by Ed Cohen
It's the middle of the night.
You're a new mother. Your baby
starts crying.
You know from past experience
that if you go to her room, pick
her up, nurse her, maybe even
bring her back to bed, she'll stop
crying and fall back to sleep. But
you also know better than to do
that. Cave in to her demands now,
and she'll become overly dependent
on you and never sleep through the
night. It may be hard, but it's
better to show a little resolve
now than to hinder her
psychological development. She'll
cry herself to sleep in a while.
What is wrong with this
picture? Everything, according to
James J. McKenna, professor of
anthropology at Notre Dame and
director of Notre Dame's new
Center for Behavioral Studies of
Mother-Infant Sleep.
Before joining the faculty this
past year, McKenna taught at
Pomona College in California,
where he collaborated with
neurologist Sarah Mosko of the
University of California, Irvine,
School of Medicine for 15 years on
a series of experiments looking
into what happens physiologically
when babies sleep with their
mothers instead of alone.
What McKenna and his partner
discovered contradicts long-held
assumptions about infant care, in
particular the notion that parents
need to take a hard line against
comforting babies at night or
bringing them back to bed. In
fact, just the opposite appears to
be true, they say. Some of their
evidence even suggests that some
babies who sleep with or near
their mothers might gain a measure
of insurance against Sudden Infant
Death Syndrome (SIDS).
Scientists have long
investigated infant sleeping
patterns, but the studies have
always focused on babies sleeping
in isolation, the arrangement most
common in Western industrialized
nations. For their initial study,
McKenna and Mosko recruited a
group of Hispanic mothers living
around Irvine who normally slept
with their babies (the practice is
common in Hispanic households) and
had them do so in a special sleep
laboratory. Both mother and child
were hooked to equipment that
monitored breathing, heart rates,
body temperature, brain waves,
time spent nursing, and other
activity and variables.
The researchers discovered that
infants who routinely sleep with
their mothers breast-feed twice as
often and for three times longer
than babies left in a separate
room at night. Extra breast-
feeding is considered beneficial
because breast milk provides
antibodies to fight disease.
Breast- feeding also has been tied
to more rapid and complete
cognitive development. And,
contrary to popular expectations,
mothers who routinely bring their
babies to bed get more sleep than
those who try to keep their
offspring one or more rooms away.
But the advantages of
"co-sleeping" go way
beyond nighttime breast-feeding on
demand or extra shuteye, McKenna
argues. It's his belief that the
arrangement is nothing less than
what nature intended. Or, put
another way, what evolution has
built into our biology.
Mothers have been sleeping with
their babies to keep them warm and
safe from predators since at least
the time families ate mastodon for
dinner. As a result, McKenna
argues, all babies are born
physiologically
"expecting" a steady
stream of sensations —
specifically, the touches, smells,
sounds, movements and warmth they
receive only from being in close
proximity, day and night, to their
mothers. When these sensations
cease because one has been
deposited in a separate bedroom
down the hall, a predicable
response occurs: crying.
"It's natural and
expectable and appropriate for a
babies and children to protest
sleep isolation from their
parents," says McKenna.
"(Crying) is a loving
gesture, and it's a healthful
gesture that children make. It
isn't a sign of pathology at
all."
There's another good reason why
infants instinctively desire
round-the-clock closeness: Humans
are born with just 25 percent of
their adult brain volume, making
us the least neurologically mature
of any primate species at birth.
In a very real way, we are all
born prematurely.
McKenna's theories are relevant
to SIDS because infants sleeping
next to their mothers have been
found to spend less time in the
deepest stages of sleep than
babies sleeping alone. They also
are naturally nudged at least
partially awake more often at
night by their parents moving in
their sleep. In some cases, SIDS
is believed to result from babies
experiencing apnea, a temporary
suspension of breathing during
sleep. It could be that certain
babies die because they're too
deep asleep and have too little
experience being roused from
sleep, the result of their being
deposited in a quiet, empty
bedroom for sleeping period after
sleeping period.
McKenna suspects that the
physiological changes babies
experience sleeping next to their
mothers, combined with the
periodic breast feeding that
naturally occurs, can offer some
protection from SIDS. He notes
that in Japan, which has the
world's lowest incidence of SIDS,
babies routinely share their
parents' bed. Co-sleeping is, in
fact, the preferred arrangement
for 90 percent of the world's
population.
McKenna says the idea that
co-sleeping can stunt a child's
psychological development is not
based on research. In fact, the
few studies that have looked at
the arrangement's developmental
effects suggest the opposite. A
study of military families, in
which co-sleeping is common
because fathers (and, nowadays,
mothers) are often away from home
for extended periods, found that
children who had coslept as babies
received higher evaluations of
their comportment in school and
exhibited fewer psychiatric
problems. Another study found that
by college age, co-sleepers appear
to be better adjusted and more
satisfied with their sexual
identities and behavior than their
counterparts.
One enduring fear about
co-sleeping is that accidental
suffocation can result from a
parent rolling over onto an
infant. McKenna says accidental
suffocation is extremely unlikely,
except in cases where a mother is
desensitized from taking drugs or
alcohol, or where a mattress is
too soft or the bed is falling
apart. Adults will naturally avoid
rolling onto a baby, McKenna says,
the same way they automatically
keep from rolling out of bed. In
fact, the researcher hopes to lay
that fear to rest this fall with
experiments in the new Notre Dame
lab in which students will be
given a doll to sleep with while
their movements are recorded using
infrared cameras.
So how did it become the norm
in the industrialized West for
mothers to sleep apart from their
babies? McKenna's research points
to several possible historical
origins. In 17th century Europe,
laws were enacted threatening
parents with jail if they were
caught in bed with their infants.
The measures were aimed at
preventing infanticide — a
serious problem among the
extremely poor at the time. When
they were unable to provide food
for more than one child at a time,
some parents falsely claimed to
have accidentally rolled over
them, killing the infants while
sleeping. "The important
point," McKenna emphasizes,
"is that it was not
accidental suffocation that
induced such laws but purposeful
suffocation."
Despite the many benefits he
sees in co-sleeping, McKenna stops
short of declaring it essential
for healthy child care. People
who, for whatever reason, don't
feel comfortable doing it,
shouldn't, he says. He merely
hopes the practice comes to be
viewed as an option that parents
can feel good about choosing.
-
This article
is copyrighted, and used
with permission of Notre Dame
magazine. All information on
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