Losing Sleep: Risk, Responsibility, and Infant Sleep Safety

New parents are inundated with warnings about the fatal risks of co-sleeping, and Laura Harrison's book "Losing Sleep" explores the origins of the infant sleep safety debate and how it has become increasingly punitive. She argues that our understanding of sleep-related infant death has burdened parents, especially parents of color, in increasingly punitive ways, and that the government is taking a more visible role in criminalizing parents.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 08 July 2022
Publisher: New York University Press

New insights into the anxiety over infant sleep safety have emerged, with medical brochures, website forums, billboard advertisements, and evening news warning about the fatal risks of co-sleeping, or sharing a bed with a newborn. Laura Harrison's book, Losing Sleep, uncovers the origins of the infant sleep safety debate and provides a window into the unprecedented anxieties of modern parenthood. Harrison explores widespread rhetoric from doctors, public health experts, and the media to explain why our panic has reached an all-time high. She traces the way safe sleep standards in the United States have changed and shows how parents, rather than broader systems of inequality that impact issues of housing and precarity, are increasingly being held responsible for infant health outcomes. Harrison shows that infant mortality rates differ widely by race and are linked to socioeconomic status. Yet, while racial disparities in infant mortality point to systemic and structural causes, the discourse around infant sleep safety often suggests that individual parents can protect their children from these tragic outcomes, if only they would make the right choices about safe sleep. Harrison argues that our understanding of sleep-related infant death, and the crisis of infant mortality in general, has burdened parents, especially parents of color, in increasingly punitive ways. As the government takes a more visible role in criminalizing parents, including those whose children die in their sleep, this book provides much-needed insight into a new era of parenthood.

Weight: 430g
Dimension: 152 x 228 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781479801152