Cosleeping is twice as safe: how the stats really stack up. (Special Issue).

Publication: Mothering

Publication Date: 01-SEP-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Mothering Magazine

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and the Juvenile Product Manufacturers Association (JPMA, the crib manufacturers' lobby) recently launched a campaign to discourage parents from placing infants in adult beds or sleeping with them, based on data showing that infants have a very small risk of dying in adult beds. (1,2) The CPSC implies that infants in adult beds are at greater risk than infants in cribs, but as we know, and as they know, babies also die in cribs.

What we need to do is calculate the relative riskiness of an infant sleeping in an adult bed versus a crib. We can do that by dividing a measure of danger for each situation by the prevalence, or frequency, of that situation, and then comparing them. (Oddly, the CPSC never presents relative risks.) Using government figures, we can perform a rough calculation to show that infants are more than twice as safe in adult beds as in cribs. This is aside from the many other advantages of cosleeping or bedsharing, such as increased breastfeeding and physiological regulation, the experience of having slept well, parents' feeling of assurance that their child is well and happy, the enhanced security of psychological attachment and family togetherness, and family enjoyment. (3)

Let's begin by looking closely at the CPSC data. The anti-cosleeping campaign is based on a dataset that contains the 2,178 cases of unintentional mechanical suffocation of US infants under 13 months old for the period 1980 to 1997. CPSC-authored articles about these data reflect only the small portion of deaths that occurred in adult beds. (4) However, these data also have been published with summaries of the cause-of-death codes on all 2,178 cases. (5) This complete dataset is further summarized in Table 1.

OF THESE 2,178 INFANT SUFFOCATION DEATHS, WE are certain of only 139 occurring in an adult bed. For 102 of these, we know that a larger person (presumably a...

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