Anxiety About Baby Dying

Not that I am suggesting that you should tempt fate with your children's lives. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), as cot death is clinically known, is as ghastly a thing as can happen to a family. My point is that the probabilities are always smaller than we acknowledge. Just as a baby is almost certain not to be born with spina bifida, so your child is extremely unlikely to die a cot death. 
 

Anxiety About Baby Dying

Around 200 British babies do each year, which represents 0.2 per cent of babies born. And many of the higher risk factors almost certainly won't apply to you. As well as smoking, these include drug use, maternal alcoholism and social isolation. According to the British Confidential Enquiry into Stillbirths and Deaths In Infancy, sleeping in the same room as your small baby is 'strongly protective' against cot death. This includes sleeping in the same bed: in cotless cultures in Africa, Asia and South America, cot death is unheard of.
 
You would never guess this from some of the newspaper headlines. 'Perils Of Babies In Parent's Bed' and 'Adult Bed No Place For Babies' were two I saw one month last year, stories based on Some Wonderfully shaky statistics from the US. Newspapers are more responsible than anyone for fuelling The Fear. And providing a lot of their raw material are American researchers and interest groups. 

In July 2003 a group of US pediatricians identified a new risk to babies being put to sleep on their backs, as cot death guidelines now recommend. True, these babies may be more likely to survive those crucial first months, but up to 48 per cent may find that on their first birthday they have flattened heads. (Note: 'up to' 48 per cent. This could easily mean two per cent.) To correct this condition, say these eminent pediatricians and plastic surgeons, could cost $3,000. A nice way to drum up business.

And it gets better. More research has revealed that putting babies to sleep only on their backs 'has raised a generation of infants who risk never learning, or learning very belatedly, how to crawl ... There was even the suggestion that [they] would struggle with their handwriting and motor skills when at school if urgent corrective action - placing them on their tummies - was not taken.' We live in a world in which putting your child on its stomach has become 'urgent corrective action'. (The solution, obvious surely to all, has already been christened 'tummy time'.) 

As your child grows and you, too, become obsessed with pedophiles, bear in mind the often-ignored fact inconvenient to all tabloid newspapers and vigilante groups: no more children are abducted and/or killed by lunatics than 50 years ago, a hundred years ago, or ever. Indeed, the homicide rate for school age girls is lower than for any group in society (including boys of the same age). But The Fear is at work, stoked by excessively violent films and TV series. Result: children's freedoms are unnecessarily curtailed, and parents go loopy. 

For some The Fear is a life sentence. Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he had already been elected President of the United States, and his mother was over 80, let slip that he had never in his whole life gone outdoors without the old bag calling after him, 'Franklin! Are you sure you're dressed warmly enough?' There's something of Ma Roosevelt in us all, whether we admit it or not. To find out more, you can check out Anxiety About Baby Dying.