October is SIDS Awareness Month, so it’s a good time to review safe sleep practice for babies. Babies need to sleep safely and develop a healthy bond with their mothers. These two essential newborn needs must occur in the first months of an infant’s life, but they do not occur simultaneously.

How can a loving parent provide the safest possible sleep environment for that beautiful little infant? The most important advice has been repeated since 1992: Always place your baby on his or her back to sleep. This has cut the number of infant deaths from sudden infant death syndrome in half.

Unfortunately, 50 percent of babies still are dying. A close look at the deaths has revealed that many of these babies who died were sleeping in unsafe places. We don’t know all of the answers to the question of why these babies die. But we do know the chance of death would have been reduced if those babies were placed to sleep in the way recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

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School will be starting soon. It’s time to help get your kids on a healthy back to school sleep schedule.

Kids need more sleep than adults. Children ages 6 to 12 years old need 10 to 11 hours of sleep at night. Teenagers need at least nine hours of sleep.

It’s important to get enough sleep because chronic sleep deprivation has been linked to poor school performance, behavioral, developmental and mood problems, weight gain and obesity. Drowsy teens who get behind the wheel of a car can cause a deadly accident.

Here’s a sleep checklist to start working on now:

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At the Infant Death Center of Wisconsin, a significant part of our job is to educate families about the importance of a safe sleep environment and what exactly that means: Infants should be placed alone, on their backs in a crib, bassinet or portable crib for every sleep time. If these safe sleep measures were practiced, the number of preventable infant deaths in our community would be greatly reduced.

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