A Study On Parent Infant Sleeping

A very controversial topic in the world today is, parent-infant sleeping, otherwise known as, “co-sleeping.” Parents want to know if there’s any risks or is sleeping with their child actually beneficial. A longitudinal study was invented to test the effects of co-sleeping within the first year of an infant’s life.

Researchers took a sample of, “139 families at one, three, six, nine, and twelve months of infant age in the central Pennsylvania area” (Teti, Shimizu, Cosby, & Kim, 2016). At each of the above ages, parents’ filled out questionnaires about their families. Questions the parents’ had to fill out were: “educational attainment, yearly family income, parental age, partner status and family size. sleeping space for everyone in their household, part or full time breastfeeding, or none” (Teti et al., 2016). Researchers studying sleeping patterns between parents and infant, marital distress, co-parent distress, and mother’s behavior with their babies at bedtime. Each study had a different hypothesis and different results.

First, researchers studied the regular sleeping patterns for both the baby and the mother. The hypothesis was that mothers’ who have parent infant sleeping arrangements report more frequent incidents of infant night waking. This is studied by actigraphy, the monitoring of the baby’s cycles of sleep and rest. They also watch for how awake and how often the baby woke up and among the parents’ sleep fragmentation. The researchers wanted to see if Volkovich’s finding match theirs. Volkovich found that with the use of actigraphy, it was the mother’s wakefulness that showed rising, not the infants’. Parents were asked to label their baby in one of four assessments based on where the infant slept within the five c...

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...arly childhood. I would still keep an eye on them by using baby monitors and frequent trips to check on their sleeping.

My biggest fear is to roll over and suffocate my baby. I know someone back in my home town that did that to her first baby, of course it was a complete accident. It’s not something uncommon. Marital distress is another reason why co-sleeping could be a bad idea. Not all parents agree to this sleeping arrangement so it could cause conflict between the two parents. No room in the bed for everyone, more sleep disruptions, no alone time, and it is just not comfortable for everyone. Thus being said, my thoughts are that co-sleeping is not for everyone and that I personally do not agree to it being safe and it causes other marital issues even if the research did not have enough data to back that up.