Don’t sleep with your baby, Cook Children’s warns as infant deaths mount
At least 30 infants have died during unsafe sleep situations since January 2022, with most of the deaths involving the baby sleeping with a parent or careigvier, according to Cook Children’s Medical Center.
The children’s hospital, located in Fort Worth, alerted families to the unusually high number of sleep-related deaths in an effort to promote safe sleeping habits for infants and their families. More infants have died from unsafe sleep situations than gunshot wounds and drownings combined, according to the medical center. Most of the children are from Fort Worth and the Metroplex, with a few coming to Cook Children’s from elsewhere in Texas.
Candle Johnson, a pediatric nurse practitioner at one of Cook Children’s neighborhood clinics, said she urges families not to share beds with their infants.
“It seems to be so much easier to co-sleep when breastfeeding,” Johnson said in a news release. “I do advise against that because even though it may be easier, it’s not safe. No one can control their body function once they’re sleeping. When you’re in a deep sleep and your infant is next to you, you’re not able to say ‘I won’t roll over on them.’”
Of the infants who have died while sleeping since January 2022, 16 of them — or 54% — were Black.
If an infant sleeps with a parent, they can become wedged between the headboard and mattress, suffocate under blankets, or get trapped under the adult’s body, according to Cook Children’s. Other unsafe sleeping conditions that caused infant death include leaving a baby on a pillow with a propped bottle and wearing a loose T-shirt that covered the child’s face.
An estimated 3,500 infants die from sleep-related injuries each year in the U.S., according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Dr. Fern Hauck, a professor at the University of Virginia and an expert on infant deaths, compared co-sleeping to riding a bike without a helmet.
“It’s possible to ride carefully without your helmet, but it’s safer to wear it,” Hauck said during a presentation on safe sleeping. “Of course, many people do ride without a helmet, and many people who ride a bicycle without a helmet never crash or get hurt, but that doesn’t mean that riding without your helmet is ‘safe.’”
