Sleep Safety for Holiday Travelers
December 19, 2007 by Heidi Green | 3 questions or comments
Most importantly, the CPSC warns parents not to put their young children to sleep on those ubiquitous air mattresses. Over the past few years, the agency has received more than a dozen cases of children dying as a result of sleeping on such surfaces, either because they rolled face-down and suffocated or because they fell into a gap between the edge of the mattress and nearby furniture or walls and suffocated.
Suffocation is a real risk for young children who sleep on air mattresses, because the surfaces are too soft. Such mattresses are prone to leaks or being under-inflated. Even when they are fully inflated, they tend to be, in the words of CPSC, “too soft for infants to maintain a clear airway.”
But air mattresses aren’t the only risk. Some things to consider:
Back to sleep. To reduce the risk of SIDS, always place your baby on his back to sleep.
Use adult beds with care. Infants can suffocate on bedding or fall between the mattress and the bedframe or the mattress and the wall. If you are going to co-sleep with your child in an adult bed, please be sure to check out safety guidelines from Attachment Parenting International and from Elizabeth Pantley, author of The No-Cry Sleep Solution. Key among the recommendations, for holiday revelers, is not to sleep with your infant if you’ve had alcohol, are overtired, or are for some other reason likely to sleep very deeply.
Check sleep surfaces carefully. Make sure that any crib your baby sleeps in meets current safety standards and has a firm, tight-fitting mattress. If you’re using a portable crib or playpen, make sure you use the manufacturer’s mattress pad. There’s no guarantee any other one will fit tightly. You can search for crib recalls on the CPSC’s site.
When all is said and done, you might find that you feel safer bringing along baby’s co-sleeper, portable crib, bassinet, or bedrails. Without a doubt, preventing an accident from occurring while your child sleeps is an important part of enjoying your visit with the extended family! Happy holidays!
I’m disappointed to read here, on such a breastfeeding friendly website, the boldfaced suggestion above to “avoid using adult beds for young children.” Although it is followed up by links to information about co-sleeping safely, the message is still “do not co-sleep if you can help it.” The CPSC is notoriously anti-co-sleeping, and their position is not based on good data, because there simply aren’t good data to support the position that co-sleeping is inherently dangerous. Of course, safe and responsible co-sleeping is important, but the same is true of safe crib sleeping. Perhaps a better way of putting it is what James McKenna says, that it’s important to remember that adult beds were not created to keep babies safe; therefore co-sleeping families must be vigilant and thoughtful about setting up a safe sleeping arrangement. But this does not mean–and the data do not support–that a crib is necessarily a safer place to sleep than a properly configured family bed.
Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention. It is readers like you that help us do a better job! Perhaps a better statement would have been, “Use adult beds with care.”
Please know that our goal at baby gooroo is to give parents and health professionals balanced information on a wide range of parenting related topics, especially breastfeeding. Experience has taught me that bedsharing is among the short list of highly controversial topics and one which engenders lots of emotion on both sides.
I certainly support your assertion that “co-sleeping families must be vigilant and thoughtful about setting up a safe sleeping arrangement.” I actually believe that your recommendation applies to all parents of infants, regardless of the sleeping surface. As a health care provider (HCP), I firmly believe that the role of HCPs is not to tell parents how to parent their children, but to give them the knowledge and skill they need to parent effectively based on their individual circumstances.
I think the best message we can give parents of young infants is that solitary, unprotected sleep carries the greatest risk.
Again thank you for your comment. We will make the necessary correction right away.
Barbara, Amy, thank you. I am actually a supporter of co-sleeping (and, I think, one of Jim McKenna’s biggest “fans”). The article initially began with the intention of covering CPSC’s recommendations, thus the original phrasing, but I understand concerns about bias and agree that Amy’s phrasing is better. I am glad to be engaged in discussion of these issues.