Crib Bumpers No Longer Recommended by American Academy of Pediatrics
Thursday, October 20th, 2011By Glinda
The American Academy of Pediatrics has advised that they no longer recommend the use of crib bumpers.
Yes, the ones people have been using for YEARS. Pretty much every single crib bedding set at BabiesRUs has a bumper.
Now, I’m not saying that there is no basis for the new recommendation, I’m sure there is. It’s just that all of a sudden, bam! Don’t use them anymore! They can kill! I’d heard various things throughout the years about crib bumpers, and when my daughter (briefly, like, two weeks) slept in a crib we had the breathable ones.
But the whole notion of the crib bumpers is to keep their arms and legs from getting stuck in between the slats, as well as in my daughter’s case, to keep her head/body from bumping against the slats and waking her up. Which she did constantly, which is why we started co-sleeping. She also would try to climb up on top of the bumpers, as they had to be stretched fairly tightly to stay on properly, thus resulting in something she could get her feet up on. Scary stuff, much scarier than the supposed risks of us rolling on top of her or something, which has never even remotely happened. When I sleep with her I am so hyper-aware of her presence that I barely even move.
Neither of my children did well in the crib, and luckily we had bought the convertible kind, because at least we got to use it as a head and foot board for my son’s big boy bed. Otherwise, total waste of four hundred bucks.
So if you aren’t supposed to use crib bumpers, I wonder what people are going to do? Will people pay for them but not use them? Or will all of these sets suddenly go on sale?