A few weeks ago, Delilah, out of the blue, told me she missed her crib. I didn’t blame her. It was a lovely crib, and her Daddy made it himself. But she didn’t stop there. As she reminisced about her long lost youth (she’ll be four next week, you know…) something suddenly struck her as odd — “Except there weren’t any blankets or pillows in my crib, Mommy. You should have given me blankets and pillows, what if I was cold?”
Scott and I both laughed, but Delilah wasn’t joking. She was very concerned for past Delilah. How could we have allowed her such a sparse sleeping environment? The pink pillow in the picture up there was totally staged for the “nursery tour” I was shooting to make it look just a little more homey, but her memory does serve — for the first year of her life and then some, my little lady slept in a crib with nothing but a mattress and a crib sheet. (I was online throughout my pregnancy, the fear of my child suffocating in her sleep had been well instilled in me by Moms who had suffered those horrific realities.)
It’s been a while since the gripping fear of having your baby slip away in their sleep seized my everyday. I remember the first night Dee was home from the hospital, hovering over the bassinet she was in just next to my bed, watching her belly rise and fall, terrified to go to sleep myself because then, who would watch her and make sure she’d keep living?
Every new parent has heard of SIDS. It’s the horror story they tell you before you leave the hospital — the mysterious syndrome (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, to be exact) that could come in the night and take your sweet baby’s life, leaving you to wake up to tragedy. SIDS is very tragic and very real. But last week I had an opportunity to attend a dinner at LA’s Power 106 with a group of influential Moms in media hosted by ICAN (Inter-Agency Council for Child Abuse and Neglect) to talk about their Safe Sleep for Baby campaign in response to the infant sleep death epidemic running rampant in our local community and I learned some shocking stuff –
According to ICAN, The San Fernando Valley, aka The 818, has the third highest concentration of infant sleep deaths in all of Los Angeles, beaten out only by Downtown, and the South Bay. 64% of these deaths occur while sleeping in an adult bed, 13% occur when the baby is asleep on the couch, and 8% in an unsafe crib environment.
I was really shocked to learn that according to the L.A. County Coroner, over the past twelve months, of the sixty-nine sleep related infant deaths in Los Angeles (one every five days), not one single one of them could be attributed to a true SIDS case. Every single sleep-related infant death in Los Angeles County last year was avoidable.
In fact, in 2011 here in L.A., there were only 68 deaths of all children under the age of fourteen NOT related to unsafe sleep. Guns, drowning, illness, traffic collisions, etc. all accounted for less deaths combined than those of children under the age of one who died due to inadequate sleeping conditions.
It’s a difficult topic to discuss because these are tragedies that are born out of the best intentions. Surrounding your baby with stuffed animals and fuzzy blankets is something that parents do out of love. Bed sharing with your infant certainly comes from love. Cuddling them on the couch until they fall asleep and dozing off with them is a loving thing to do. But the numbers are hard to ignore. Suffocation happens in seconds. Parental instincts are strong, but the fact is, they aren’t always fast enough.
When we decided to follow safe sleep practices with Delilah, there was some pushback. People didn’t think Dee’s bed looked cozy. (She wore flannel jammies and sleep sacks to make up for no blankets). Our parents didn’t understand why we didn’t want them to use bumpers, and sometimes the arguments got personal. It helped to remind everyone that research never stops, statistics don’t lie, and we are all always doing our best with the information we have at the time.
For us, as hard as it was, we kept Dee out of our bed for the first year of her life. Even through breastfeeding (I’d prop myself up to ensure I didn’t fall back asleep too deeply with her in my arms) and exhaustion and all of it. And then the moment she became big enough, we relished in the ability to let her cuddle in bed with us…something she gets away with more nights than not to this day.
To learn more about this initiative, or to help spread the word, visit the Safe Sleep for Baby website or Facebook Page.
[A big thanks to the One2One Network for inviting me to be a part of this important campaign and sponsoring this conversation.]