In Latin America, the Philippines, and Vietnam, some parents sleep with their baby in a hammock next to the bed. Others place their baby in a wicker basket in the bed, between the two parents. In Japan, many parents sleep next to their baby on bamboo or straw mats, or on futons.
However, there is always a safety risk to co-sleeping (sharing the same bed or sleep surface) if your little one is younger than 12-months-old. For examples, in predominantly Asian countries and regions, such as Hong Kong, Singapore, China, and Japan, the majority of people co-sleep.
Families in predominantly Asian countries and regions such as Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, or China co-sleep much more frequently than in the United States.
Countries such as Sweden, Egypt, and Japan value a child-rearing model of interdependence and hold beliefs that co-sleeping is developmentally beneficial to children.
In Japan — a large, rich, modern country — parents universally sleep with their infants, yet their infant mortality rate is one of the lowest in the world — 2.8 deaths per 1,000 live births versus 6.2 in the United States — and their rate of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, is roughly half the U.S. rate.
Australian research has found that around 75% of babies spend at least some time co-sleeping in the first 3 to 6 months of life.
The low incidence of SIDS among bed-shar- ing Asian infants may reflect the fact that few Asian mothers smoke.
Year after the year, Japan is one of the countries with one of the lowest infant mortality rates. There are a few reasons why this may be: They have lower rates of maternal smoking and alcohol consumption — and research has shown that both maternal smoking and prenatal drinking increase a child's SIDS risk.
Breastfeeding mothers and babies sharing sleep is a biologically normal behaviour, while formula feeding and separate sleep are departures from the norm. It is these behaviours that need to be shown to be effective and safe, not the other way round.
Soine (co-sleeping) is a common practice in Japanse families, with parents sharing sleeping spaces with children until around the age of ten. When explaining what soine means to them, families emphasise the importance of anshinkan.
Co-sleeping. Japanese families often share two or three large futons spread over a tatami room, with parents sleeping next to babies and young children.
For the Japanese, separate sleep means peace
They simply appreciate quality sleep, which will not allow anything to disturb them while they sleep. The Japanese do not want to be awakened by their partner snoring, spinning, falling asleep…
Whenever you put your baby down to sleep, day or night, give them a safe place to sleep. Always put baby to sleep on their back. Baby should sleep in their own cot, in your room, for the first twelve months.
We may like to think we're a party nation but Australians have the earliest bedtime of any country, according to a new study of global sleep patterns.
Eating with their hands or having children sleep in bed with their parents are not considered practices harmful to children and are not uncommon in Norway, irrespective of cultural background.
In Nordic countries, there's a norm of letting babies take a nap alone outside in their pushchairs. Wander down a street in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, or Finland and there's a chance you'll see strollers and prams quietly sitting by themselves with a sleeping baby inside, even on a chilly winter day.
Rebecca Fisk, a pediatrician at Lenox Hill Hospital at Northwell Health in New York, told Insider. That being said, Fisk said that parents should never share a bed with a child under the age of 12 months because of an increased risk of death from SIDS and suffocation.
More recently, the highest SIDS rates (>0.5/1000 live births) are in New Zealand and the United States. The lowest rates (<0.2/1000) are in Japan and the Netherlands.
The lowest SIDS rates among these countries were in the Netherlands and Japan.
The incidence of SUDI in Australia as a whole is also on the decline. Currently, it is about the same as in other Western countries – around one in every 3,000 births, or 130 babies each year. This compares to about 500 Australian babies lost to SIDS in 1990.
The incidence of SIDS has been more than halved in recent years due to public health campaigns addressing the known major risk factors of prone sleeping, maternal smoking and overheating.
Infants (children under 1 year) had the highest rate of death in all jurisdictions in 2020, accounting for 59% of all child deaths in Australia. Rates of infant deaths from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and undetermined causes ranged between 0.16 and 0.52 per 1,000 live births.
SUID rates per 100,000 live births were highest among non-Hispanic American Indian/Alaska Native (213.5), non-Hispanic Black infants (191.4), and non-Hispanic Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander infants (164.5).
SUID is the sudden death of an infant that has occurred as a result of accidental suffocation in a sleeping environment, SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome), or from an unknown cause of death. Nationally, non-Hispanic Black (NHB) infants have twice the risk of SUID compared to non-Hispanic White (NHW) infants.
Babies who sleep in their own room since birth or who sleep in the same bed as their parents are known to have a higher incidence of SIDS. That said, it is to be noted that SIDS is less common amongst South Asian babies where it is a common practice for babies to sleep in the same bed as their parents.