The Family Bed Defended©

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by Karen Squires
"The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association (JPMA) is launching a mass-media national campaign aimed at "reducing deaths associated with placing babies in adult beds."-The Compleat Mother magazine

I received this information in an email from The Compleat Mother Magazine. I have a burning question about their campaign. The CPSC is there to warn us about product safety, not family practices. I wonder why they are concerned with my family's sleeping arrangements. Wouldn't it be nice if their focus was to help make the family bed a safer place, and not about scaring parents into buying cribs? But that's not their goal. The CPSC sited an average of 64 deaths per year of babies in adult beds. From this they decided to tell parents to avoid having the baby sleep in their bed. How many children die in car crashes every year? Why aren't they warning us to keep our children out of cars? They aren't. We are warned to use car seats, and taught to use them properly. Why not teach parents who want to have their children in bed with them how to do it safely?

The family bed is the practice of having babies/children sleeping in the same bed as their parents. We have a family bed ourselves. It wasn't something that I planned on when our youngest child was born. It wasn't something I'd even heard of. Not as something people actually wanted anyway. When I did hear of it, it was when parents who were too tired to handle a child who didn't want to sleep alone, gave up and let the baby/child sleep with them. I wish I had been so smart.

Our older son had slept in a room by himself from 6 weeks on. I felt so overwhelmed by his needs during that day that I needed to be alone during the night to recoup. Looking back, I can see that I was a new mother who needed some help from family, friends, anybody in fact, to reduce my stress level. The answer then of course did not lie in needing to put my 6 week old in another room at night, but in getting more help during the day, or the night, to help me deal with motherhood better.

I was not following my instincts to have him near me at night, as I would wake up in the morning and upon not hearing him cry right away, would assume that he had succumbed to SIDS during the night. One such morning I lay in bed for about 20 minutes, terrified to go and check on him. I was sure he had died and I was trying to put off going through the horror of actually knowing that it had happened. He eventually began to cry and I was incredibly relieved.

After he turned 12 months I started to relax about SIDS, but then the fear that he would be kidnapped out of his crib during the night started to creep in. I would check all the windows and doors before going to bed at night in my attempt to guarantee his safety until morning when I could have him safely in my arms again. Believe it or not it didn't occur to me to ignore the pressures from society to push him away at night, and take him in my arms and keep him by my side. When my second son was born,I was older and wiser. I was less likely to be affected by what the crowd was doing. I came home from the hospital with my newborn son, still not aware of the family bed concept. I had a crib, a very expensive mattress, cute sheets, blankets and bumpers to match.

I held him almost constantly for the first 2-3 days as relatives and friends dropped by to see my new baby. During one such visit I became overwhelmed and tired from all the visitors and decided to retire to the bedroom. I lay my new sleeping son in his fancy crib and started to walk toward my bed for a much needed nap. I hadn't even made it three steps when he woke up crying. I went back to him, picked him up and started to rock him gently as I sang him a song. He was asleep in seconds. Again I lay him down in his crib and he awoke a few seconds later. This happened again and again. Over the next few days I grew more and more tired as I only managed to grab a few minutes sleep here and there. One day I was so desperate for sleep that I lay down in my bed with him, too tired to stand any longer. I made the bed safe for him, and fell asleep almost instantly. I woke up 2 hours later, the most amount of sleep I'd had in over a week. My baby was starting to stir, he was hungry, and this no doubt had awakened me. This was my first experience with the family bed. He has been in my bed every night since, over five years now.

I didn't immediately accept the family bed as a good thing. I did it because if I was to survive, I had to sleep. I couldn't leave him screaming for me, ignoring his cries. It would have broken my heart. The first year was the hardest. I had family telling me to get him out of my bed. That I would suffocate him, roll on him, he'd roll off the bed. On and on went the warnings. But I knew he needed me close, and as a bonus I was not waking up in the morning wondering if he was alive. I could see that SIDS had not taken him, and no stranger was going to get into my bed, steal my baby, and leave without me hearing something. I was content being close to him and he was content being close to me.

FOR PART II: The Family Bed Defended Part II