as much as 40 times more likely to suffocate than babies who sleep in standard cribs.
Researchers at the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development issued a study in January that said bed sharing among parents and infants was increasing in the United States, and infants were more likely to suffocate while sleeping in an adult bed.
Parents are extra tired around the holidays and should be careful, said Shirley Mann Gray, manager of social work at Children’s Hospital of Michigan in Detroit and a member of the Wayne County child death review team.
“The whole thing about the holidays and so forth is you have a lot of families visiting,” Gray said. “We need to begin thinking about when we get to grandmother’s house with our 5-month-old baby, where will baby sleep?”