Making your children safe

Although swaddling a baby helps them to sleep on their backs (they naturally want to sleep on their tummies), there is no “medical reason” for swaddling. It isn’t the same as a child needing prescription antibiotics for an ear infection. When I tried to get my pediatrician to write the waiver, I got a definite no, along with the official line from the AAP, which states that swaddling isn’t recommended after two-months of age. No swaddling without a waiver and no way to get a waiver, so essentially there is a ban. Similar bans are already in effect in Minnesota and California.

Dr. Harvey Karp, who wrote Happiest Baby on the Block and Happiest Baby Guide to Great Sleep, the bibles of swaddling and sleep, is furious about the ban. He argues that between two and four months of age is the “absolute worst” time to stop swaddling because it is the time that SIDS is most likely to occur. “Evidence shows that swaddling may well reduce infant sleep deaths. By reducing crying and boosting sleep, swaddling lessens a parent’s temptation to bring the baby into bed with them or to put the baby to sleep on the stomach,” Karp argues.

“Young babies that were sleeping an hour [or] an hour and a half are now sleeping 20 minutes,” a day care worker in Texas, where swaddling has effectively been banned, told the Huffington Post. “I have some babies who are not sleeping at all.” Speaking for others at her facility, the employee complained that [teachers] feel "they are not able to meet the needs of the infants they are caring for … They are not allowed to do what they feel is needed.”

As a parent, I feel the same way. Why should the decision to wrap or not wrap my baby be made by an unaccountable stranger? It would make more sense and be more efficient if the day care workers and me had a conversation and decided how best to care for him. Also remember that, as the NRC admits, they are making policy based on what might happen. They are not basing their recommendations on reported cases of babies who were swaddled and died from SIDS while in day care.

The NRC even claims that it is not anti-swaddling. When I asked an NRC representative why they had enacted the regulations, the answer was positively Orwellian. NRC standards, she explained, are based on the recommendations of Dr. Rachel Moon at the American Academy of Pediatrics. Dr. Moon isn’t anti-swaddling, she’s just against any blankets in cribs in day care. But you have to have a blanket to swaddle the baby, I sputtered. “We aren’t anti-swaddling,” the woman replied. “We’re just against blankets in cribs.” So there you have it, no blankets in cribs and another unreasonable, unnecessary standard becomes law.