JAMES MCKENNA (B.A., University of California, Berkeley; M.A., San Diego State University; Ph.D., University of Oregon) Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C., Professor of Anthropology
McKenna pioneered the first behavioral and electro-physiological studies documenting differences between mothers and infants sleeping together and apart and has become known worldwide for his work in promoting studies of breast feeding and mother-infant cosleeping. A biological anthropologist, and Director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory McKenna began his career studying the social behavior and development of monkeys and apes with an emphasis on parenting behavior and ecology. He has published over 150 articles and six books including a popular parenting book Sleeping With Your baby: A Parents Guide To Co-sleeping. He has coedited Ancestral Landscapes In Human Evolution, Evolutionary Medicine, and a more recent co-edited volume Evolution and Health: New Perspectives (Oxford University Press. He won the prestigious Shannon Award (with Dr. Sarah Mosko) from the National Institutes of Child Health and Development for his SIDS research and is the nation's foremost authority and spokesperson to the national press on issues pertaining to infant and childhood sleep problems, sleep development, and breastfeeding.
Breastsleeping refers to bedsharing-amongst breastfeeding mothers and infants occurring in the absence of all known independent risk factors.
Given that most breastfeeding mothers bedshare, there is a critical need to develop a new SIDS/SUID discourse, one that employs harm reduction strategies, family- tailored education, evidence-based medicine, and primary advice formulated by breastfeeding and lactation communities, researchers and associations. This new bottom-up, evidence-based discourse first and foremost respects what parents say they need, want, can and are willing to do.
This discourse acknowledges that, in the United States, bedsharing is common and what helps us to understand it is to reference scientific studies (heretofore dismissed by ‘authorities’) on the powerful infantile and parental biological factors that motivate bedsharing, and the realization that sleep-related risks are not co-equal but vary along a significant continuum of relative risks ranging between acceptable (especially where exclusively breastsleeping occurs i.e. where hazardous factors are eliminated) to unacceptable where a variety of well independent “risk factors’ are present.
I argue here for recommendations based on evidence-based medicine rather than the ideologically driven opinions and assumptions of those making the recommendations which are failing after 20 years of attacks on bedsharing and bedsharing families.
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