03.15.06
Today’s IT
contains a few items of note…
 1. Kathryn Holmquist has become Kate in her by-line..after 20 years of Kathryn. Mid-life crisis?
2. Just last week the IT published YET ANOTHER article saying that co-sleeping increases the risk of SIDS. As a mother who kept her little babies right under her arm for the 1st 6 weeks I HATE those articles. We were so happy sleeping together, all snuggled up. I am convinced my babies were great sleepers because I moved them really gradually from from me into cots in separate rooms. (I looked at like this..tummy, in the bed…moses basket beside bed for naps..then at night…then cot beside bed..then cot in corner of room…then cot in own room…all done when baby ready and not just turfed out of tummy and into cot thus causing trauma). Anyway, what I had always suspected is FINALLY confirmed today…
“Dr McKenna added that the social and biological connection between an infant and its carer is critical if co-sleeping is to be protective, and refutes a dominant medical view that co-sleeping per se is dangerous.
According to Dr McKenna, multiple independent risk factors converge with SIDS deaths.
“High bed-sharing associated with high breastfeeding rates have been associated with relatively low SIDS amongst non-smoking mothers in Japan, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand,” wrote Dr McKenna in a review paper, “Bed-sharing and Breastfeeding” (Paediatric Respiratory Reviews, 2005).
“The difficulty is that there is a continuum of co-sleeping from those with positive, protective outcomes to those where babies are put at risk due to maternal smoking and unsafe bed conditions,” he added. Heavy alcohol and/or drug use have also been associated with infant death.
Dr McKenna says the medical community cannot promote co-sleeping because of the risk factors in specific high-risk populations. Risk factors associated with bed-sharing in impoverished, high-risk populations are maternal smoking, infants placed to sleep on pillows or under duvets, with other children and co-sleeping with infants on sofas, waterbeds or couches.”
In other words, as a middle class, non-smoking, breastfeeding mother who doesn’t drink at all for the first 2 or 3 months of baby’s life when baby is in the bed, I am hugely REDUCING the risk of SIDS in my baby but I have to put up with guilt inducing research and warnings from doctors which never clearly points out that the high SIDS rates for co-sleepering babies are associated with poor, smoking, drinking mothers. Thank god SOMEONE finally said it.
3. The IT like RTE is not mentioning the fact that Joe O’Reilly, Rachel’s husband, has been arrested again. Every other paper and news organisation is. I suppose they will argue that they are not going to risk allegations of an unfair trial by revealing his name. The other papers must be taking the view that the cops will never get him so there will be no trial. Either way, the family of Siobhan McLaughlin must be hoping that their case will not go the same way since there is a “chief suspect” there too….
4. William Binchy is back writing about embryo and the constitution. We can’t do this again……….please! where is the bloody legislation? COWARDS in the DAIL….
P O'Neill said,
March 15, 2006 at 6:22 pm
I sort of understand their reticence in the Rachel case, but sort of don’t — wasn’t everyone happily naming all the arrestees in the Donna Cleary shooting?
Domestic Despair » Blog Archive » Rachel O’Reilly’s murder said,
March 16, 2006 at 12:16 am
[...] She writes: The IT like RTE is not mentioning the fact that Joe O’Reilly, Rachel’s husband, has been arrested again. Every other paper and news organisation is. I suppose they will argue that they are not going to risk allegations of an unfair trial by revealing his name. The other papers must be taking the view that the cops will never get him so there will be no trial. Either way, the family of Siobhan McLaughlin must be hoping that their case will not go the same way since there is a “chief suspect†there too…. [...]
Fiona said,
March 16, 2006 at 8:31 am
I have just dragged my other half in here to look at your piece on co-sleeping. I absolutely agree but that article yesterday only gave her more impetus to reaffirm her view that our children will never sleep in the bed with us. When I was a baby we were moved slowly from tummy to bed to cot as well and, as we become prone to saying once we reach a certain age, “it did us no harm”. These articles are probably quite well-meaning but they do have the blowback effect of frightening people who want their children to co-sleep or making people feel guilty about chosing a period of co-sleeping andm, in our case, making a couple who don’t even have the children yet to contionue fighting about this!!