http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1083020.ece
Margot Sunderland, director of education at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London, says the practice, known as “co-sleeping”, makes children more likely to grow up as calm, healthy adults.
Sunderland, author of 20 books, outlines her advice in The Science of Parenting, to be published later this month.
She is so sure of the findings in the new book, based on 800 scientific studies, that she is calling for health visitors to be issued with fact sheets to educate parents about co-sleeping.
“These studies should be widely disseminated to parents,” said Sunderland. “I am sympathetic to parenting gurus — why should they know the science? Ninety per cent of it is so new they bloody well need to know it now. There is absolutely no study saying it is good to let your child cry.”
She argues that the practice common in Britain of training children to sleep alone from a few weeks old is harmful because any separation from parents increases the flow of stress hormones such as cortisol.
Her findings are based on advances in scientific understanding over the past 20 years of how children’s brains develop, and on studies using scans to analyse how they react in particular circumstances.
For example, a neurological study three years ago showed that a child separated from a parent experienced similar brain activity to one in physical pain.
Sunderland also believes current practice is based on social attitudes that should be abandoned. “There is a taboo in this country about children sleeping with their parents,” she said.
“What I have done in this book is present the science. Studies from around the world show that co-sleeping until the age of five is an investment for the child. They can have separation anxiety up to the age of five and beyond, which can affect them in later life. This is calmed by co-sleeping.”
Symptoms can also be physical. Sunderland quotes one study that found some 70% of women who had not been comforted when they cried as children developed digestive difficulties as adults.
Sunderland’s book puts her at odds with widely read parenting gurus such as Gina Ford, whose advice is followed by thousands.
Ford advocates establishing sleep routines for babies from a very early age in cots “away from the rest of the house” and teaching babies to sleep “without the assistance of adults”.
In her book The Complete Sleep Guide for Contented Babies and Toddlers she writes that parents need time by themselves: “Bed sharing . . . more often than not ends up with parents sleeping in separate rooms” and exhausted mothers, a situation that “puts enormous pressure on the family as a whole”.
Annette Mountford, chief executive of the parenting organisation Family Links, confirmed that the norm for children in Britain was to be encouraged to sleep in cots and beds, often in separate bedrooms, from an early age. “Parents need their space,” she said. “There are definite benefits from encouraging children into their own sleep routine in their own space.”
Sunderland says moving children to their own beds from a few weeks old, even if they cry in the night, has been shown to increase the flow of cortisol.
Studies of children under five have shown that for more than 90%, cortisol rises when they go to nursery. For 75%, it falls whenever they go home.
Professor Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Washington State University, who has written a foreword to the book, said Sunderland’s arguments were “a coherent story that is consistent with neuroscience. A wise society will take it to heart”.
Sunderland argues that putting children to sleep alone is a peculiarly western phenomenon that may increase the chance of cot death, also known as sudden infant death syndrome (Sids). This may be because the child misses the calming effect on breathing and heart function of lying next to its mother.
“In the UK, 500 children a year die of Sids,” Sunderland writes. “In China, where it [co-sleeping] is taken for granted, Sids is so rare it does not have a name.”
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The only difference with the original Times article that this is lifted from is that any balancing views have been oh so conveniently edited out. What are you scared of folks? An open and fair discussion? I’m a new parent and if there’s one thing I’m sick of; it’s scaremongering ‘experts’ who distort statistics in order the lend weight to their preferred notions of child rearing.
Here’s a suggestion: offer your readers the full facts and trust that they might actually have the wherewithal to decide what is best for them and their children.
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Hana – I thought I copied all of the Times article, sorry if I missed bits, I agree that we need balancing views. If you have any links to research that balances the co sleeping argument please share them.
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Please see the end of this comment for studies to balance the debate.
For anyone with the patience, how about we consider the origins of the debate? The study that is quoted ad nauseam as suggesting a link between co-sleeping and low SIDs rates in China (entitled ‘Cot Death in Hong Kong: a rare problem?’ was published in The Lancet Journal in 1985…yes, 26 years ago. What’s more, Davies, the author of the study was cautious when speculating about the reasons for the low rate: “It is argued that this rare occurrence is real and not cot death masquerading as other causes of death. It is speculated that perhaps life-style (including crowded living conditions), the practice of placing babies supine in their cots rather than prone, and a lower frequency of preterm birth could contribute.” (Taken from the abstract).
Furthermore, the idea that SIDs is so rare in China that people don’t know what it is also comes from a study that is now a quarter of a century old: in 1986, again in The Lancet, Michel Odent, wrote that HE couldn’t find anyone who knew what it was…interesting, but hardly scientifically convincing. He couples his comment with these musings: “Ever since then, I have held the view that even if it happens during the day, cot death is a disease of babies who spend their nights in an atmosphere of loneliness, and that cot death is a disease of societies where the nuclear family has taken over.” An interesting piece of social criticism, but it lacks the weight of scientific fact that people have come to attribute to it.
Does the issue warrant greater study? Certainly.
The link that follows offers pros AND cons of co-sleeping (and sights studies that are more recent that the 1980s. http://life.familyeducation.com/SIDS/Co-sleeping/64358.html
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Lisa, I owe you an apology. The article is indeed there in its entirety. By way of explanation, I’ll be a new mum soon, and whilst doing the obligatory reading, I’ve been fascinated and alarmed at how polarized the child rearing debate can be, and at the lengths some will go to in order to bolster their camps. Having missed some of the article, I assumed it was yet another careful omission I’ve become used to in the debating forums.
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No problem, I often grab things from the web I think might be interesting to people and I am quite capeable of missing chunks of things
I co slept, in fact I still do sometimes with my boy who is now 7, I stopped mostly because he flails and turns sideways during the night pushing me out of bed with his feet in his sleep
Co- sleeping was not one of the (many) things I spent time worrying about though, generations of parents have shared beds with their children and I felt it was safer to have him near me, I was the sort of mum who put him in stripy clothes because I could see him breathe more easily though and co-sleeping meant I could check him. If he hadn’t been rushed to SCBU when he was born maybe I wouldn’t have been so neurotic.
It is another one of those parenting choices where you need to make an informed decision and then go by your instincts I think.
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