The negotiations of involved fathers and intensive mothers around shared-bed sleeping with infants (co-sleeping)

Abstract

This article discusses some emerging issues that arose during a much wider evaluative investigation of the Western Australian Health Department's bed-sharing policy and how effectively health professionals provided advice to parents. The broader evaluation report was developed for a clinical and health bureaucratic, policy-making audience. In contrast, this article adopts an approach that is more sociologically informed to tease out some of the social and cultural discourses that influence how bed-sharing advice was interpreted and used by the mothers interviewed for the study. We ponder the influence of current parenting discourses on parental decision-making, including those that construct fathers as ‘involved’ and mothers as ‘intensive’, as well as the theory of ‘attachment parenting’, which has enjoyed something of a resurgence in Australia. We also touch on and alert to the differences in responses to this information reported by the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal women interviewed for the study. This article highlights areas that may require further consideration and investigation by social and health researchers in maternal and child health, as well as practitioners involved in the development or delivery of bed-sharing information for parents.