Children 'should sleep with parents until they're five'

This is an older article - but so good.
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May 14, 2006
Sian Griffiths

Margot Sunderland, director of education at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London, says the practice, known as “co-sleeping”, makes children more likely to grow up as calm, healthy adults.

Sunderland, author of 20 books, outlines her advice in The Science of Parenting, to be published later this month.

She is so sure of the findings in the new book, based on 800 scientific studies, that she is calling for health visitors to be issued with fact sheets to educate parents about co-sleeping.

“These studies should be widely disseminated to parents,” said Sunderland. “I am sympathetic to parenting gurus — why should they know the science? Ninety per cent of it is so new they bloody well need to know it now. There is absolutely no study saying it is good to let your child cry.”

She argues that the practice common in Britain of training children to sleep alone from a few weeks old is harmful because any separation from parents increases the flow of stress hormones such as cortisol.

Her findings are based on advances in scientific understanding over the past 20 years of how children’s brains develop, and on studies using scans to analyse how they react in particular circumstances.

For example, a neurological study three years ago showed that a child separated from a parent experienced similar brain activity to one in physical pain.

Sunderland also believes current practice is based on social attitudes that should be abandoned. “There is a taboo in this country about children sleeping with their parents,” she said.

“What I have done in this book is present the science. Studies from around the world show that co-sleeping until the age of five is an investment for the child. They can have separation anxiety up to the age of five and beyond, which can affect them in later life. This is calmed by co-sleeping.”

Symptoms can also be physical. Sunderland quotes one study that found some 70% of women who had not been comforted when they cried as children developed digestive difficulties as adults.

Sunderland’s book puts her at odds with widely read parenting gurus such as Gina Ford, whose advice is followed by thousands.

Ford advocates establishing sleep routines for babies from a very early age in cots “away from the rest of the house” and teaching babies to sleep “without the assistance of adults”.

In her book The Complete Sleep Guide for Contented Babies and Toddlers she writes that parents need time by themselves: “Bed sharing . . . more often than not ends up with parents sleeping in separate rooms” and exhausted mothers, a situation that “puts enormous pressure on the family as a whole”.

Annette Mountford, chief executive of the parenting organisation Family Links, confirmed that the norm for children in Britain was to be encouraged to sleep in cots and beds, often in separate bedrooms, from an early age. “Parents need their space,” she said. “There are definite benefits from encouraging children into their own sleep routine in their own space.”

Sunderland says moving children to their own beds from a few weeks old, even if they cry in the night, has been shown to increase the flow of cortisol.

Studies of children under five have shown that for more than 90%, cortisol rises when they go to nursery. For 75%, it falls whenever they go home.

Professor Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Washington State University, who has written a foreword to the book, said Sunderland’s arguments were “a coherent story that is consistent with neuroscience. A wise society will take it to heart”.

Sunderland argues that putting children to sleep alone is a peculiarly western phenomenon that may increase the chance of cot death, also known as sudden infant death syndrome (Sids). This may be because the child misses the calming effect on breathing and heart function of lying next to its mother.

“In the UK, 500 children a year die of Sids,” Sunderland writes. “In China, where it [co-sleeping] is taken for granted, Sids is so rare it does not have a name.”

Nighttime Parenting

Why isn't there more research into parenting regimes for infants?
Oliver James
The Guardian, Saturday 13 December 2008

When a baby is small, particularly if it's the first one, parents tend to verge on the doctrinaire regarding the best parenting approach, falling into two camps: strict routine (the schedulers) or infant-led (the huggers).
Holidaying friends with conflicting methods risk lifelong schism, yet hardly anyone bases their view on science. So what do the studies show?
The most definitive was done recently by British and Danish psychologists. They identified a sample of pregnant London mothers who intended to follow a parent-led, scheduled routine. For example, many hoped to get the baby into a cot as soon as possible, feeding and sleeping to a timetable, and planning to delay responses to crying, to teach self-soothing.
By contrast, another sample was also studied, who adopted the hugger approach. They would be keeping the baby in the bed rather than a cot, and feeding on demand. There was also a sample of Copenhagen mothers who fell between these two nurturing plans. The samples were followed until three months of age. Compared with the hugger mothers, the schedulers spent half as much time holding their babies and were four times less likely to make contact with it when fussing or crying. Twice as many schedulers had given up breastfeeding when the baby reached three months of age (85% v 37%). The results for the Copenhagen mothers generally fell between the two, though veering towards the huggers.
The consequences of this differing care were considerable. At all three ages when studied (10 days, five weeks and three months), the babies with scheduler mothers spent 50% more time fussing or crying. For example, at five weeks, the scheduler babies fussed/cried for 121 minutes of the 24 hours, compared with 82 minutes for the hugger babies.
If you take the view that persistent fussing and crying are undesirable for a baby - because they are signs of distress - then this is evidence that the scheduler regime is bad for a baby's wellbeing. If the method really does cause a 50% greater prevalence of fussing and crying in three-month-olds, innumerable other studies suggest that such distress often presages emotional insecurity, hyperactivity and conduct disorders in later childhood.
However, if scheduling was bad news for the babies, it was not all bad for their mothers. At three months (although not before that age), scheduler babies were more likely to sleep for five or more hours a night without waking or crying - significantly longer than among the huggers. However, this scheduling benefit may have been illusory. If the scheduler babies were sleeping in cots in another room, how confident could their mothers be that their babies had not woken up? Nearly all the hugger babies (84%) were in bed with their mothers and waking or crying would rarely be missed. The researchers concluded that the scheduled babies were probably waking more than their mothers realised, casting doubt on the finding.
It is pathetic that this is the only serious study of the question. We also need to know what the consequences of different regimes are in later life. For there is good evidence that as the child gets older, scheduling is increasingly effective for creating good sleep. So it may be helpful to encourage such "self-regulation" when the child is one or two, not at all good to do so at three months. But it is also possible that children who keep getting into the parental bed until middle childhood are ultimately more secure and creative. Why is this issue not at the top of the psychology profession's research agenda?
• Hugger v Scheduler study: St James-Roberts, I et al, 2006, Pediatrics, 117(6), pp e1146-55.