Co-Sleeping, Breastfeeding and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

Introduction Cultural innovations and child care practices and, importantly, the dynamic social values and ideologies that legitimize them, shift quite rapidly relative to evolutionary-based changes in fundamental infant biology. This raises the possibility that widely recommended infant care practices can be at odds with the human infant’s biological, psychological and emotional needs and expectations, at least as inferred from the human infant’s evolutionary past. This mismatch between human infant biological needs and contemporary caregiving practices or contexts may be particularly heightened in western industrialized cultures within which sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and/or sudden unexpected infant death in infancy (SUID) are both more salient and prevalent.