Parent-Child Bed-Sharing Review
10/23/2017
Reaching back to the Bible days people have talked about the health effects of mothers sleeping in the same bed as their babies. (The Bible) I will explain the goals of the article, outline the paper showing interesting points of information, explain my motivation for picking this topic and how the article has not changed my behavior. Bed sharing is the practice of sleeping in the same bed with one's child. (Bed) The authors of the article used many different resources when trying to describe bed sharing around the world. They rigorously compiled information gathered from multiple sources in hopes of carrying out common goals.
The goals of the authors were to integrate the parent-child bed-sharing literature from the years 1973 to start of 2016 and to identify cultural issues in the literature. The literature was found from searches performed on EMBASE, ERIC, Google Scholar, PubMed and PsycInfo. The objective was to focus on the main themes and not to combine opposite findings. They proposed the creation of a new subfield of study that was termed psychoanthropediatrics. They detailed the trends found in the six hundred and fifty-nine articles they used. Much work was showed explaining criteria to which an article must meet to be integrated.
With this integrated information little conclusive data was delivered explaining whether healthy benefits or unhealthy and dangerous risks resulted from bed sharing. A choropleth map of the world showing the prevalence of bed sharing around parts of the world showed much of North and South America did not reach more than twenty percent of the surveyed population co-sleeping. Asia and Africa had higher rates of bed-sharing than Europe and North and South America. Amongst surveyed Africans there was less deliberate bed sharing. Rather the people continued an unconscious cultural normative of bed sharing but not actively doing it like some Americans.
While there were a few instances where deliberate bed sharing, where the mother had a positive attitude towards the act and it resulted in a positive benefit to the life of the child not much of the article leaned ether positive or negative but was rather a mix of inconclusive, positive and negative effects. My motivation for picking this topic was to aid myself in deciding for sleeping habits if I ever have a child. While my hope was to find a definitive answer on weather bed sharing is healthy and beneficial or disadvantaging and potentially dangerous. The article did not sway my preference for not sharing my bed with any future children I may have. The deliberate practice of bed sharing may be indicative of a highly determined parent to better the life of their child. Leading us to think bed sharing is the cause when it is maybe a correlation to positive attributes.
Weather bed sharing resulted in a positive collation with a survey of “counterculture” Americans or a group of bed-sharing Chinese preschoolers who had more anxiety and daytime sleepiness we can see the coin is still in the air as to the best place for guardians and their children to sleep. While the number of bed sharers around the earth are not all known, we do know the percentages of bed sharers are vastly different from community to community. My choosing this topic and reading the article can now be used to help other people who may have misconceptions about bed sharing, its motivations or lack thereof and its use around the world.
Works Cited
Mileva-Seitz, Viara R., et al. “Parent-Child Bed-Sharing: The Good, the Bad, and the Burden of Evidence.” Sleep Medicine Reviews, W.B. Saunders, 15 Mar. 2016, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1087079216000265.
The Bible. Authorized King James Version, Oxford UP, 1998. 1 Kings 3:19
"Bed Sharing." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 23 Oct. 2017.