The potential risk associated with bed-sharing and sudden infant deaths has led many health professionals to recommend parents to never take their infants into bed with them. In a previous paper, the authors have reported this might lead some parents to adopt more hazardous nighttime infant care practices, such as sleeping on a sofa.
This study investigates the longitudinal patterns of bed sharing, the characteristics associated with those patterns, and the relationship with breastfeeding using an established longitudinal cohort of parents and their children monitored from birth in Avon, England, since 1991.
The study used prospective, population-based data to investigate nocturnal bed sharing at 5 time points from birth to 4 years of age. Of 14,062 live births, 7447 (53%) had data available for all time points. Incomplete data from the remaining respondents followed similar trends. Postal questionnaire information was collected on sleeping practices (including where and when the infants and children and their parents slept) and on feeding practices (in particular, whether infants were breastfed and for how long breastfeeding continued).
The researchers identified 4 mutually exclusive groups, broadly described as nonsharers (66%), early bed sharers (only in infancy) (13%), late bed sharers (after the first year) (15%), and constant bed sharers (throughout the 4 years) (6%). The boy/girl ratio and the proportion of families of nonwhite ethnicity were slightly higher in all 3 bed-sharing groups, compared with the non–bed-sharing group. Higher maternal educational achievement and higher social class were positively associated with early bed sharing, negatively associated with late bed sharing, and not associated with constant bed sharing. The 3 bed-sharing patterns were related significantly to breastfeeding at 12 months (P< .001), whether the families shared beds late, early, or for the whole period. The prevalence of breastfeeding was significantly higher among the groups that shared beds constantly or early for each of the first 15 months after birth.
The authors state it is difficult to be precise about the dominant direction of the relationship between bed-sharing and breastfeeding, whether mothers share beds because they are breastfeeding or whether bed sharing make breastfeeding more likely to be successful. They conclude that given the likely beneficial effects of bed sharing on breastfeeding rates and duration, risk reduction messages to prevent sudden infant deaths should be targeted more appropriately to unsafe infant care practices such as sleeping on sofas, bed sharing after the use of alcohol or drugs, or bed sharing by parents who smoke and that advice on whether bed-sharing should be discouraged needs to take into account the important relationship with breastfeeding. This research was partly funded by the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths.
Relationship Between Bed Sharing and Breastfeeding: Longitudinal, Population-Based Analysis. Peter S. Blair, Jon Heron, and Peter J. Fleming; Pediatrics. published online 18 October 2010, 10.1542/peds.2010-1277.
