Why sleeping in bed with your kids could wind up killing them

Hands up if you’re a mum with long hair that sheds everywhere!

You know who you are. 

It doesn’t matter if you comb your hair in the shower and deposit the wet clump in the bin, or brush it again over the bin, or run your fingers through it and dispose of the strands.

If a TV detective wanted to get a sneaky DNA sample at your house, he’d just need to sweep the floor because there are long strands of hair everywhere.

I regularly have to take a pair of scissors to cut the strands of my own hair tangled around the rotating brush of our Dyson. 

And normally long hair isn’t a big deal, unless you have a baby roaming around with fat little fingers and toes just waiting to get hair wrapped around them so tightly, they need surgery to deal relieve the hair tourniquet.

When your child has passed the baby phase, you think you’re out of the woods – the child is no longer in danger from rogue strands of hair. It certainly wasn’t on Rosie’s mind when she went to bed next to her little boy Noah.

“My three-year-old had a sinus infection and wanted to sleep in bed with us. My husband was on the night shift, so it was just me and my son,” she wrote in a Reddit post.

“I woke up suddenly to him screaming his head off and (what I thought was him) pulling my hair.

“I figured he was having a nightmare so I pulled back trying to get him to release his grip while saying, ‘It’s ok Noah, mommy’s here, wake up’.”

But the little boy started to cough and gag, and that’s when Rosie realized he was being strangled.

Mum’s hair wraps around boy’s neck in sleep

“I feel down my hair for his hands and I don’t find them. Instead, I find his neck.”

Rosie’s long hair had come loose from the topknot she’d for the night and it had wrapped around Noah’s neck “like a noose”.

Rosie panicked. She was about to scoop up Noah and run downstairs to chop off her hair when she managed to free him.

“It took a while for him to calm down and now he has a ring around his neck that is going to be fun to explain to his preschool teacher.”

Rosie shared her story as a cautionary tale to other parents and Reddit users were shocked, with some saying it was the worst case of a hair tourniquet they’d ever heard of.

Others shared their own experience.

“One of my twins had a hair tourniquet on three toes and had emergency surgery to cut the hairs,” one mum said.

“The toes were very swollen. Hard to tell how long it had been wrapped around her toes. She was eight weeks old and tiny.”

“This legitimately happened to me as a baby,” said another person. “I have the scar on my toe where the hair tourniquet was and had to be cut.”

One person had some advice if Rosie and Noah ever co-slept again.

“Next time you sleep with your child in one bed, wear your hair in a braid and think about using a bonnet,” she said. “That’s healthy for your hair anyway. Glad your little one is ok. Don’t beat yourself up. With breast-length hair, I would not have thought this could happen.”