The Attached Mother

I found this article called Co-Sleeping: Bad Habit, or Handy Tool in the Parenting Toolkit? The mother shares her nighttime struggles with her daughter and how they have resorted to whatever works to get some sleep, including co-sleeping. I think that for many people there is this fear that if you co-sleep your child will never leave your bed. Of course it is silly to say “never” about any thing, but is still a common remark made.

The main problem is that no one, including the person saying it, really believes the child will never leave their parents bed. Perhaps they will want to co-sleep longer than what society considers “normal”, but even that still is not never. For some children they just need a longer time to adjust to new things, including sleeping alone. We would not say “if you start feeding your child he’ll never feed himself” or “if you dress your child he’ll never dress himself”. Both of those ideas seem silly to most of us. Of course the child will learn to do those things someday when he’s ready. And so the “if you don’t make him sleep alone now he never will” thought goes.

Despite cultural norms sleeping alone is not really normal. Imagine a primitive mother putting her young child to sleep alone. She would wake in the morning to find some animal had came along and eaten her baby while she slept alone. There is also the role that co-sleeping has in breastfeeding. Many children are not physically ready to sleep through the night without food, despite their parents wanting them to be. Just as you cannot potty train a child who is not ready and expect it to work, sleep training a child who has not matured enough to sleep through the night will bring tears and frustration.

Each child develops in their own pace, and with that their co-sleeping needs will be different. There is no “one size fits all” model of when it’s OK to force a child to sleep on their own. And don’t worry, despite what some may say no child will still be sleeping next to you every night forever. Sooner or later they’ll move out.

Resources:

• Making It Work: Guidelines for Safe Co-Sleeping
• Dr. James McKenna’s Mother-Baby Sleep Laboratory, University of Notre Dame
• Where Should Babies Sleep at Night?: A Review of the Evidence from the CESDI SUDI Study
• Rethinking “Healthy” Infant Sleep
• Collection of articles on co-sleeping

cosleeping, co-sleeping, family bed, sleep, children, infants, parenting