Comment by mindslight
15 hours ago
The "happy ending" where one of the parents and their three other kids find out that the other parent likely killed the older brother they never met? That doesn't sound very happy to me, but maybe we have different definitions of happy?
When I tried reading into the causes of so-called SIDS it seemed like at least some of the cases were a catch-all diagnosis that included cases where parents inadvertently killed their infants (eg co-sleeping and rolling onto them). Fundamentally I think there often isn't much upside to fully fleshing out the truth of cases where parents have already paid the heaviest price.
Man, SIDS. It's specifically non-specific, but the worry it causes is quite specific.
My daughter, as a baby, always managed to find a way to sleep on her stomach. Wouldn't sleep on her back, but almost magically by comparison would fall asleep lying on her stomach (face to one side or the other, not straight down, obviously - I hope). We tried various combinations of devices, arrangements of pillows and cushions, tight wraps, to keep her lying on her back, but babies are remarkably, if involuntarily, wilful (or she was, anyway, and remains to this day).
I worry about very few things, but for the first few nights we'd regularly get up to check on her, and literally be holding our breath waiting for her to expel hers.
Out of necessity the every-parents-SIDS-fear, from allowing the baby to sleep on their stomach, had to be removed from our psyche so that we could continue to function day-to-day.
Said baby is now, thankfully, a semi-healthily functional teenager. As functional as teenagers get anyway :)
I swear, all the shit they push at new parents. You can see the point to much of it, and it's obviously going to be a very stressful time regardless. But there's the same inescapable bureaucratic dynamic where once something becomes legible, the system pathologically emphasizes those few bits over and over and over, to the detriment of balanced judgement - both your own and most healthcare providers if you try to get some nuance out of them.
It's understandable that they're trying to help the people who might not be the most competent at following the guidelines, because there is still harm reduction to be had there. But it pushes the instruction-followers into the territory of "well, this probably doesn't apply to us because XXX", which is an epistemologically terrible place to be.
We're still joking about how much they repeated the advice to keep the belly button dry, when it was relevant for like maybe two whole weeks.
during covid they actually laid hospital patients face down (suspended i think?) to help with breathing when a ventilator wasnt available. this behaviour reminds me of that, perhaps your baby was doing this to help with breathing? i dont know...
I mean, if it was the case that one parent killed the child (Which, to be clear, we don't know. It could have been anybody who had access to the child at the time), then I'd think the best outcome is them getting convicted of it. I don't know why so many people treat homicide as "not a big deal" when it comes to babies.
Consider an unrelated hypothetical scenario, a family father accidentally hits and kills somebody with his car. He flees from the scene and is not discovered for 20 years. Would you then not attempt to prosecute him because it would be sad for his family to know? And now consider the case if it was his own child that died.
We don't know it was the parents. Could've been a babysitter. Could've been a grandparent. New parents often have help.
> The "happy ending" where one of the parents and their three other kids find out that the other parent likely killed the older brother they never met? That doesn't sound very happy to me, but maybe we have different definitions of happy?
While "happy" isn't the word I'd use, that seems better than knowing that this could happen to any baby at any time and nothing would be done.
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SIDS was named in 1969, might be related to combined vaccines.
https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety...
have you read the linked page?
> However, since immunizations are given to about 90 percent of children less than 1 year of age, and about 1,600 cases of SIDS occur every year, it would be expected, statistically, that every year about 50 cases of SIDS will occur within 24 hours of receipt of a vaccine. However, because the incidence of SIDS is the same in children who do or do not receive vaccines, we know that SIDS is not caused by vaccines.