Study Claims Co-Sleeping Causes SIDS, But Not Really

A new study out of England claims that “most babies who died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) were babies who were co-sleeping, either in a bed or on a sofa, with an adult or another child.

The study consists of a 4-year study conducted in a southwest region of England. It includes 4.9 million people and 184,000 births. It focused on 80 infants who had died from SIDS, 87 who were randomly selected from the population and 82 who had known risk factors for SIDS, which was defined as having young, socially deprived mothers who smoked, but whose babies did not die.

The study found that 54% of SIDS infants were sleeping with someone else at the time of death.

Now while this could definitely be construed as a huge factor in why so many infants die of SIDS every year, as Mama 2 Mama Tips pointed out, and what I definitely agree with, is that SIDS is when there is no clear cause as to why that infant died, so you cannot point to a case of a mother who rolls onto her infant while sleeping and smothering that infant as a SIDS case–that is a case of a mother who accidentally and unconsciously smothers her baby. What she also pointed out is that this study is making very big use of the term “co-sleeping,” which has also translated to many other high-reaching publications and has undoubtedly sent many mothers of infants and small children into a tailspin, putting up cribs they had never planned on using and ceasing co-sleeping with their children. But. Yes, but. The researchers who have conducted this study obviously have no idea what true co-sleeping is. They say that co-sleeping causes SIDS in over half of the babies in cases that they studied, but they actually lumped co-sleepers with parents who got drunk, took drugs and passed out on the couch next to their baby, which is not co-sleeping and in any case, is just bad, bad parenting.

In addition, I actually find the reporting of this study as incredibly offensive. To suggest that all, or even most or the bulk of SIDS tragedies happen when babies have young, “socially deprived” mothers who smoke. With all of the numerous SIDS cases around the world, this isn’t something happens to just one class of people or one race of people and to conduct a study that focuses solely on lower-income, lower-class mothers strikes me as quite discriminatory.

A big fat thanks to Mama 2 Mama Tips for pointing the flaws and misinformation of this study.