Sleep in babies is and will surely be for a long time a complicated issue to address because just as some studies say that sleeping with babies is positive others come to say that it is negative and that it even produces insomnia.
A current study, conducted at the Hospital "Virgen de la Luz" in Cuenca concludes that 51% of babies with insomnia problems sleep in an inappropriate place, such as the parents' bed or even in their arms.
Surely, after reading what I have just written in bold, many of you will have already turned the matter around, as I am going to give it to you, but before going into the subject we will continue explaining a little more what What do you want to tell us with this study?
Results and conclusions of the study
As they explain, this data shows that inadequate sleep habits (you know, everything that someone sleeps touching a baby, or near him) are related to insomnia and other sleep disorders. This communication has been awarded the prize for the best communication in the area of Sleep (I do not want to think then how was the worst ...).
The study involved more than 200 families and as bad habits it has been said that 18% of 15-month-olds go to bed at 11 p.m. or more, that 4.7% of six-month-old babies sleep in their parents' bed, with 8.2% when children reach 15 months.
Another conclusion of the study reveals that there is a low prevalence of sleep disorders in the population, 7.9% of the total, and that these disorders are symptoms of insomnia. To avoid this, they recommend that parents teach their children to sleep properly, come on, something we have heard many times from professionals dedicated to children's sleep.
Turning the tortilla of the results they have obtained
They say that 51% of children who have insomnia have it because they sleep with their parents or in their arms. This makes it look a remaining 49% who do things "well", that is, who sleeps in his crib, in his room and hugging a doll to feel safe and calm.
Of a sample of 200 children, 7.9% have insomnia problems, that is, about 16 children. Of those 16 children, 51% slept with parents or in their arms and 49% in the crib. In approximate figures, 8 of those children slept in a theoretically inappropriate place and 8 slept in a suitable place. Is this enough to say that insomnia in children is caused by picking up or sleeping in arms? Obviously not.
Let's say that the conclusion they reach: "bad habits cause insomnia" is the most absurd thing I've been able to read this year, and that is already ending, because according to his study I could also say that sleeping in the crib causes insomnia, because the same children sleep badly because of the cradle than because of the arms or the schoolboy.
From this it follows that it does not seem that one thing has to do with the other. Moreover, it is very possible that (cooking the tortilla even more on the other side) many of the children who have insomnia sleep with their parents because they sleep better. This being so, sleeping with parents, in the same bed or in their arms, is a consequence of insomnia and not vice versa, that is, they don't have insomnia because they sleep with their parents, but they sleep with their parents because they have insomnia.
Making this reflection we could conclude that sleeping with parents in the same bed or in their arms is beneficial because children with sleep problems get to sleep as well (or equally badly) as children who have less sleep problems and sleep in their crib (in both cases only 8 out of every 200 children still sleep poorly). So, from my point of view, this study that tried to show that it is better to put children to sleep in their crib ends up demonstrating that the opposite is recommended, that they sleep with parents and in their arms.
With respect to other bad habits, such as that 18% of 15-month-old children fall asleep at 23:00 at night, it would be necessary to know what time they wake up. I always remember a friend of mine who told me "Armando, everyone says that we do fatal, my son falls asleep at almost 00:00 at night, but I can not get him to sleep before." Then I asked him: "And what time do you wake up?", to which he replied that since she worked in the afternoon shift, they took advantage of the morning to sleep until late, then getting up between 10:00 and 11:00 in the morning. Obviously, I told him that I didn't see where the problem was.
Upgrade: Certainly, as Alicia Navarro has commented in her comment, the calculations I have made are not correct, because I have neglected babies who sleep well who do not collect, who are the majority. If there are 200 children and between 4.7 and 8.9% of them collect, this corresponds to about 18 children. That is, 18 sleep with their parents and 172 in the crib. Of the 18 children, 8 are the ones who sleep poorly, as we have commented previously, and of the 172, they are 8 too (remember that there were 16 who slept badly). Seen this way it seems that sleeping with children causes insomnia. However, as I commented earlier, children usually sleep with parents precisely because they sleep poorly or wake up a lot. Alicia Navarro comments in her comment that in her case it was like that, I have lived the same, because we started to collect when we saw that our son slept better with us than alone and most parents who sleep with their children explain the same thing: “ I sleep with them because we all sleep better that way. ”
