Overview

New insights into the anxiety over infant sleep safety New parents are inundated with warnings about the fatal risks of “co-sleeping,” or sharing a bed with a newborn, from medical brochures and website forums, to billboard advertisements and the evening news. In Losing Sleep, Laura Harrison uncovers the origins of the infant sleep safety debate, providing a window into the unprecedented anxieties of modern parenthood. Exploring widespread rhetoric from doctors, public health experts, and the media, Harrison explains why our panic has reached an all-time high. She traces the way safe sleep standards in the United States have changed, and shows how parents, rather than broader systems of inequality that impact issues of housing and precarity, are increasingly being held responsible for infant health outcomes. Harrison shows that infant mortality rates differ widely by race and are linked to socioeconomic status. Yet, while racial disparities in infant mortality point to systemic and structural causes, the discourse around infant sleep safety often suggests that individual parents can protect their children from these tragic outcomes, if only they would make the right choices about safe sleep. Harrison argues that our understanding of sleep-related infant death, and the crisis of infant mortality in general, has burdened parents, especially parents of color, in increasingly punitive ways. As the government takes a more visible role in criminalizing parents, including those whose children die in their sleep, this book provides much-needed insight into a new era of parenthood.

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9781479801152

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Reviews

Losing Sleep is a superb contribution to the literature on infant risk, maternal responsibility, and reproductive justice. Framing infant safe sleep as a social construct, Harrison analyzes the ways safe sleep campaigns reproduce inequalities and fail to account for structural causes of infant death. The book is insightful, engaging, and timely. * Monica J. Casper, author of <i>Babylost: Racism, Survival, and the Quiet Politics of Infant Mortality, from A to Z</i> * Losing Sleep has an impressive scope and dynamic analysis....Harrison artfully draws on scholarship across sociology, feminist theory, feminist science studies, and reproductive justice to showcase how medical, political, legal, and public policy approaches work together to reward some parents (primarily mothers) and punish others....Harrison invites readers to reflect on taken-for-granted parenting advice about infant sleep to demonstrate the social and political dimensions of it, an absorbing read. * Laury Oaks, author of <i>Giving Up Baby: Safe Haven Laws, Motherhood, and Reproductive Justice</i> *

Losing Sleep is a superb contribution to the literature on infant risk, maternal responsibility, and reproductive justice. Framing infant safe sleep as a social construct, Harrison analyzes the ways safe sleep campaigns reproduce inequalities and fail to account for structural causes of infant death. The book is insightful, engaging, and timely. * Monica J. Casper, author of <i>Babylost: Racism, Survival, and the Quiet Politics of Infant Mortality, from A to Z</i> *

Losing Sleep is a superb contribution to the literature on infant risk, maternal responsibility, and reproductive justice. Framing infant safe sleep as a social construct, Harrison analyzes the ways safe sleep campaigns reproduce inequalities and fail to account for structural causes of infant death. The book is insightful, engaging, and timely.-- Monica J. Casper, author of Babylost: Racism, Survival, and the Quiet Politics of Infant Mortality, from A to Z

Author Information

Laura Harrison is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She is the author of Brown Bodies, White Babies: The Politics of Cross-Racial Surrogacy.

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