Co-sleeping: time to talk

Monkey baby-carrying. User 825545 via Pixabay.

Co-sleeping has been demonised by SIDS networks because evidence suggests that it correlates with higher levels of unexplained infant deaths. However, in western societies, approximately 50% of babies and parents co-sleep (i.e. sleep on the same surface) at least some of the time, with combination bedsharing (where a baby starts the night in one sleep location and ends the night in bed, usually with mum) the most common type. In other places around the world, 100% of parents co-sleep with babies: this is just the cultural norm. It's also what anthropologists think is the most natural way to sleep based on other precocial mammal babies, especially primates.

Three Things I Don’t Know (Part III): Eyes

So, I asked myself, what unanswered scientific questions do I have, and are there answers out there for me? I had a think. And I came up with a list of three questions – and did my research. So here is the first of my three “Things I don’t/didn’t know” – let’s find out whether there’s an answer!

Why were my baby’s eyes indigo at birth?

Baby with dark blue eyes. Wiki Commons.

I’ve never heard of purple eyes before, but I know that the colour you’re born with can change. So, you can imagine when I looked into my baby daughter’s face and saw her eyes were a deep, dark purple that I was surprised – but I accepted it would be temporary. And temporary it was. Over the first year of her life, the time scientists say it takes eye colour to settle down, they have lightened to a medium blue, with that reminiscent darker blue round the edges.

I don’t have very clear pictures of the first month or so of her life: she kept her eyes mostly shut, and those I do have simply show their darkness, but me and her father remember that deep indigo colour – a bluish, purplish darkness, which looked indigo both under the artificial lights of the midwife unit, and under natural light from the window at home.

I turned to the internet…

Baby Tastes (Things We Don’t Know about Pregnancy Series #22)

Do your baby’s tastes depend on what you ate when they were in the womb?

Apparently, you can taste foods in amniotic fluid and breast milk – certain distinct flavours such as carrot, vanilla, mint and garlic, anyway. These flavours can be detected in breastmilk as little as half an hour after eating, and adults can even smell and identify them.

Caesareans (Things We Don’t Know about Pregnancy Series #15)

Historically, a caesarean section was a life or death operation. When a birth started to go wrong, the question was who to save – the mother, or the baby? Luckily, the maternal mortality rate for pregnancy has dropped to around 0.007% in the UK in 2017 (down from 0.09% in just 1952^[1]), and caesarean sections are now considered only slightly more risky than vaginal births (death risk is 3 times higher^[2], but this may be because a number of caesareans are only carried out in emergencies). Caesareans may also reduce the risk of complications in some cases. It used to be that having a caesarean once meant further babies always had to be delivered this way – but that’s no longer true: for women who have previously had a caesarean section, choosing an elective one for a subsequent baby over a vaginal birth reduces the risk of complications or consequential health problems (such as womb damage) from 1.8% to 0.8%^[3]. However, risk overall is small.

Caesareans now account for 26.2% of births in the UK^[4], but there is still a lot we don’t know about them, especially how they might affect babies later in life.

Caesarean by Salim Fadhley via Wikipedia Commons.

Baby Brain (Things We Don’t Know about Pregnancy Series #14)

Around eight weeks of pregnancy, I started forgetting the names of things.

Some know it as tip-of-tongue syndrome, and it’s definitely not new to pregnancy for me – it’s just worse.

Scissors via Wikipedia Commons.

No wonder I struggled with vocabulary in languages: looking for a pair of scissors, I will do the “scissor gesture” with my fingers and ask “Where are the …?” … “You know, the …?” It sounds odd coming from a writer, but it’s honestly true. I forget words easily. Nouns. These are obviously the least well-coded information at my disposal: after all, I can gesture or describe what I mean – even draw, if I need to, so this was the most easily lost content. Or that’s what I think was happening.

Other women have reported losing track of conversations, being absent-minded, and struggling with tasks such as reading comprehension.

The literature disagrees when it comes to the phenomenon known as “baby brain”. Is it real, or just a figment of women’s imaginations?

Vitamins and Supplements (Things We Don’t Know about Pregnancy Series #13)

Is it a safe and good idea to take vitamins whilst pregnant? One thing’s for certain – it’s the norm.

Bacteria. Public Domain.

Whilst scientists have shown that taking certain specific vitamin supplements can protect you against diseases to which you are at risk, taking high, regular doses of multivitamins is actually proven to increase your risk of heart disease or cancer^[1]. We don’t know why – it could be because of the fibre, or the various digestive pathways food goes through in your body – but swallowing a broccoli vitamins tablet just doesn’t do the same as eating a broccoli. It may also mean you are missing out on foods rich in other stuff your body needs, perhaps things we haven’t even discovered yet. Then there’s your microbiome: we still understand relatively little about this, but we know you can alter the microbial constitution of your gut through diet and use of supplements.

Overall, a varied diet is recommended as the most healthy one – supplementing where necessary.

Determining the Sex of a Baby (Things We Don’t Know about Pregnancy Series #12)

“And do you know… what it is?” they ask.

They mean the sex of our unborn baby, of course.

There isn’t much you can find out about who your unborn baby is, but you can know their sex. Or can you?

Often misnamed as “gender”, sex primarily relates to the organs a person presents with, but we already know that it’s more complex than that.

Chromosomes via Wikipedia Commons.

For a long time, we believed that sex was determined by a single chromosomal pair: XX or XY, but recent research has shown that the expressions of a bunch load of other genes is important too. For example, genes known as “enhancers” regulate the expression of genes that drive the development of physical sex characteristics. This means you can develop testes if you have an extra copy of the enhancers, even if you have two X chromosomes, or develop ovaries if you’re missing them, even if you are XY. The enhancers were found amongst the set of DNA formally known as “junk DNA”. These findings imply that observed biological sex and genetic sex may actually be different in some cases.