The Child Care industry in the US has been growing by leaps and bounds over the past several decades as more and more young parents find themselves working to support their families. Child/Home Care Centers are now responsible for the welfare and safe keeping of approximately one third of our nation’s children from infants to preschoolers. As this national trend continues to grow, we need to make every effort to ensure our children’s and especially our baby’s safety. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) last report on “SIDS and Child Care Centers”, which was published in 1999, 20% of all reported cases of SIDS occurred in Child/Home Care Centers. That is a startling statistic and one that, quite frankly, we should all be concerned with. Licensed Child/Home Care Centers have a responsibility to ensure they are doing all they can to provide for the safety and well being of our nation’s babies. Of these responsibilities, perhaps the most important one, is to make sure they are doing everything in their power to prevent the possibility of SIDS. Currently, there are no national regulations for our Child/Home Care Centers, but rather, they are regulated on a state by state basis.
The AAP’s report found that an extremely large percentage (82.3%) of infants were found sleeping in the prone position, i.e. on their tummies, at the time of death. They go on to say that prone sleeping infants may be at increased risk (of SIDS) because they have not yet developed the upper body muscle strength which may be protective in lifting the head and clearing the airway when sleeping prone.
At home, if a parent finds that their baby has rolled from back to front, they can return the baby to their back. But in a childcare setting the baby may be allowed to continue to sleep face down. In the “Sleeping, resting and supervision” section of the State of Michigan’s “Licensing Rules for Child Care Centers” regulation manual, they state “When infants can easily turn over from their stomachs to their backs and from their backs to their stomachs, they shall be initially placed on their backs, but shall be allowed to adopt whatever position they prefer for sleep”. Unfortunately, this somewhat subjective statement could prove to be fatal for inexperienced tummy sleepers. But on a breathable sleep surface, such as the one found in our Breathe Easy Baby Breathable Crib Mattress, should a baby roll from their back to their stomach they will be at a reduced risk for cutting off their airways. This is important as the cutting off of a baby’s air supply has been found to be an important contributing factor to the occurrence of SIDS. Therefore, it stands to reason that Child/Home Care Centers have an obligation to provide infants and toddlers with the safest sleeping environment available.
As the gold standard for safe sleep for infants and toddlers, the Breathe Easy Baby Breathable Crib Mattress has the highest level of sleep surface breathability in the world &emdash; proven by a CO2 dissipation test performed by a highly accredited testing facility and designed by two of the world’s leading medical experts on SIDS. Breathable mattresses that are proven to have the highest level of sleep surface breathability, which is 10 times more than a conventional filled mattress, should be mandated for use by all licensed Child/Home Care Centers either at the federal or state level.
