As I was swooning over Matt Lauer {he’s just so darn heart throbby} this a.m. I caught the news on this recent campaign. Because of my Advertising background, I find this to be a fascinating case study of the old dilemma — does any publicity, good or bad, do a brand, or a cause, good?
If you can’t see the picture clearly, it is a baby. In an adult bed. Next to a meat cleaver. And it reads “Your baby sleeping with you can be just as dangerous”. Really? I know what they’d say. That it specifically reads can be. That it isn’t saying that every baby is co-sleeps is going to die. But wow. Scare tactics, much?
I can honestly say that the number of times Barrett slept with us as a baby was 0. I had heard the dangers of having baby in bed time and time again. The number of times Jonah slept on my chest, in our bed, in the wee small hours of the morning in the first 6 weeks? Countless. I’m not saying it’s right. I’m saying I did it in an effort for all of us to get some real rest. To be able to function. To have my less than 5 pound preemie close to mommy. As he would have been had he gone to 40 weeks.
In one mom’s reaction, she states that health officials would be better off telling parents how to safely co-sleep, rather than demonizing parents who do it as a deliberate choice with plenty of safety precautions. Wow. A proactive approach rather than a big hammer approach? What a novel idea…
I think my biggest issue with this campaign is, what’s the goal? People who truly co-sleep are not going to stop because of this, because they believe the benefits to be greater than the risks. And people who don’t co-sleep, well, they already have their opinions formed and minds made up. Instead, it’s just another issue to divide moms into two camps. And I’m not really into camping.
Read the piece from the Today Show here.
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