Comment by fnordpiglet
2 years ago
This article reminded me of another local story about a doctor who provides assessment beyond the knee jerk child protection industrial complex -
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/child-abuse-or-med...
This also reminds me a lot of the indoctrination we went through at the hospital when my daughter was born.
Despite being a high risk pregnancy we were railroaded into a natural birth. After nearly 24 hours of horrific labor she spiked an extremely high fever and they had to do a c-section, making us feel like failures. They found that our daughter wouldn’t have made it otherwise.
We were castigated because my wife took medicines that entered her milk and were made to feel like failures for considering not breast feeding. She had to pump milk at five AM before she took any medicine to minimize the exposure to the extremely toxic medicine that would be present in her milk. She didn’t produce enough milk and we were at wits end. The nurses and doctors at the hospital were unhelpful and treated us like abusers. When we went to our local pediatrician he laughed and said entire generations were raised on formula and to stop killing ourselves. It was the best advice we were ever given.
Likewise my daughter couldn’t sleep on her back. She wailed every night. I read everything I could find on SIDS and I realized the correlation for back sleeping was very weak - almost statistically irrelevant - and even then the prevalence of SIDS was very low. Yet I knew for 100% my daughter wasn’t sleeping. I knew if I told anyone I would be lectured, and I worried might even be reported. The after nearly a week of not sleeping I flipped her over one night with my heart pounding. She fell asleep immediately. She didn’t die.
She’s nine now and an incredible athlete and has a sharp and brilliant mind. None of the doomsday stuff occurred. No autism, no weak immune system, no weight problems, intellectual deficiency, or all the other warnings we were given about c-section, formula, or belly sleeping. Over the years I continued to read the research and there’s basically nothing compelling about any of this advice, at least not at the level of stridency parents experience.
I didn't know that about sids. What a bullshit diagnosis. Our children mostly slept tummy down on mum's chest, skin-to-skin, because that reduced sids chance (and we were terrified). But like yours, they couldn't sleep tummy up
AIUI tummy down on a (wakeful) person is generally not a concern nor what the "back is best" crowd is referring to
Obviously a parent who is spending nearly all their time with a newborn knows them best and is likely able to make the best judgement about what works for the child, but the purpose of the advice is to avoid a class of scenario that occur most often. due to issues that are very difficult to detect and often go completely undiagnosed, as they pertain to early development and often improve naturally over time.
The technical report by AAP the other year does an excellent job of presenting the current evidence in an as objective way as possible, I highly recommend it:
https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/150/1/e20220...
You will note that efforts are being made to disentangle diagnoses from the broad SIDS label and that while SIDS cases are trending downwards, it's likely due to both proper classification and education.
The point of preventative measures is to avoid the issue entirely. Sure, tummy sleeping might not be a problem for you (or maybe it was and you just got lucky!) but by generally recommending back sleeping, a class of issues is avoided.
So all in all, I really don't see this as bullshit at all. Caveat that you gotta do what you gotta do, but I'd rather this advice persist than not. We should hope that no one ever has to endure the loss of a child.
Even in reading that despite the hyperbolic phrasing I find it unconvincing. We are talking about something that happens to less than 0.04% of babies. The odds ratio quoted is 2 - so for belly sleeping it’s 0.08%. They give hyperbolic advice (it’s critical they sleep supine every time they sleep, etc), and while I don’t dismiss an observed odds ratio in a single study of 2, I also hold that it’s not critical in the least. What’s critical is sleep, milk, love, and intimate closeness. The energy spent on back sleeping would be better applied to emphasizing the need for intimacy as failure to thrive is much more likely than sids.
And people wonder why the fertility rate is falling.