We were convinced by the research and arguments presented in the book “Sweet Sleep” that we could bedshare without a significant risk of SUID given our circumstances (breastfeeding, non-smokers, no alcohol or medication that would induce drowsiness) and the proper preparations (firm mattress, light bedding, packing towels between the mattress and wall to eliminate gaps).
We initially planned to use a side-car crib (we had a convertible crib with one wall removed, pushed up against our bed with the mattresses at the same height so it formed an extension of the sleep surface) but our son was such a barnacle baby that he refused to sleep even a foot away from me. Not all babies are that clingy, so it’s definitely a good option for a lot of families.
Bedsharing allowed both me and my husband to avoid sleep deprivation, even with a newborn. Our son would wake up and start to squirm and make tiny noises, which was enough to wake me up so I could nurse him, but never reached the level of crying that would wake up my husband, who was able to sleep a normal 8 hours and get up for work feeling well-rested.
I was also able to get rest equivalent to 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep; it just required staying in bed for 12 hours in those first few months because of all the partial wake-ups for nursing.
I can’t imagine how much more difficult our lives would have been without the high-quality sleep we were able to get due to our choice to bed-share.
We’re in the process of transitioning our 2-year-old to his own bed to make room for his little brother who is due in a few months. The transition is going very smoothly. We could have done it sooner but bedsharing was working well for all of us so we saw no reason to make a change.
Here’s the link to the book “Sweet Sleep” Even if you’re not comfortable bed-sharing intentionally, it’s important to have a safe sleep surface set up because of how common it is for parents (especially breast-feeding mothers) to fall asleep accidentally with their babies. Much safer for accidental co-sleeping to happen in a prepared bed vs. on a recliner or couch where the risks of suffocation are very high. https://g.co/kgs/jCrdAX
Thank you for describing your experience in detail. So many smart, intelligent and rational parents go through months of hellish sleep deprivation (which we know makes any human slow, sick and dangerously incapable of clear thinking) because they don’t give cosleeping a fair consideration.
The idea is to have the baby on the mother’s body or next to it, touching.
When the child stirs, the mom can react without either of them fully waking up. And the child would not need to wake up, freak out and cry to get attended to, so they grow up without the wake-up-alone-into-terror neuropathways.
> Isn't the risk of accidentally suffocating the baby quite high when co-sleeping?
No, it's on average quite low, but notably higher than not cosleeping, and the consequences are severe so many people generally prefer (and the medical community generally recommends) to avoid the risk, at least as a regular practice.
IIRC, there is some reason to believe that the on average risk is misleadingly high for many concrete cases, though, because it seems like there are other factors without which the risk does not increase [EDIT: nearly as much as the on-average increase would suggest] (and with which the risk increase is much higher than the on-average increase), but I forget the details.
The risk of death with cosleeping is always higher than not cosleeping. It's even higher if either parent drinks or smokes.
Of course, these are public health interpretations of the data which are applied across a population. Individual parents need to do their own risk / benefit analysis.
Also, people sometimes mean different things by the term "cosleeping". In this thread it seems to be mostly people talking about parents and the child sleeping in a bed, but some people include parent and child sleeping on a sofa or in a chair. This (couch or chair cosleeping) is riskier than bed cosleeping.
I have found many people in our society treat most risks as black/white, and treat minor risk-taking as a taboo irrespective of potential benefits, while at the same time entirely ignoring serious risks that would be inconvenient to avoid. This goes double for anything related to children.
For example, localized air pollution from an idling pickup truck is obviously worse than standing outside near someone smoking, but I see people waving their arms around and making ridiculous faces and asking outdoor smokers to move, while I have never seen someone make an objection to the driver of an idling vehicle.
My 2-year-old kid and I walk around San Francisco barefoot, and on a daily basis strangers suggest that we are taking our lives into our own hands (because of the vanishingly tiny chance he might find a junkie’s discarded hypodermic needle, step on it in a way that injected the junkie’s blood, and contract a fatal blood-borne disease), but I have never once heard someone suggest it was a bad idea to walk in the vicinity of automobile traffic, objectively many orders of magnitude riskier. The society is almost entirely unwilling to slow automobile traffic, but the public library won’t allow us inside without shoes because a book might fall on our feet or something. Most people seem entirely unaware of the effects of habitually wearing stiff shoes on foot development and gross motor skills.
It is considered horrible for children to have a small sip of alcohol (for fear of profound brain damage? a slippery slope to moral decadence?) but large amounts of sugar are just fine and strangers are constantly offering children candy and juice and cookies etc., and once someone turns 21 years old then any amount of alcohol consumption is considered more or less fine as long as the person isn’t driving.
Brushing and flossing teeth multiple times per day is considered a mandatory part of basic hygiene, but again, nobody has any problem with people constantly eating sugar and simple starches, the main drivers of cavities.
Pregnant women are told to avoid all sorts of foods and activities (and sometimes judged severely if they disregard the advice) despite in many cases very poor evidence supporting those proscriptions.
Some people with medium skin-tone religiously apply sunscreen when they plan to spend a short while in the sun, but seldom consider the harms of insufficient sun exposure, or the potential risk of whatever gunk is in the sunscreen.
All manner of toys are marked “age 3+” including things that couldn’t possibly be choked on, and some parents seem to believe those warnings, but any family religiously following such advice is delaying their kids’ fine motor skills by 1.5 years.
Relevant to this discussion: many school-aged children end up chronically sleep deprived because school schedules don’t align with their natural sleep rhythm; the problems this causes (aggression/irritability, tiredness, distraction, problems with working memory, ...) are treated as the children’s intentional personal failings which they are then punished for.
As for co-sleeping: the benefits to our family have been very obvious. We all get more or less enough sleep, babies can eat whenever they like, and everyone maintains a close physical relationship.
It's unlikely that he would step on a needle, specifically, but not so unlikely he steps on something sharp, e.g. glass, or a stone.
> I have never once heard someone suggest it was a bad idea to walk in the vicinity of automobile traffic
you've never heard anyone suggest a 2 year old should not walk near road traffic? young children are explicitly told to stay away from roads without an adult all the time, and parents will often hold their hands near cars so they don't run in front of them.
> but large amounts of sugar are just fine
On the contrary, I hear people complain about kids sugar intake all the time. alcohol is an entirely different thing entirely.
> once someone turns 21 years old then any amount of alcohol consumption is considered more or less fine
It's legal, it isn't necessarily encouraged outside that age group.
> nobody has any problem with people constantly eating sugar
If you brush and floss, there is no hazard to your teeth.
> but seldom consider the harms of insufficient sun exposure
vitamin D deficiency can be fixed with a pill, skin cancer can't.
> including things that couldn’t possibly be choked on
If you don't know why it's marked that way, you are appealing to ignorance.
> school schedules don’t align with their natural sleep rhythm
What “hygiene reason” are you thinking of? In the general case it doesn’t seem any more or less hygienic to touch the bottom of my shoe to the library floor vs. the bottom of my bare foot. Both are going to be comparably dirty if I walked in off the sidewalk (the foot is probably a bit cleaner on average).
If the worry is something like fungal or bacterial infections of the feet, those thrive in the warm, wet environment of a sock/shoe, and can’t survive when consistently exposed to fresh air and sunshine.
If the worry is injury/liability, then high-heeled shoes would be the obvious first thing to ban. Those are dramatically more dangerous than bare feet in basically every context.
I suppose if someone had gaping sores on the bottoms of their feet it might leave gross/contagious residue? But someone could just as easily track vomit, feces, cake frosting, rotten food, chewing gum, or whatever other yucky thing in on the bottom of their shoe. The “has a serious contagious skin disease” case seems like it would be handled better with a more targeted restriction, since I don’t think you want such people’s hands touching stuff in public spaces either.
My guess is that the real reason is to keep barefoot, shirtless, etc. homeless people and/or hippies out of public buildings. There are also rules against lying down, being drunk or intoxicated, making loud noises, bringing luggage or carts, communicating “willfully” or obscenely, emitting strong odors, &c. I’d be curious to learn more about the history of restrictions against bare feet in particular.
> the bottom of my shoe to the library floor vs. the bottom of my bare foot
The hygiene of your foot, not their floor, i.e they don't want you walking on their (relatively) dirty floor bare-foot.
Also, if they allowed others to walk in bare-foot, gaping sores etc would make the floor dirtier.
I'm pretty sure they don't "allow" you to vomit on the floor, or throw rotting food onto it either, but if you did that (unintentionally?) I'm sure they would clean it up and disinfect the floor, for hygiene reasons. That people might track those things in in trace amounts is why the floor is considered dirty, and why it is probably cleaned periodically.
Normally, the crib is attached next to the bed - with an open side facing the bed so that nursing is more convenient. They still sleep on the firm surface needed in a crib (to prevent suffocation, as you noted). That's still a lot closer and more comforting [for them] than having it be in a different room.
I would rather roll the dice on a one-off suffocation than subject a young mammal to a separate sleeping cage in the darkness of night, personally. What other mammals make their young sleep not in a pile?
I'm not trolling, nor do I feel I'm dismissing it lightly. I'd rather take a relatively minor risk of death than knowingly inflict whatever psychological trauma comes from forcing an infant to sleep alone. I think the horror of this is seriously downplayed by our society. It's relatively safe to leave a baby in a box now, but this hasn't been the case for our deep evolutionary past. If you're a baby being left in a box at night the proper response is to freak out and try to get an adult to hold you, because otherwise you might get eaten by a wolf.
Wow. Psychological trauma? Horror? Freaking out? I'm not sure what makes you think babies experience those things when "forced to sleep alone", but my two kids seemed pretty content in their cribs.
Letting your kids share your bed might seem like a lovely thing to do, but I've heard so many friends complain that their kids are still co-sleeping 5+ YEARS later, and that comes with a huge impact on stuff like sleep quality and having a sex life.
3 kids of my own, lost a lot of sleep with them early on until they got into a workable routine. I advise to be careful of mistaking the battle for the campaign. You want to win the campaign, even if it means losing some battles. In this case, turning to co-sleep is attractive because it feels like you're winning the sleep battle easily. However, in the campaign that is life with your children, this is a losing strategy if the co-sleeping has a negative effect on your relationship with your spouse, particularly when it comes to intimacy. Remember that your kids also need your marriage to work well over decades to come.
Similarly, giving in to defuse a tantrum is a short term win that will cost you over the long run as your child becomes insufferable, self-centred, and fails to achieve age-appropriate levels of maturity.
> Letting your kids share your bed might seem like a lovely thing to do, but I've heard so many friends complain that their kids are still co-sleeping 5+ YEARS later, and that comes with a huge impact on stuff like sleep quality and having a sex life.
I haven't thought about this in years, but I believe I slept in my parents's bed until I was around 8 years old (at which point I stopped by choice). Perhaps they just never told me, but my parents seemed perfectly happy with the whole thing.
As a parent I must say he's not completely wrong. We have decided to not co-sleep, to not get stuck with this. But quite often my wife would fall asleep without putting the baby back to the crib. At which point the baby would not cry till the morning, unless a dirty nappy started itching.
Not a parent. Have spent a decent amount of time around children. Have stayed up all night watching the door of a hospital room while my sister co-slept with her newborn child, waking her up when the nurses jiggled the doorknob.
> Have stayed up all night watching the door of a hospital room while my sister co-slept with her newborn child, waking her up when the nurses jiggled the doorknob.
Co-sleeping was forbidden by hospital. If they'd seen her sleeping with the kid they would have observed her for the rest of the stay to make sure it didn't happen again. She disagreed with this rule, as did I.
The acronym SIDS really does a disservice to parents by obfuscating the fact that babies die as a result of being accidentally asphyxiated by a sleeping parent. How many lives could be saved by an acronym like 'Accidental Parental Baby Asphyxiation' that raises awareness of what's going on and how to prevent it?
"In 2017, there were about 1,400 deaths due to SIDS, about 1,300 deaths due to unknown causes, and about 900 deaths due to accidental suffocation and strangulation in bed." [1] which works out to be approximately 1 in 1000 babies die of SIDS.
The link you gave says 2500 per year due to SIDS - which appears overstated by 70%.
