Sleeping with Your Baby: A Parent's Guide to Cosleeping - Softcover

McKenna, James J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1930775342 ISBN 13: 9781930775343

Publisher: Platypus Media, 2007

Synopsis

Sleeping With Your Baby: A Parent's Guide is your guide to understanding how to make nighttimes with your baby safe, fun and relaxing! Written by James McKenna, the world's authority on co-sleeping.

About this title

About the Author

Professor James J. McKenna, Ph.D. is the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce CSC Chair in Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. He also directs the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University. He has published extensively on infant sleep, breastfeeding, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), and the evolution of human behavior with special emphasis on the differences between the behavior and physiology of solitary and co-sleeping-breastfeeding mother-baby pairs. His interests include how cultural factors influence infant and childcare practices, which in turn, affect maternal-infant health and well-being. The National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development fund his research. Currently, he is involved in a multi-site USA national prospective project examining first-time teen moms throughout their pregnancies and throughout the first three years of their infants' lives. His articles have appeared in refereed periodicals and academic journals around the world, and he is considered one of the leading authorities on scientific studies of infant-parent co-sleeping and breastfeeding, especially bed-sharing, having been the first to study the practice.

From the Back Cover

Sleeping with your baby has been the norm for almost all cultures through almost all ages. Yet, in our modern world, the practice is fraught with questions and guilt. In Sleeping with Your Baby: A Parent's Guide to Cosleeping, a world-wide recognized cosleeping authority examines why simplistic recommendations against any and all forms of cosleeping are not only scientifically inappropriate, but dangerous and morally wrong. Walking readers through various ways to safely cosleep, whether bedsharing or not, this book provides the latest information on the potential scientific benefits of cosleeping. Complete with sections on minimizing hazards and risks, this book explains why and how to sleep with your baby.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

WHAT IS COSLEEPING?

Many people don't fully understand the term "cosleeping," but they use the term nonetheless because most have a sense of what it is. Picture a mother lion and her cubs sleeping in a big heap, paws on top of backs, heads on bellies, body parts rising and falling with each rhythmic breath, the whole group intertwined in one peaceful lump of warmth and touching - that is cosleeping, or at least one version of it.

Of course, each species cosleeps uniquely in a manner reflecting the special biological needs and characteristics of its infants and mothers. For example, primates (including humans) typically give birth to one offspring at a time, providing each infant the opportunity to sleep alone with the mother or father. This way each infant can receive maximum attention during a very long and vulnerable infancy. Human infants are especially in need of a great deal of contact, emotional support, breastfeeding, and transportation.

Cosleeping refers to the many different ways babies sleep in close emotional and physical contact with their parents, usually within arms reach. Whether it is for protection, warmth, food, or comfort, humans and other mammals routinely sleep side by side, generation after generation. This book is about cosleeping, as practiced here in Western cultures and around the globe. In one way or another cosleeping remains universal for our species, predating history itself.

Cosleeping cannot necessarily be characterized the same way across all situations, but must be further broken down into safe and unsafe. And while each family's circumstances may vary, they can all be said to "cosleep" whenever they cuddle, snuggle and snooze together close enough to detect and respond to each other - whether on the same surface or not, and when at least one adult is committed to the infant's well being.

It is very important to acknowledge that cosleeping does not simply refer to bedsharing, for example, but it refers also to roomsharing, or any situation in which parents and infants are within arms' reach but not necessarily sleeping on the same surface. One of the difficult issues facing us is to reach agreement that while not all forms of cosleeping are safe, not all forms of cosleeping are dangerous, either. For example, some medical authorities mistakenly state that "cosleeping is dangerous," when they really mean to say that couch or sofa sleeping is dangerous (which is always true) or, that in their opinion, that bedsharing is dangerous (which may or may not be true, depending on how it is practiced). To speak about cosleeping without specifying what type of cosleeping one is referring to is to create more controversy and confusing than is necessary. While there may still be differences of opinion as to how to read the scientific findings on bedsharing (as I report below) there is generally much more agreement on some of these issues than it might appear.

Edition details

• Publisher: Platypus Media
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1930775342
• ISBN 13: 9781930775343
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128