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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Home is where the revolution is
When they forsake the revolution to raise children at home, smart women fear they've made a stupid choice.
By Cecelie S. Berry
[09/29/99]

Wild Thing
How do I know I'm really me?
Children ask the big questions, and these dreamy books venture to answer.
By Polly Shulman
[09/28/99]

Thelma and Louise it wasn't
When you can't vacation without them, the kids can come too. Just change your expectations and leave your husbands behind.
By Mona Gable
[09/27/99]

Where have all the Eddie Haskells gone?
The daughter of a cool mom attempts to carry on the tradition, only to find that there are no smarmy, well-groomed takers for her act.
By Karen Karbo
[09/24/99]

Give me a dick or give me death!
Today I am a femme with an inner soft butch, but as a child, I failed to meet the demands of either gender.
By Kera Bolonik
[09/23/99]

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By Peggy O'Mara

Sept. 30, 1999 | Usually I welcome the warnings of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. I like to know about dangerous products. But, not this time. This time the CPSC has come into my bedroom and I want them out. Since when is co-sleeping a product? Who has the authority to tell me what to do in the privacy of my own bedroom? What if this one-size-fits-all prescription just doesn't fit my family? Am I to be terrorized by the CPSC illustrations of strangled and smothered babies or am I going to stand up and say, "Not me." "Not this time." "No thanks."

Interestingly enough the CPSC gives little detail about the alleged deaths associated with babies in adult beds. Who are these parents who managed to smother their babies? I've never heard about any of them and I've been listening to parents for over 20 years. Is there any chance that these parents were heavily drugged or drunk when this happened? Most of the co-sleeping parents I talk to complain about not getting enough sleep, of having a heightened, not a diminished, sense of awareness when their baby is in bed with them.

Please! Give us parents more credit. Our job is hard enough without being terrorized by worst-case scenarios. I am tired of having my perfectly normal instincts co-opted by bureaucracies and institutions that focus on extremes at the expense of normalcy. And I refuse to buy into a fear-based philosophy for my parenting.

With all the important issues that the CPCS, the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics could focus on, why bother with a "mother management" issue like co-sleeping? Is there some fear of future liability if they don't "warn" the public of obscure deaths? Are the crib manufacturers losing money? What's the big deal? Is it that medical experts unfamiliar with the family bed don't know how to advise parents and therefore want to make co-sleeping go away? Is it that old fear of intimacy, once again?

Don't you think that if parents had been rolling over and suffocating their babies that we would all have heard about it by now? Don't you think that we would have told each other?

It's enough to make a parent crazy. Obviously this CPSC recommendation was written by people who never get up in the night with babies. In 1997, the AAP told us to breastfeed and then undermined its own recommendation by telling us to put the baby back in his or her own crib after breastfeeding. Maybe I'm just a lazy mother, but one of the big advantages of breastfeeding is that you don't have to get up and take the baby down the hall. You have the equipment built in.

One of the things that the CPSC scare tactics fail to mention is that in practically all other cultures in the world, babies sleep with their mothers. In her book, "Our Babies, Ourselves," pediatric anthropologist Meredith Small tells us that the United States is unique in the way that it treats its children during sleep. Only in industrialized Western countries, such as the United States, Canada and some European countries, has sleep become a private affair. Small cites one study of 186 non-industrial societies; in none of these cultures do babies sleep in a separate place before they are at least 1 year old. In another study of 172 societies, all infants do some co-sleeping at night.

Are we to believe then that these other countries just don't know any better? Do they have different beds, different mattresses? Do they use less drugs, drink less alcohol? Couldn't we consider learning something from these other cultures? As the most violent culture in the world, it seems to me that we could use some more of the touch that reduces violence: breastfeeding and co-sleeping.

Next page | I refuse to give up my authority as a parent to others