Mother Knows Best? Bedsharing against Expert Advice

Sleep is a universal and widely debated topic for parents and parenting experts. The where, when and how of infant sleep motivates public awareness campaigns, forum discussions, scholarly research and parenting literature, each offering different solutions to the problem of managing babies’ sleep. Sleep is the subject of this level of debate and interest not only because babies are universally known for sleeping erratically but also because of the danger associated with sleep, specifically Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Also known as cot death or, more recently, Sudden Unexpected Death in Infancy, SIDS is the unexplained or undetermined death of a child within its first year of life. While the cause of SIDS is unknown, research has identified a number of risk factors such as smoking, and preventative measures such as a supine sleep position. The latter spurred perhaps the most famous anti-SIDS campaigns in the mid-1990s: Back to Sleep. The campaign advised parents to put babies to sleep on their backs and successfully lowered SIDS incidence rates in the UK, Canada and other countries. Although rates have fallen dramatically since this campaign, SIDS remains a cause for concern in both countries, remaining one of the leading causes of death in children under two, and has inspired ongoing Safe Sleep campaigns that advise parents of the merits of breastfeeding and the dangers of smoking, alcohol and drug use while caring for an infant. In this chapter, I examine AP's solution to the problem of sleep: bedsharing, defined as a baby and its caregiver sharing an adult bed. The status of bedsharing is controversial in the world of public health and, indeed, among mothers, whether they reject or embrace AP practice. The sleeping habits reported by the mothers I interviewed echoed the findings of a 2019 study in the UK that reported that over three quarters of parents had bedshared despite public health warnings against the practice. Motivations for disregarding public health advice varied, but in this chapter, I highlight how these narrative defences of bedsharing reveal the currency of ‘nature’, enduring gendered divisions of labour in infant care and the complexities of competing sets of parental expertise in contemporary parenting culture. In these myriad ways, AP is revealed as an expression of intensive mothering ideology uniquely suited to the neoliberal context.

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