'We measured heart rate, breathing patterns, chest movement, body temperatures, brain waves - even the carbon dioxide levels between the moms' and babies' faces.' They even had infrared cameras to watch how the babies moved around at night. McKenna and his colleagues transformed his laboratory into an apartment, recruited dozens of moms and babies, and analyzed their bodies while they slept. is ipso facto excommunicated,' the church declared in Milan in 1576.īack in the early 1990s, Notre Dame's McKenna decided to do what seemed almost impossible: Figure out just what happens at night when a mom sleeps with a baby. 'Any women who kept an infant less than 1 year old in her bed. By the 10th century, the Catholic Church began 'banning' infants from the parental bed to prevent poor women from intentionally suffocating an infant whom they didn't have resources to care for. Wealthy Roman families had rocking cradles and bassinets by the bed, historians have noted. Western culture, on the other hand, has a long history of separating moms and babies at night. The shorter line represents the child, sleeping between the mother and father, represented by the longer lines.

And in Japan, the most common sleeping arrangement is referred to as kawa no ji or the character for river: 川. 'But there's someone else with them there, isn't there?' one mom asked.īalinese babies are generally held almost every moment - day and night, anthropologists have noted. In one study, Mayan moms in Guatemala responded with shock - and pity - when they heard that some American babies sleep away from their mom. Some cultures even think it's cruel to separate a mom and baby at night. Bed-sharing is a tradition in at least 40 percent of all documented cultures, Konner says, citing evidence from Yale University's Human Relations Area Files. The practice continues to be widespread around the world. Modern hunter-gatherer cultures provide our best insight into the behaviors of our early ancestors, and bed-sharing is universal across these groups, he says. Homo sapien moms and their newborns have been sleeping together for more than 200,000 years, says anthropologist Mel Konner at Emory University. What's more, the practice of bed-sharing is as old as our species itself. 'This is what's good for their physiology. What they need the most is their mother's and father's bodies,' McKenna says. There is good reason for this mutual pull toward each other, says James McKenna, an anthropologist at Notre Dame who has been studying infant sleep for 40 years. Demanding to be held is a newborn's forte. And many babies have strong opinions about wanting to sleep with their moms. There is no question that many moms have an instinct to sleep with their babies. The high-risk baby is of low birth weight and has parents who smoke and a 21-year-old mother who has more than two alcoholic drinks regularly.Ĭristina Spanò for NPR./Sources for statistics: BMJ Study On Bed-Sharing (SIDS) NOAA (lightning) CDC (drowning and car accident) NIH (peanut allergy)

The low-risk baby is of average birth weight and has a 30-year-old mother who does not smoke or drink.

SIDS risk is calculated for a 2-month-old, female baby of European ancestry.

7 safe sleeping practices