Goodnight moon, hello Mom
By Bruce Bower
If the nighttime is the right time to be with the one you love, then a surprisingly large proportion of mothers and their babies have taken that advice to heart.
Nearly half the infants in the United States spend at least some time during the night sleeping in the same bed as their mother or other adults, according to a report in the January Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. Moreover, from 1993 to 2000, the proportion of infants regularly sharing an adult’s bed throughout the night–a common practice in many parts of the world–rose from 5.5 percent to almost 13 percent, say Marian Willinger of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in Bethesda, Md., and her colleagues.