Infant sleep

My mother has told me once or twice that I was a “difficult baby.” As Hiscock and Wake say in this week's BMJ (p 1062), babies who don't sleep through the night can leave their mothers with postnatal depression.

When it comes to pregnancy and parenting, magazines, television programmes, and well meaning friends and family automatically feel it their duty to tell you that you are doing it all wrong. Add the internet to all this and you have information overload. And there is a lot of rubbish out there.

The latest big issue in the baby world is “co-sleeping” —babies sleeping with their parents in the same bed. Natural Parenting UK (www.natural-parenting.com) is very emotive, heading its co-sleeping page: “We are the only mammals that push our babies out of the ‘nest’ at birth.” I laughed out loud at www.littlekoala.com/familybed.html as the “local expert” carefully weighs up most of the pros and a few of the cons of co-sleeping, concluding that it is safe but not before putting a whopping disclaimer that he accepts no responsibility and advising that you seek medical advice.

But what if you are the medical advice? Easy enough for those who have children, but not for those who don't. Concise, gentle advice can be found at www.health.state.ok.us/program/mchecd/infsleep.html and equally rational but more comprehensive is www.ivillage.co.uk/pregnancyandbaby/baby/sleepbaby/articles/0,9547,27_167511,00.html

www.isisweb.org/icis2000program/web_pages/group330.html presents the evidence. The site is wordy and wouldn't be the most parent friendly site in the world, but it is good for facts.

There are sensible, downloadable parent guides at the Australian based Child and Youth Health (www.cyh.com/cyh/parentopics/usr_index0.stm?topic_id=269). These are free and cover a broad range of information. Sleepnet.com is a good general sleeping site (although I did its sleep questionnaire and it told me I had sleep apnoea). And Babyworld (www.babyworld.co.uk) has some balanced advice—if you can fight your way through the advertising.

My favourite site was Family and Children's Services, another Australian site. Its advice on infant sleeping (www.fcs.wa.gov.au/_content/parenting_information/lws/baby-19.html) seemed sensible and non-inflammatory, and the site had a strangely calming layout, with a picture of a baby yawning.