Bed-sharing with a baby? Here’s how to be safer

As more parents shun abstinence advice, focus shifts to ways to reduce practice’s risks.

- By JENNY GOLD

HEALTH researcher Emily Little, shown with her baby, helps families mitigate the risks of bed-sharing.

(TANYA GOEHRING For The Times)

When Emily Little gave birth to her first child, sleeping together with her baby in bed was a given-despite all the public health messages telling her not to.

"I knew it was something that I wanted to do," said Little, a perinatal health researcher and science communications consultant who has studied cultures around the world that bedshare. Little was drawn to the skin-to-skin closeness she could maintain with her baby throughout the night, and the ease of breastfeeding him without getting up. It felt natural to sleep the way mothers and babies had slept "since the beginning of human history," she said.

So she began to research ways to reduce the risk to her baby. Bed-sharing has been found to be less risky for full-term infants in nonsmoking, sober homes who are exclusively breastfed: Check. Only the breastfeeding parent should sleep next to the baby: Check. Since babies are less likely to suffocate on firm mattresses and without loose bedding, Little replaced her pillowtop mattress and got rid of all of her blankets and extra pillows. Because babies could fall off the bed or into a gap between the bed and the wall, Little pushed the bed up against the wall, and filled in the gap with foam.