The first night we brought my son home from the hospital to our empty flat, we sat up far longer than needed, unmoored by a new, overwhelming responsibility to keep him alive. That some babies stop breathing in their sleep, and scientists still don’t really know why, terrified me when I’d just been primally rewired towards his survival. All you can do, you are told, is try to minimise risk.
And so you commit the guidelines to memory: “For the first 12 months (adjusted for prematurity), the baby should be placed on its back in their own clear, flat, firm separate sleep space (eg a cot or moses basket) in the same room as you. They should not get too hot, and it should be a smoke-free environment.”
This is drilled into you for a good reason: babies die from sudden infant death syndrome (Sids) and sudden unexpected death in infancy or childhood (Sudic, which covers Sids and other causes, for example, accidental suffocation). However, they are dying in far fewer numbers than a few decades ago. In the absence of a genetic test for Sids, safe sleep guidelines are the best things we have to prevent infant death.
The problem is that babies don’t always play ball. They don’t read the leaflets. They have just left the safety of the womb, with its feeling of boundaried containment, only to be placed in a separate cot away from their mother’s body (even to be put down can prompt a startle reflex, from the sensation that they are falling). I remember looking at my son and all the other tiny babies in their neonatal intensive care unit incubators. The nurses had surrounded them with rolled up towels for this very reason.
The rolled-up towel trick isn’t recommended at home. We often used a Purflo baby bed, reminiscent of a pod, that was advertised as being certified safe for overnight sleeping. Like many others, I was forced to negotiate the uneasy tension between wanting to keep my baby safe, and offering him the closeness, comfort and containment that is so natural for infants to crave.
It is also not always easy to follow the guidelines. Your baby might sleep happily on its back. But many don’t. So where to turn? Online, it’s a culture war between the official health advice and ideological cosleepers – parents, mostly mothers, for whom sleeping with their infant has become akin to an identity, linked to the theory of attachment parenting. Somewhere in the middle you have, well, most of us, trying our best to keep our babies safe while also hoping to get enough rest to not lose our minds.
Despite being long practised in many societies, cosleeping is a dirty word in the west (it is even more taboo in the US). Many parents are harshly reprimanded or guilt-tripped for doing it, or have lied to health professionals. Yet the charity the Lullaby Trust found that nine out of 10 parents cosleep with their babies at one time or another.
I did. I had a preterm baby (an added Sids risk factor) who slept happily on his back, until, at seven months, he stopped. I went against advice and coslept as safely as possible, but, haunted by a phrase in a baby book (“Imagine how you would feel if you coslept and your baby died”), I developed a crick in my neck from sleeping anxiously in the “C-curl” position.
Pods and docks aren’t recommended either, despite ostensibly being the ideal solution to this quagmire. I recently visited a friend and her newborn who use the same Purflo baby bed, and it was only then that I found myself wondering what its claim of “certified safe for unsupervised, overnight sleeping” actually means. In fact, there is no one existing safety standard for this kind of product. The company DockATot brought an Advertising Standards Authority complaint against Purflo in 2021, and Purflo was reprimanded for its use of the phrase, because it could imply there is a certificate that says this.
Purflo has stopped using “certified” in its claim, and told me its Sleep Tight Baby Bed “follows safe sleep guidelines, being fully breathable with a firm, flat base and firm, structured sides that allow air to circulate and will prevent risk of suffocation and overheating”. Both Purflo and DockATot, which thoroughly test against the standards available, say there should be a British safety standard for these (still relatively new) products.
I agree. DockATot – which adheres to the general safe sleep recommendations – says that “without such standard, no brand promoting an unregulated product can make safe sleep claims that are true”. But worryingly, the market is flooded with untested products that prey on parents desperate for some rest.
Despite cosleeping and using a pod, I try to look back kindly on my choices. In hindsight, I was so anxious and impressionable, desperate to do the right thing but also doubting myself. Recognising that telling parents off is less effective than supporting them to do things more safely, the UK seems to have turned a corner in its approach. Health professionals and charities are increasingly focusing on teaching parents how to bedshare more safely (a sofa or armchair is never safe).
“We can have an ideal, but we understand that some people, for lots of different reasons, aren’t always able to do that on every single night,” says Jenny Ward of the Lullaby Trust. She wants people to have what she calls “an internal alarm bell” so that in a high-risk scenario where, say, you have had alcohol or are feverish, you have a separate sleep space for your baby that is completely clear.
I admire its approach. The charity exists because of the tiny lives that have been lost. Yet in its quest to prevent more deaths it is being pragmatic and realistic, treating sleep-deprived parents with compassion and working with them. Alarmingly, recent research found that Sudic rates in the US increased by 12% from 2020 to 2022, with a similar increase in the UK. Doctors don’t know why, and are hopeful that it may be a pandemic-related blip, but they have raised concerns about the role of social media in encouraging unsafe sleep practices.
The internet is a wild west of unsubstantiated opinion and untested products, but people look to it because they feel alone, unsupported and unsure. Isn’t that the story of modern western parenting in a nutshell? Ward says that her dream policy would be better postpartum support to help parents get their babies sleeping safely right at the beginning. So when you are sitting on the sofa like I was, feeling too overwhelmed and unmoored to even think about sleep, there’s someone there to help you find a way.
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Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author. She is the author of a novel, The Tyranny of Lost Things, and a memoir, The Year of the Cat
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