Doctors warn parents not to sleep with their babies because of the risk of death by accidental suffocation. Still, mothers who've carried those infants inside them want to be nearby, which is only natural. Surely, modern technology can find a way to do that safely. One idea is the device shown above by BellyBelly. Years later, it is not widely used outside of the Netherlands.
The truth is that parents in the United States want to sleep with their children, and many, in fact, already do. Between 1993 and 2015, surveys show that co-sleeping spiked from 6% to 24%, despite doctors’ warnings. There are also many bedside sleeping devices on the market for home use that allow you to attach a bassinet to the side of your bed so you can sleep close to your child, though the American Academy of Pediatrics declines to comment on their safety. On its website, the AAP says it “cannot make a recommendation for or against the use of bedside sleepers or in-bed sleepers until more studies are done.”
Some doctors are pushing back on the AAP’s recommendations. They argue that the risks of infants dying because of co-sleeping are actually very low. Many of the studies about SIDS were conducted in the early 2000s and found that it often happens when parents sleep in the same bed as their children. But when you take a closer look at the data, the cases of sleep-related infant deaths mostly fell under a few categories: They involve parents who drink or do drugs, they involve premature babies or parents who smoke, and they involve babies sleeping on sofas with their parents and then getting trapped in the cushions.
Read about the struggle over co-sleeping at Fast Company. -via Digg