These celebrity baby photos are cute. They're also deadly.

Any celebrity who posts a photo of themselves and their baby on Instagram is asking for trouble.

In the past week or so we’ve seen Pink shamed for cooking stir-fry while holding her baby in a sling, Ciara slammed for taking her three-month-old on a toboggan, and Jessa Duggar told off for letting her young son play with a Mr Squishels, a stuffed giraffe with glass eyes.

But there’s one social media trend that’s come under attack recently for good reason.

It’s the trend of dads posting photos of themselves with their babies asleep on their chest – often, when they’ve fallen asleep as well, and often, when they’re on the couch.

Adorable, right? Sure. Great parenting, right? Not so much.

Dr Sam Hanke wants to see these kind of photos become unacceptable, and there’s a very personal reason why. In April 2010, the US paediatric cardiologist fell asleep on the couch with his four-week-old son Charlie on his chest. It was the early hours of the morning, Charlie had been hard to settle, and the new dad was trying to give his exhausted wife Maura a break.

“We were just hanging out and I nodded off,” Dr Hanke tells Fatherly. “A couple hours later I woke up and Charlie was gone.”

Charlie was a victim of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. It’s believed his death was triggered by the unsafe sleep environment.

The couple now run a foundation, Charlie’s Kids, to promote safe sleeping.

LISTEN: Holly Wainwright and Andrew Daddo dissect what parents are talking about this week on This Glorious Mess (post continues after audio…)

Dr Hanke says these images of babies asleep on sleeping dads on couches have become part of parenting tradition, and that needs to change. He says they need to become as unsettling as a photo of a kid hanging out the window of a moving car.

“We hope that people will say, ‘Wow, that kid is in an unsafe sleep environment,’” he says. “We hope that it’ll become more and more recognised.”

In Australia, Yvonne Amos from Red Nose also gets concerned when she sees photos where babies are sleeping on their stomach on their parent’s chest, especially if that parent is famous.

“When they’re famous, that just goes worldwide: ‘If it’s safe for David Beckham, it’s safe for us,’” Amos tells Mamamia. “Well, it’s not safe for anybody, doesn’t matter who you are.”

She says that settling a baby on a parent’s chest is not a problem. But once the baby is asleep, the parent should put them in their own cot or bassinet.

“The risk is that baby’s asleep and you fall asleep,” she explains. “You’re in your own bed or you’re on a sofa. It doesn’t take much for a parent who is overly tired.”

Amos says on a couch, a baby can end up wedged between cushions, while on a bed, there are adult doonas and bedding, plus the risk of falling off.

“They’re equally as risky in different ways,” she adds.

So while these celebrity photos might look adorable, people like Amos, working to reduce the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, see them in a very different way.

“What they’re doing is modelling inappropriate behaviours.”

Do you agree that these kinds of baby sleeping arrangements are dangerous?