What decades of research reveal about sharing your bed with your baby

When the American Academy of Pediatrics looked for scientific evidence that sharing a bed with an infant reduces the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, it did not find any. Its 1997 public policy statement said so plainly, and in 2005 its own Task Force on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome went further, labeling bedsharing hazardous. Gary Ezzo and Robert Bucknam use that research trail to challenge three habits parents often reach for without thinking twice, nursing a baby to sleep, rocking a baby to sleep, and sleeping in the same bed as a baby.

Each of these, they argue, is a sleep prop, something a baby comes to depend on to fall asleep rather than learning to fall asleep on his own. The dependency itself is the real cost, more than any single night of use. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School tracked three hundred and three families and found that cosleeping was linked with more sleep problems in children, including night waking and trouble falling asleep, and that families who cosleeper frequently still showed high rates of these problems a full year later. Several pediatric sleep specialists cited in the book echo the pattern from different angles, one notes that separate sleeping spaces help build a child's sense of competence, another calls the family bed dangerous and observes it tends to appear more often among anxious mothers, a third points out simply that the more bodies share a bed, the less soundly everyone in it sleeps.

The safety risk is not theoretical either. A coroner in Madison County, Illinois reported five infant deaths from parental overlay during cosleeping in just the first eight months of 1997 in that county alone, and a deputy medical examiner in Oregon described a thirteen-day-old girl found dead between her parents after being brought into their bed for a middle-of-the-night feeding.

None of this means rocking or nursing your baby is wrong. Ezzo and Bucknam are careful to say cuddling and nursing should happen often. The distinction they draw is between comfort offered generously while your baby is awake, and comfort used as the only bridge into sleep, because the second kind has to be rebuilt, tired night after tired night, for as long as it lasts.

Tonight, try putting your baby into the crib while he is still awake rather than already asleep in your arms, even if it means a few minutes of fussing before he settles. If nursing has become the only way he falls asleep, keep nursing him generously at feeding times, but finish the feeding a little before he's fully asleep and let the last stretch into sleep happen in the crib. Do the same with rocking, rock and cuddle freely, then put him down alert enough to notice where he is. And treat your own bed as off limits for sleep, not because closeness is bad, but because the research the authors cite links shared sleep to more night waking and, in the worst cases, to real physical danger. Give naps and a firm, well-fitted crib mattress the credit for your baby's rest instead of a prop that has to be recreated every single time.