Not this again.

So, this old chestnut. Yes, I’m sorry. We all have to go through this AGAIN. Get your boots on, ladies. Lace ’em up. Forget those dishes for the moment. Put down that baby for a sec (flat on her back on a horizontal surface at least five metres away from where God forbid she might be able to hear your breathing or listen to your heartbeat, just for safety’s sake.) Take a swig of strong coffee. Join me in the ranks, as I draw an extremely world-weary sigh and tell this guy why he’s riled me up – yet again – on the topic of co-sleeping.

I sadly note that nothing in this post is new information, or anything I haven’t personally observed many times in the past either online in real life when similar ‘news’ items have cropped up. I really regret the fact that, once again, I’m obliged to rant it all out.

1. There is a very persuasive argument to be made that co-sleeping is a healthy and natural way of sleeping with tiny, new human beings. See a list of articles from scientific journals on the subject here. Buy a brilliant book on the subject here. Or do your own research (I suggest you start with medical opinions, rather than legal ones – apologies, Wallace).

Image: Katie M Berggren

2. The facts show that “co-sleeping” deaths are almost universally associated with other factors: alcohol, smoking, drugs, obesity, pre-existing health problems in the baby, or sleeping the baby on its front. (In this case, the baby was sleeping on its front and the parents had “a history of smoking and marijuana use”.) Despite the ubiquitous presence of these obviously major contributing factors in all the reports, it is ALWAYS co-sleeping that gets the rap in the media.  In the stuff.co.nz report that sparked this rant, co-sleeping was cited as ‘the cause’ of the death in the second paragraph. The fact that the baby was sleeping on its front was mentioned SIX paragraphs down. The tobacco and drug history was mentioned ELEVEN paragraphs down, in a parenthetical clause.

3. We humans in our current form have been around for 200,000 years. For how many of those years does Wallace reckon human babies have been tucked into their own cushy little custom-built cots more than an arm’s length away from their watchful mothers? Does he think that when we lived in caves, our fore-parents were decorating little ‘nursery’ sub-caves out of their sight and hearing, in order to put their little cave babies down to sleep there without any other humans in the vicinity? Before we were humans, for all intents and purposes we were apes. How many ape mothers has Wallace ever heard of, I wonder, who carefully put aside their babies at the end of the day to sleep by themselves in a designated corner of the jungle?

Together we Sleep by Laura Koniver MD

4. How many babies in the third world  – the majority of the human population alive today – the unwashed millions who listen to their mothers and grandmothers about how to care for their babies, and not to dicks like Wallace, whose pompous verbosity they cannot avoid on the internet – how many of THOSE babies does Wallace suppose sleeps as he demands their mothers make them sleep, tucked up shipshape in their own wee bed? Can he tell us why Japan, where co-sleeping is common, has the lowest rate of SIDS in the world?

5. There is no statistical record on the number of infant deaths in New Zealand for which co-sleeping was a cause. Wanna know why?  Because deaths in New Zealand are coded according to the World Health Organization’s international coding rules, and within those rules bed-sharing is not a cause of death. I’d like to repeat that last part again: Bed-sharing is not a cause of death. Babies die from suffocation – attributable to a whole array of factors (see point 2). Not from bed sharing.

Can’t find an attribution for this image! (Can you help?) Edit: this is l’intime by Faby Artiste. Thanks Paulina!

6. The New Zealand Ministry of Health’s FIRST piece of advice for parents to avoid Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is: ‘Put your baby to sleep on their back with their face up. A baby’s breathing works best in this position.’ Why aren’t you asking for legal enforcement of rule number 1, Wallace?

7. Wallace Bain is throwing around terms like ‘epidemic’ and ‘child abuse’ and ‘kill’. Those are huge, dirty words, Wallace. We mummies don’t use words like that. When we talk about this stuff – when we talk to fellow parents and to the wider world about the issues that are important to us (and these issues are very, very important to us) we try very hard not to use language that could even be construed as negatively subjective. Because as mothers we’ve learnt – the ridiculously hard way – that every single situation is different. Every child, every parent, every family. It’s a dangerous game to make wide-ranging generalisations about a parent’s or parents’ actions, or their personal experiences: not even when you know some of the circumstances, and not even when you know ALL of the circumstances. Using those ugly words is the worst sort of scare-mongering. (epidemic? Really? Do you know what New Zealand’s SIDS stats actually are? As a percentage of live births they barely show up on a graph – and the infant death rate has been steadily decreasing over time.)

8. Wallace Bain is not a paediatrician. He’s not a ‘baby-whisperer’. He is NOT a mother. He’s a lawyer. That is the sum total of what he’s qualified to comment on – the law.

9. He’s also Pākehā, and he’s middle-aged, and MALE (in one fell swoop, the experience and wisdom and instinct of New Zealand’s hundreds of thousands of mothers is ignored and negated; who cares what our nation’s mothers think about big issues like this one?) – which means that the media listen to him, and feel not the slightest compunction in spreading his words far and wide and implying that they are the last ones to be had on the topic. God forbid – god FORBID that New Zealand mothers will listen to him too.  Mummies, I beg you.

Don’t listen to him.

Daisy