Babies need their mothers beside them!
Dr. James J. McKenna, Professor of Anthropology, in World Health
(the magazine of the World Health Organization), March-April/96
Throughout human history, breast-feeding and parents sleeping
alongside their infants constituted a marvellously adaptive system
in which both the mothers' and infants' sleep physiology and health
were connected in beneficial ways. By sleeping next to its mother
the infant receives protection, warmth, emotional reassurance
and breast milk in just the forms and quantities that nature intended.
This sleeping arrangement permits mothers (and fathers) to respond
quickly to the infant if it cries, chokes, or needs its nasal
passages cleared, its body cooled, warmed, caressed, rocked or
held. It thus helps to regulate the infant's breathing, sleep
state, arousal patterns, heart rates and body temperature. The
mother's proximity also stimulates the infant to feed more frequently,
thus receiving more antibodies to fight disease. The increased
nipple contact also causes changes in the mother's hormone levels
that help to prevent a new pregnancy before the infant is ready
to be weaned. In this way the infant regulates its mother's biology,
too; increased breast-feeding blocks ovulation, which helps to
ensure that pregnancies will not ordinarily occur until the mother's
body is able to restore the fat and iron reserves needed for optimal
maternal health. It is a curious fact that in Western societies
the practice of mothers, fathers and infants sleeping together
came to be thought of as strange, unhealthy and dangerous. Western
parents are taught that "co-sleeping" will make the
infant to dependent on them, or risk accidental suffocation. Such
views are not supported by human experience worldwide, however,
where for perhaps millions of years infants as a matter of course
slept next to at least one caregiver, usually the mother, in order
to survive. At some point in recent history infant separateness
with low parental contact during the night came to be advocated
by child care specialists, while infant-parent interdependence
with high parental contact came to be discouraged. In fact, the
few psycholgical studies which are available suggest that children
who have "co-slept" in a loving and safe environment
become better adjusted adults than those who were encouraged to
sleep without parental contact or reassurance.
The fear of suffocating infants has a long and complex cultural
history. Since before the middle ages "over-lying" or
suffocating infants deliberately was common, particularly among
the poor in crowded cities. This form of infanticide led local
church authorities to make laws forbidding parents to let infants
sleep next to them. The practice of giving infants alcohol or
opiates to get them to sleep also became common; under such conditions,
babies often did not wake up and it was presumed that the mothers
must have overlaid them. Also, in smoke-filled, under-ventilated
rooms, infants can easily succumb to asphyxia. Unfortunately,
health officials in some Western countries promote the message
that sleep contact between the mother and infant increases the
chances of the infant dying from sudden infant death syndrome
(SIDS). But the research on which this message is based only indicates
that bed-sharing can be dangerous when it occurs in the context
of extreme poverty or when the mother is a smoker. Some researchers
have attempted to export this message to other cultures. However,
in Japan, for example, where co-sleeping is the norm, SIDS rates
are among the lowest in the world, which suggests that this arrangement
may actually help to prevent SIDS.
Human infants need constant attention and contact with other human
beings because they are unable to look after themselves. Unlike
other mammals, they cannot keep themselves warm, move about or
feed themselves until relatively late in life. It is their extreme
neurological immaturity at birth and slow maturation that make
the mother-infant relationship so important. The human infant's
brain is only about 25% of its adult weight at birth, whereas
most other mammals are born with 60-90% of their adult brain size.
The young of most other mammals become independent of their parents
within a year, whereas humans take 14 to 17 years to become fully
developed physically, and usually longer than that to be fully
independent.
Apart from being a natural characteristic of our species, constant
proximity to the mother during infancy is also made necessary
by the need to feed frequently. Human milk is composed of relatively
low amounts of protein and fat, and high amounts of quickly absorbed
and metabolized sugars. Therefore the infant's hunger cycle is
short as is the time spent in deep sleep. All of these factors
seem to indicate that the custom of separating infants from their
parents during sleep time is more the result of cultural history
than of fundamental physiological or psychological needs. Sleep
laboratory studies have shown that bed-sharing instead of sleeping
in separate rooms almost doubled the number of breast-feeding
episodes and tripled the total nightly duration of breast-feeding.
Infants cried much less frequently when sleeping next to their
mothers, and spent less time awake. We think that the more frequently
infants are breast-fed, the less likely they are to die from cot
death. Our scientific studies of mother and infants sleeping together
have shown how tightly bound together the physiological and social
aspects of the mother-infant relationship really are. Other studies
have shown that separation of the mother and infant has adverse
consequences. Anthropological considerations also suggest that
separation between the mother and infant should be minimal. Western
societies must consider carefully how far and under what circumstances
they want to push infants away from the loving and protective
co-sleeping environment. Infants' nutritional, emotional and social
needs as well as maternal responses to them have evolved in this
environment for millennia.