Is Mom Co-sleeping with Baby Child Abuse? A Safe Time-Honored Tradition Now Used to Kidnap Babies

As long as parents have been having children, babies and parents have been sleeping together. "Co-sleeping," as it is called now, has been a normal part of life across the majority of the world's cultures, throughout all of human history. It is only in modern times that babies have been expected to sleep in a crib, separated from the warmth and comfort of their mothers' breasts. Now, the practice is frowned upon by some doctors and experts, and it is even being used as justification for Child Protective Services (CPS) to take babies away from their parents. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) strongly warns against co-sleeping, and some have termed it "child abuse," connecting it to SIDS and even perversion and sexual abuse. These assertions fly in the face of the attachment parenting model as well as the practices of millions of parents world-wide. Proponents of co-sleeping cite many valid health and emotional benefits of co-sleeping. How do we separate fact from myth? More importantly, how do we protect children? Are they truly at a greater risk of dying by sleeping in their parents' bed? At what point does the risk of them being seized by CPS and taken away from their parents outweigh the benefits of co-sleeping? Michaeleen Doucleff of NPR recently addressed many of these issues in a well-documented article entitled, "Is Sleeping With Your Baby As Dangerous As Doctors Say?" She points out that the studies used to show the danger to babies from co-sleeping are misleading, because they lump all co-sleepers together. They fail to differentiate between parents who are drunk or high on drugs and normal, low-risk parents who sleep with their babies. Information that should be used for recommending safer practices are instead being used to demonize good, loving parents. It has come to the point where parents who co-sleep can no longer risk posting their photos of mommy or daddy sleeping with their baby on social media. There have been cases where innocent, sweet photos, like those that many of us have in our photo albums from an earlier time in history, have been reported to Child Protective Services.