Co sleeping worries

[cttd1]

My little boy is 9 months. He slept from 8pm until 5am in his next to me until he was 5 months old. Since then he will not sleep anywhere except our bed (he will sleep 12 hours!) which we don't mind as we get more sleep that way and also he's our first baby so enjoying every minute of it.

He has been able to roll for months now he's a very sturdy baby, very capable and strong. However, he's been turning onto his tummy whilst in our bed (only when we're in the the living room and he has enough space to do so) is this safe? He's on the mattress, he's never fully face down, his face is to the side but I have anxiety to the point where I just sit next to him pretty much until I want to go to bed! Any advice appreciated :)

Such shite spouted on here already.
90% of Sid’s deaths are from falling asleep with the baby on the sofa/parents on drugs or alcohol etc it’s not the same fucking thing as an astute mother that’s has taken every necessary precaution.

We move our son into a day bed with bed guard just before he was 1, he couldn’t walk yet but was crawling. We would lay with him holding his hand and singing or soporific breathing etc.. then just get up and leave. Some times we’d have to go back in or even stay the whole night but eventually he got more and more used to being in that bed and move from sleep cycles on his own.

put your baby in a cot, alone on their back. Then leave them to sleep

Lol @ this.

Have you not wondered why baby sleep products/literature is a $350m market.. when you could just put them down duhhhhh.

All I know is that I followed, and continue to follow, the ABCs of safe sleep with my children.

The only safe place for a child under two years old is alone, put down on their back, in a crib. No toys, no blankets, no bumpers, no mobiles.

If others want to do things differently then it's up to them. It's dangerous but there we are.

And actually, yes, breastfeeding and using a dummy have been shown to be beneficial, however the effects aren't cumulative.

The mattress thing about them being so so so much softer seems to come from the US and isn't quite as relevant in the UK. I've always had firm mattresses and they really aren't that much softer than a cot mattress.

He is nine months old. It's absolutely fine. Once they can roll over to their front, it's considered safe to let them stay that way. Once you pass 4 months cosleeping is considered just as safe as cot sleeping as long as there are no major risk factors like smoking, alcohol/drugs or sofa sleeping.

Never have I ever heard this it needs to be as hard as a travel cot. Source please. Travel cots are hard because the sides are flexible so you can't afford any compression at all from the mattress. That's not the case in a bed.

Yes, rolling out of the bed is a very real hazard and something to be aware of once babies can roll. You can surround him with a wall of duvet or pillows, but please keep an eye with a monitor if you do that, as that is a suffocation risk if he did roll right up to it.

It's just like anything else, use common sense and keep the risks in mind.

Why don't you try and start the night in his own bed then bring him through if he wakes up after you've gone to bed? This is what we do and it works really well!

Frodis what about all the toddlers who learn to climb out of their cots before they’re 2? There’s no point in a crib for them.
Putting them down on their backs is completely irrelevant once they start immediately standing up and screaming at you.
Falling asleep holding your newborn baby when you’re trying to get them to calm down so you can put them back in their cot is dangerous too.
Did you breastfeed? Feeding makes you soooo sleepy at night time. I felt safer setting up to safely cosleep so that it didn’t matter so much if I drifted off rather than desperately trying to feed sitting up and not fall asleep so that I could put my newborn back in the cot.

If the mattress is already on the floor don’t worry about him rolling off it. He will. And he will be fine. Don’t bother with duvet wall etc. Rolling off a 20cm high mattress just isn’t a big risk.

Japan and Sweden most commonly co sleep. They also have the lowest rates of sids

Mine just climbed uk and out the cot at 16 months.

It's fine with a firm mattress and the pillow is away from him. If he can roll in your bed he can equally roll on his own in a cot. Follow safe sleeping guidelines

He's 9 months old!!! Not 2 months!! the biggest worry with pillows and teddies with newborns is that they can't lift their head away from the danger. Your not-a-baby-anymore can

My 3 kids slept in our bed. Like you said, that meant "I" slept!!

What you can get is those side protectors

DD slept in our bed from pretty early. It's definitely much safer to be set up for safe co-sleeping than not and fall asleep sitting up with baby in your arms or on the sofa or something. Those are the 'unsafe' situations statistics talk about generally. That and intoxicated/impaired parents. Healthy full-term babies and a safe co-sleeping set-up is not a massive risk or 'just luck' if they survive

SIDS is terrifying but thankfully very rare, and sadly is also just as possible in cots, as statistics from UNICEF show that around half of SIDs babies die in a cot or Moses basket. Of course unsafe sleeping practices can happen with cots too: bumpers, babies put down on front when they can't lift their heads yet, etc.

Some 90% of co-sleeping deaths are in unsafe situations, falling asleep on sofa, beside a smoker, beside someone drunk or on drugs. The number of healthy babies who die in a safe co-sleeping environment is tiny.

Some of lowest SIDs rates in the worlds are in countries where bedsharing is much more common. There are also a heap of other variables such as whether the baby is breast or formula fed, temperature of room/clothing, birth weight, etc.

Do people not realise cots and all these other pointless baby gadgets are man made? How on earth did women cope for thousands of years before they were invented? It’s almost like we were meant to sleep with our babies!!

The only safe place for a child
It's dangerous but there we are

That’s insane; have you seen what language you’re using for a baby sleeping with it’s fucking mother 😳

Some people need some perspective 🥴

I think it’s just America that say no bedding. Uk/ Europe have always given babies bedding imo. Either a baby suitable sleeping bag, swaddle, or blankets ie cellular style with holes in.
I can’t imagine putting a baby to bed with no type of cover at all.

@Caspianberg

I think it’s just America that say no bedding. Uk/ Europe have always given babies bedding imo. Either a baby suitable sleeping bag, swaddle, or blankets ie cellular style with holes in. I can’t imagine putting a baby to bed with no type of cover at all.

DD3 just falls asleep and wakes up to kick away ANY kind of cover and falls asleep again 🤷🏻‍♀️ she sleeps with weather appropriate clothes

Mine slept with me at that age even while i was having chemo and a bit out of it - probably not the best idea. However she did roll in her cot at 2 months old before she could lift her head and start suffocating - luckily I woke up. I don't think a 9 month old baby is at risk I wouldn't worry about - mine slept with me from 5 months old often face down on me as she had such bad colic

I think bad advice, or perhaps advice without context, has done a number on people because it's such a scary subject. The 'don't cosleep' message has ended up being more damaging than good, because people end up taking themselves to the sofa as they think being in bed is inherently unsafe, then falling asleep with their baby in their arms and causing positional asphyxia. The NHS, Lullaby Trust etc have finally realised this I think, as the more recent advice is much more balanced and focuses on separating safe cosleeping from unsafe cosleeping.

@cttd1its safe for him to lie on his front once he's able to roll. Consider a bed guard for the edge of the bed though. Both of mine were, actually still are, big sleep movers.

I gather from Reddit parenting subs that the anti-cosleeping (and, bizarrely, anti-blanket) messaging in America is extremely overblown and absolutely terrifying.

You should have seen what kicked off when I suggested that blankets are a perfectly normal thing for babies to have in most of the world :o They act as though you're suggesting tucking them up with an atomic bomb!

Exactly Hug. Co-sleeping just isn't that risky, but unsafe cosleeping is. And unfortunately, that's exactly what you get when you tell people it's terribly dangerous to co-sleep.

Reddit parenting subs are completely unhinged.

Yes, they seem to be VERY extreme about it over there, but their infant mortality rates are still higher than quite a lot of other countries. I was in a Reddit bumpers group with my first and still look there occasionally, and the advice seemed to not be very nuanced when it came to the US posters, whereas the Europeans in the group seemed more easygoing and balanced about certain things.

The advice from paediatricians seems quite rigid about some things, like sleeping and sleep training and potty training, but I wonder how much is to do with their godawful maternity rights and the fact that a lot of women have to go back at work full time nine weeks postpartum and babies are in full time daycare from tiny.

I also found it super weird that paediatricians were advising on CIO sleep training and stuff.

@BertieBotts - Ds was born in Central European hospital. At about 1hr old they tucked him into a babybay Co sleeper cot thing on wheels, under two blankets and a huge thick duvet. It was like he was buried under a Marshmellow

I had exactly the same experience in Germany :o DS3 was actually swaddled inside a sleeping bag that was as thick as a duvet, in the tiny co-sleeper cot with totally un-firm mattress that was flopping about everywhere.

For DS2 I did not understand the obsession with overheating babies and kept taking the layers off him which would set his alarms pinging because he was actually losing body heat due to being a bit crap at regulating his temperature, nobody had explained this to me, but with DS3 I just went with it. I did take his arms out though because I felt weird with him just being this immobilised baby stick with a head on it.

Paediatricians advising on sleep training didn't seem that weird since every health visitor in the UK was obsessed with whether or not DS1 was sleeping through and I ignored them too. But my lovely paediatrician in Germany has never breathed a word and just smiles when I say of course they wake up at 1+ year old.