I've read many reports and studies. My first child was 1997, and my current was born in 2014.

Parenting is a very personal issue, and I am not on a mission to change anybody's parenting decisions. At the end of the day, it is your family business. I have always questioned things, though, and I was very surprised at some of the things I learned when I first looked into co-sleeping and the warnings from mainly US institutions or government. The ads and posters are creepy to an extreme (a sleeping baby next to a meat cleaver!), and betray the scare propaganda vs. data approach [1].

>There is no safe way to sleep with a newborn.

You state this, and yet you list common sense things or precautions to take even if they are in a crib. Why not the same common sense applied to co-sleeping? Firm mattress, on back, no pillow, or headboard they can jam a bodypart through?

"The United States has a higher infant mortality rate than any of the other 27 wealthy countries..." by the CDC [2]. And this is with one of the highest expenditures on health care than other nations. And it gets worse as the baby ages in the postnatal period, so it is not just more premies or bad neonatal care where the US is not as bad.

The sharp difference is in disadvantaged or uneducated groups. A poor person's baby in another wealthier nation has more of a chance than one in the US, and that is the key to the disparity.

In one of your links they cite a waterbed! I think if co-sleeping deaths are lower elsewhere than in the US it is for lack of education, common sense, parenting knowledge or all three. I am from the US. I raised my first two there, and now I live in a very poor village in East Java, Indonesia where most of the houses have dirt floors. All of the families in this village co-sleep as far as I have seen or had answered to me. I still apply the same common sense guidelines we both have listed in our replies.

For me and my family, we feel the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. We kept the newborns flat on their backs with no loose sheets to entangle them, or other accessories. We have always had fairly firm mattresses. We don't drink alcohol, and we are not hypermobile sleepers. We are also strangely aware of where the baby is, and we still manage to get more sleep distributed across the night between smaller, more frequent feedings.

I loved waking up to watch my little ones' chests rise and fall! I'd say we were more diligent and aware and monitoring them against SIDS than if we had them in a crib in another room with audio monitor, across the same room, or at the bedside.

The US report which cites deaths from co-sleeping didn't bother to check or factor in drugs or alcohol. There is also the potential of the horrible MBPS (Munchausen By Proxy Syndrome) not discovered in some cases.

The article of the Arizona parents that left their 2 year old in the house alone, only to be discovered walking outside while they were gone for two hours playing Pokemon speaks to the level of idiocy of some parents, so I am sure in a country of 320 million you will have some numbers to cite if that is the sample population.

SIDS is said to increase with co-sleeping, although again, the studies are not too detailed, and the same recommendations then go on to say SIDS decreases when it's a bassinet opened to the bed as opposed to in another room or across the room.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/16/co-sleeping-ad-baby...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/29/our-i...