Three-month-old Jenny lies in the crook of her mother’s arm.
As the infant twitches in her sleep, nine thin wires taped to her face and bald head wiggle in all directions, giving her a baby Medusa look. Jenny’s mother opens her sleepy eyes in the dimly lit room and stares blankly into the tiny face only inches away. The matching wires on the mother’s head nod toward her baby as she unconsciously reaches out and pats Jenny reassuringly a few times. She adjusts the baby’s blanket, and they both drift back into a deeper level of sleep.
One room away James McKenna watches the needles on a 12-channel polygraph jump in tandem as Jenny and her mother experience this mutual arousal. An elfin grin spreads across his face. He’s recorded so many of these unconscious stirrings that they now seem to him to map out a nightlong dance.
McKenna, an anthropologist at Pomona College, has come to the nearby Sleep Disorders Laboratory at the University of California at Irvine to test a hypothesis: he believes that the Western practice of placing babies in their own beds at night is at odds with human nature--so odd that sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), the mysterious killer of babies, can more easily come stalking. But he is just as interested in the vast majority of babies who don’t succumb to SIDS. Sleeping in isolation affects them too, he suspects, though more subtly than in the rare cases of SIDS. Jenny and her mother are providing the numbers to support what McKenna has been advocating for the past eight years: If you have a baby, sleep with it.
His idea developed from years of watching infant monkeys cling to their mothers day and night. He also knew that babies sleep with their parents in the vast majority of human cultures. Both facts suggested to McKenna that it’s inconsistent with our evolutionary roots to put babies in their own beds at night. What’s more, he points out, the current Western practice is only a century or two old, just a wink in human history. As an anthropologist with no formal medical training, however, McKenna hesitated to push for co-sleeping. Most pediatricians, after all, thought babies should sleep alone. Yet as he began to talk about his ideas, he found a receptive audience. His words, some parents told him, finally gave them permission to do what seemed to come naturally--sleep with their babies.
