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Essay about Co Sleeping

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Kamy Snodgras English 10:45 Tues.& Thurs. Stephen Dufrechou 12/03/13 Benefits of co-sleeping with your infant for the first six months For as long as we can remember we are always told to never sleep with your baby that you could suffocate them by rolling over on them or what not. In a study by Davies, he found that prior to the 1700's co-sleeping was a normal thing around the world. It was not until the 1800's when the western society moved away from co-sleeping to an independent sleeping arrangement claiming the child will be too attached and have security problems; you will never get the child to sleep in their own bed; the child will not learn independence; or, the child could suffocate in various ways. Well, I agree …show more content…

( Hayes, Robert & Stowe, 1996). In more studies co-sleeping protect some babies from sudden infant death (SIDS), co-sleeping babies tend to nurse more often, sleep lightly, and have more practice at responding to maternal arousal. Arousal deficiencies have been linked to some sudden infant death and long periods of deep sleep for the infant could complicate the matters more. In 1997, anthropologist James Mckenna and his colleagues conducted a study in a sleep laboratory at the University of California's Irvine School of Medicine. The study was to observed thirty-five nursing mother- infant pair sleeping together as well as apart for three consecutive nights. The infants were between eleven to fifteen weeks old. Twenty of the infants had been co sleeping since birth and the other fifteen had been independent sleepers. To observe they used many tools such as polygraph to record mother and infants heart rate, breathing rhythms, body temperature, the nursing cycles and even monitored their brain waves all of this along with watching their test subjects simultaneously on an infrared video monitor. What they found was quite unique, the infant and mother were highly responsive to each other and their movements. The infant and mother changed position of sleeping to face each other. They wake more frequently to nurse, and about twice as much as an independent sleeper and nurse three times longer but still get more sleep co sleeping than independent sleepers,

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