Infant Sleeping Position and SIDS: Placing Baby on Back does not Affect Ability to Roll

Placing babies to sleep on their back does not affect their ability to roll, new research says.

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is one of the leading causes of infant deaths in the U.S., killing about 2,500 babies each year. Also known as crib death, it is the sudden death of a healthy baby during sleep. Previous research has shown that parents' method of placing newborns to sleep on their stomach increases the risk of SIDS. So, to ensure safety, parents are always advised to place their babies to sleep only on their back.

The length of time babies spend on their stomach during the initial stages has long been believed to help them develop movement skills, especially rolling from tummy to back. Babies normally start to roll over from tummy to back by 3 months of age and roll back to tummy between 4 and 6 months. However, introduction of the "sleeping on back" infant sleeping position has been cited by many critics as delaying the development of movement skills recently, as babies were spending less time on their tummies compared to the past. Parents therefore hesitate to follow the "back to sleep campaign", apprehensive of its negative impact on the child's gross motor development skills related to rolling.

Researchers at the University of Alberta came forward to analyze the hidden risks associated with the "back to sleep campaign" since its introduction 20 years ago.

The study included 725 Canadian infants aged 1 week to 8 months. Study author Johanna Darrah compared the rolling abilities and motor skills development of the infants with the infant gross motor development in the past. Darrah based her study on her 1990s work on Infant Motor Scale.

At the end of the study, the authors couldn't find any significant difference between the ability of infants before and after the launch of the "back to sleep campaign."

"Our results would suggest that gross motor skills emerge in the same order and at the same ages as 20 years ago. The environment is of course important to gross motor development, but the change in a sleeping position hasn't made much difference as to when babies roll from stomach to back," Darrah said in a news release.