Instead of telling parents not to co-sleep, they should say that it is potentially dangerous and if you choose to do it you should take precautions to ensure that the co-sleeping environment is as safe as possible and then explain what those precautions are. But they don’t do that. They just tell you that your baby can die, so don’t do it.

In terms of examples other than the New York one that you mentioned, there are also these (this is just a quick sample that I pulled together – I know there are others):

- Missouri: Title: “Experts: ‘Co-sleeping’ with baby never OK” and First paragraph: “Unsafe sleep practices are causing otherwise healthy babies to die in the city of St. Louis, city police and medical experts said Friday. They said preventing such deaths is as easy as ABC – a baby should sleep Alone, on its Back and in a Crib.” http://www.bnd.com/336/story/628174.html

- Ontario: Unsafe sleeping environments – Infants should sleep alone and on a surface specifically designed for infant sleep. The Paediatric Death
Review Committee stresses the importance of not bed-sharing, particularly with infants under the age of 12 months. http://ogov.newswire.ca/ontario/GONE/2008/06/04/c8361.html?lmatch=&lang=_e.html

- Coventry, UK: Says co-sleeping is risky and dangerous and only suggests separate cot as an alternative. http://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/coventry-news/2009/01/02/six-coventry-babies-die-while-sleeping-with-parents-92746-22592139/

- Los Angeles: “Los Angeles County officials Wednesday urged parents to avoid the increasingly popular practice of sleeping in the same bed as their infant children, calling the practice a “potentially lethal act.”” http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/24/local/me-deaths24

- U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission: “”Don’t sleep with your baby or put the baby down to sleep in an adult bed,” said CPSC Chairman Ann Brown. “The only safe place for babies is in a crib that meets current safety standards and has a firm, tight-fitting mattress. Place babies to sleep on their backs and remove all soft bedding and pillow-like items from the crib.”" http://www.cpsc.gov/CPSCPUB/PREREL/PRHTML99/99175.html

I think it would be better to accept that, whether we like it or not, co-sleeping may not be ‘very safe’. We do have evidence, despite all its flaws, that suggests that there may be some inherent risk, especially in the first few months. At the very least, I think we have to say that we can’t exclude some added risk in comparison to crib sleeping. I think it *is* the job of PHAs to give us that information. I’m quite prepared to accept that they could probably do a better job and that it’s worth us thinking about ways in which it could be done better. But I don’t think it’s helpful to be all up in arms that they’ve dared to tell us something that we’d prefer not to be true. What we’d prefer or not prefer doesn’t really come into what the evidence shows.

BTW, what actual examples of public messages were you thinking of? All I know of is the ‘babies sleep safest alone’ campaign in NY, which definitely needs a rephrase of the slogan, but, other than that, seemed to strike a reasonable balance when I checked out their webpage. In fact, my main concern would be that they don’t warn about *enough* of the potential risk factors in co-sleeping (they don’t mention the risks of sleeping with smokers, or of co-sleeping for very young babies).

I agree that much more research needs to be done on this and a whole host of other parenting topics. I do think that there are risks of putting an infant in a crib as well. It has long been shown that the presence of crib bumpers cause an increase in the risk of SIDS, yet parents continue to use “pretty” crib bumpers in their children’s beds instead of the safer “breathable” bumpers. I think if we were to go back in time to “caveman” days, we would see that our ancestors ate healthier, shared a family bed and breastfed into toddlerhood. Many of the things that our “modern” society tends to question. It is unfortunate that we don’t have the studies at our fingertips to tell us what is and isn’t safe. As a parent, I think we each have to do what is best for our own situations. Sometimes that will be cosleeping and sometimes it will be sleeping separately. I think for each person it is a very personal decision. I am thankful for people like Annie at PhDinParenting to help to educate those who feel that cosleeping “IS” for them. I wish we had more people willing and able to educate parents on topics such as these.

I think it has been proven many times over that teaching “abstinence” whether it relates to teenage sex or to co-sleeping causes more damage than teaching people how to do it safely. Is it more difficult to teach them about safety? Sure. Is it worth it? Definitely. It will save lives.

I agree that one of the problems is that current research isn’t good enough. All of the research that talks about co-sleeping being unsafe doesn’t properly account for the presence or absence or risk factors. Rather than avoiding the issue, perhaps public health authorities should be commissioning better research and using those results to educate the public.

We don’t actually know, from the available data, whether or not co-sleeping is ‘very safe’ even with all advisable precautions. Of course, there is now plenty of evidence that if both parents are non-smokers, and the co-sleeping is on an ordinary mattress and not a sofa or waterbed, and there are no other children in the bed, and the baby isn’t in the first few months of life, then SIDS risk is as low with co-sleeping as with crib sleeping. But that still leaves suffocation risk. So, OK, further evidence suggests that nearly all suffocation deaths in beds are potentially preventable with appropriate precautions – taking care the baby can’t get wedged anywhere, avoiding heavy bedding, not co-sleeping if you’ve drunk alcohol or are taking any drugs that impair your alertness or are excessively exhausted. But, even then, we can’t be sure that the risk is zero, because it’s so difficult to study. And, in the meantime, there’s a whole long list of dos and don’ts that have to be followed if bedsharing isn’t going to be too risky, which exclude huge categories of parents and which are sometimes pretty vague (what counts as ‘appropriate precautions’ against wedging? How exhausted is ‘excessively exhausted’ in new parent terms?)

So, how do you put all that across to the general public in a way that will be comprehensible to people of a wide range of intelligence and education, plenty of whom are simply not going to read their way down a long list of recommendations and then carefully think about how best to put them into practice? I honestly don’t know what the answer to that is; and I can sympathise with those PHAs who decide that going with the simple, straightforward, ‘avoid bedsharing’ message is the best way. I’m not even saying that I think that’s better either, because I really don’t know. I always think it’s the same dilemma as the one faced by people trying to figure out what to teach teens about sex. On the one hand, the safest option is just not to do it; on the other hand, some people are going to do it no matter what you tell them, and they’re hugely better off knowing how to do it safely. So, you’re faced with figuring out how to put across this mixed message that ideally you’re safest avoiding it altogether but that there are particular ways of doing it that you *really, really*, need to avoid…

And, yes, I think that the PHAs could do it better than they are doing it. But I also think that they’ve got an impossible task in which they aren’t going to be able to give optimally-pitched information to all of the people all of the time, and I do sympathise with that. And they are, unfortunately, stuck with the fact that co-sleeping *does* carry risks. It may or may not carry inherent risks – we just don’t know. It does carry a lot of risks in terms of the many different ways in which it’s possible to do it unsafely. And it *is* the job of PHAs to warn us when particular behaviours are risky, no matter how unpopular that information is or how little we like to hear it. It’s not just a case of those big meanie PHAs trying to make life difficult for us.

The stories show that it *does* happen. I think it’s rare, but I don’t think it’s absurd.

Honestly the idea of cosleeping didn’t occur to me when I had my daughter nine months ago. Now I realize it would have been (and still would be) great to get a lot more sleep at night. Maybe we’ll give it a go with our next child.