How Dangerous Is It When A Mother Sleeps With Her Baby? : Goats and Soda : NPR
▻https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/05/21/601289695/is-sleeping-with-your-baby-as-dangerous-as-doctors-say
The practice continues to be widespread around the world. Bed-sharing is a tradition in at least 40 percent of all documented cultures, Konner says, citing evidence from Yale University’s Human Relations Area Files. Some cultures even think it’s cruel to separate a mom and baby at night. In one study, Mayan moms in Guatemala responded with shock — and pity — when they heard that some American babies sleep away from their mom.
“But there’s someone else with them there, isn’t there?” one mom asked.
Balinese babies are generally held almost every moment — day and night, anthropologists have noted. And in Japan, the most common sleeping arrangement is referred to as kawa no ji or the character for river: 川. The shorter line represents the child, sleeping between the mother and father, represented by the longer lines.
Western culture, on the other hand, has a long history of separating moms and babies at night. Wealthy Roman families had rocking cradles and bassinets by the bed, historians have noted. By the 10th century, the Catholic Church began “banning” infants from the parental bed to prevent poor women from intentionally suffocating an infant whom they didn’t have resources to care for. “Any women who kept an infant less than 1 year old in her bed ... is ipso facto excommunicated,” the church declared in Milan in 1576.