Description
Book SynopsisNew insights into the anxiety over infant sleep safetyNew 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 struct
Trade ReviewLosing 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 *
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
Giving Up Baby: Safe Haven Laws, Motherhood, and Reproductive Justice *
