regarding the paper on www.us.oup.com/us/pdf/spirito/Mindell.pdf link:
it is not a sleep lab case study. it is parents taking their kids home sleep training them. it is a compilation of a variety of studies under a variety of settings, eras from the 80's onwards.
Sleep lab case studies will be fascinating because such a study would focus on the responses of the child while being sleep trained.
some parts of it was shocking like this: 'If the child came out of the bedroom, parents were "to administer one swat and without talking, return their child to bed."? effing hell, is that one of methodologies advocated by scientists for treating a 'problem'. No wonder we've got problems.
and this one was laughable: Extinction procedures can be quite stressful for parents. yes..... and..... what about the poor kid.
so they talk about graduated extinction (which is ferber's method?) which should be less stressful. On who?
i never said cc in any of it forms did not work in stopping night wakings. i agree, it works. it works on the same principles as Pavlov's dogs experiments work. the brain of a baby has less frontal lobe than adults do. more like a dog. but i would hope that adults are beyond training children like i would train a puppy.
i wonder though, why the normal waking patterns of young children in this piece of research is treated as a problem to be fixed.
children wake up because that is what they do. not because it is a disorder.
is it cc safe though. it is done to achieve an infant to sleep 'through the night'. In quotes because there are a lot of definitions of that term.
what results is that infants go into abnormally deep sleep troughs. if sleep apnea occurs during the night, it raises the possibility that the child may not have the natural brain development yet to wake himself up. it is shown that co-sleeping mothers - in sleep labs - may rouse their infants out of episodes of apnea. Now, how does a woman do that while she is asleep? another question yet not fully answered.
in the US 3/4ths of sids deaths occur while infants are sleeping alone in cots. this is despite the many manufacturing guidelines for cots and parental guidelines regarding bedding and risks of overheating.
the majority of co-sleeping deaths occur when several risk factors come together. alcohol, drugs, overtiredness and inappropriate sleep locations, etc are involved.
why is it then that cot-sleeping is considered the gold-standard?
why is it that in Japan, SIDS is almost non-existent when the Japanese are more prone to apnea than Caucasians are?
I know you hate the words 'may' and the like. that was funny reading you dispute material based on words like may. did you ever study syllogisms in uni? That is why people use words like 'may'.
your dislike of the words may and could, etc. seems to imply that you think that any of the research we are discussing are conclusive and should be set in stone otherwise not worth considering.