Hi Darren, I'm a midwife from Melbourne and I recently attended a presentation by Prof Peter Fleming (Bristol, UK). He is somewhat of an expert on SIDS and he was presenting his latest (about to be published) findings on the relationship between SIDS and sleeping arrangements. He found that babies until 6 months should be sleeping in their own bed (cot, bassinett) but in *the same room* as their mother (I think he recommended about arms length away), and that for some periods during the night mother and baby could be in the maternal bed together quite safely (eg between a couple of closely spaced breast feeds.) I asked him about his opinion of controlled crying and while he didn't have any research to support or deny a correlation, his opinion was that babies need to be able to communicate their needs and training them out of crying and training them in to deeper sleep didn't make sense to him. He felt that CC shouldn't be embarked upon till 6 months and that other things should be considered. His research involved videoing mothers and babies in different sleeping arrangements and measuring babies core temp, feeds, sleeping cycles etc etc. One of the most interesting observations he made was that when mothers and babies spend some of the night co-sleeping, the baby will feed up to 5 or 6 times during the night but the mother recalls only 2 or 3 or those breast feeds and all mothers in the co-sleeping group reported a more sound sleep...even though they were awake and attending the baby more often! I think that the lack of rest for the mother is the major concern here - maybe finding ways to support HER in this time of transition is more appropriate that trying to "fix" the baby. She may find that by putting her baby's cot next to her own bed the breastfeeding requires less effort. Best wishes to you all. Maxine _________________________________________________________________ Join the world�s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com -- This mailing list is sponsored by ACE Graphics. Visit <http://www.acegraphics.com.au> to subscribe or unsubscribe.
