‘We can’t just teach abstinence’: How advice on bed-sharing with a baby is evolving

By Jenny Gold, Los Angeles Times

When Emily Little gave birth to her first child, sleeping together with her baby in bed was a given — despite all the public health messages telling her not to.

“I knew it was something that I wanted to do,” said Little, a perinatal health researcher and science communications consultant who has studied cultures around the world that bed-share. Little was drawn to the skin-to-skin closeness she could maintain with her baby throughout the night, and the ease of breastfeeding him without getting up. It felt natural to sleep the way mothers and babies had slept “since the beginning of human history,” she said.

So she began to research ways to reduce the risk to her baby. Bed-sharing has been found to be less risky for full-term infants in nonsmoking, sober