Peer Response 3

· Read the posts of your peers and discuss their responses to these questions. Focus especially on those who disagree with what you have said, and engage in friendly dialogue about the disagreements you have with them.

· Remember that how you choose to address these questions is up to you; there's no required procedure (for instance, you don’t have to answer each in a separate post or anything like that). The main thing is to get thinking and talking about these questions, and I look forward to reading your responses.

PEERS RESPONSE:

Reflect on yourself:

Bed sharing/Co sleeping should be more commonly practiced in America. The belief for this comes from the research that I have done over the years, since I became mom. Bed sharing/co sleeping is essential to the bond between a mother and her baby, and it is an instinct for a mother to keep her baby as close to her as possible; it is also the baby’s natural instinct to be a s close to their mother as possible. Bed sharing/co sleeping not only helps a baby and mother bond but it also makes nursing an easier practice. Bed sharing/co sleeping helps a baby regulate their temperature and their breathing as well. Bed sharing/co sleeping is essential for a baby thrive.

I believe I was conditioned to believe that sleeping with your baby is a selfish, dangerous practice. I think that as someone who has been involved in ECE since I was fresh out of high school, it was a learned behavior to automatically assume bed sharing/co sleeping was wrong because that’s what all my trainings told me, and that’s what all of the doctors tell you. I never actually investigated it until I was two weeks postpartum with my first baby wondering how it was safer to get out of my bed and go feed my baby in a rocking chair. How was it safer for me to be falling asleep in a chair where I had little support to catch my baby if I did fall asleep? Was I the bad mom because my baby would cry until I picked her up from her crib? As many more questions flooded my brain I started to think “why?”, why do we do it this way? So, I started on my own path to finding the why.

Reflect on the other:

I feel like this a little harder for me to do because I am on the latter side in America. When someone asks me about my sleeping practices with my children, I will tell them that I co sleep, and will immediately get the “look”. I will tell who ever I am having the conversation with the same thing that I wrote in the first paragraph. The other person will usually tell me that it is dangerous and that the baby is at a higher risk of SIDS. When they say this, I tell them that I follow the safe sleep 7 and my husband does not sleep in our bed. Then I get an even more concerned look and the “your marriage is going to fall apart” statement. Which is untrue and we have been doing fine since we had our first baby 3 years ago.

When it comes down to it, America is the weird place for not practicing co sleeping. Co sleeping is the most common practice in other societies around the world. In most other societies the husband and wife do not sleep together either. However, an example of where mother, father and baby sleep in the same bed is Japan. They refer to the mother and father as the banks of the river that keep the child safe.

America believes that co sleeping/bed sharing should not be practiced because it increases the chance of SIDS, takes a toll on marriages, and because it delays the development of independence in infants.

Engage with the text:

I think the concept of co sleeping/bed sharing is objective. I think that the belief to or not to bed share/ co sleep can be justified individually upon society or culture. Societies that practice co sleeping/bed sharing value things like connection and bonding where as societies that do no practice co sleeping/bed sharing value things like independence.

Reference:

Chenoweth, H. (2015). America, you are sleep training wrong. Bed-Sharing And Co-Sleeping Across Different Cultures | FatherlyLinks to an external site.

McKenna, J. (2007) Cosleeping Around the World. Cosleeping Around The World - The Natural Child ProjectLinks to an external site.