A question to keep parents awake at night: whether to allow their children in their bed
A passing comment by Hollywood actress Christina Ricci that she shares a bed with her eight-year-old son became international news last month. While she has her bed invaded by her eldest, her youngest is sleeping soundly alone. "The fact that I can put her in her crib and she falls asleep while my eight-year-old daughter is still sleeping with me is amazing," she told People magazine.
Few things in the parenting world attract more opinions than sharing a bed with your baby or toddler. And that's understandable: according to The Lullaby Trust, around 133 babies die every year in the UK in co-sleeping situations. The death of a baby is an incomprehensible tragedy and I was so afraid of the possibility that I spent the first two years of my son's life stumbling in the dark and miserably trying to get him into a bed. , mind-blowing with fatigue and vibrating with adrenaline. Until he got big enough and mobile enough, after moving on to his first bed, to keep him from invading ours, it was like trying to keep the Atlantic Ocean out of a beach.< /p>
But things get less clear as kids get older. The five, seven, or even 10-year-olds who creep under the duvets of their parents' or caregivers' beds like a tarantula while barely conscious. Do you do a rod for your back letting them sleep with you? Are you just catering to the needs of your particular child? Has this sweet parenting gone crazy?
That is, of course, an extremely Western debate. In large parts of the world, co-sleeping (which tends to mean sharing a room but can also mean sharing a sofa) and bed-sharing (more explicit) are ubiquitous to the point of being innocuous. Janhavi Jain, who is 23 and grew up in India, describes the practice of sleeping alongside parents as "very common" until late childhood. “I grew up in a close-knit family. We slept with our parents until we were five or six,” she tells me on the phone from Delhi.
Talk to your parents for a while out of sleep and resounding the truth will emerge; that we all feel judged about it. Those, like me, who put their children in separate bedrooms, did sleep training and locked their bedroom doors. Those who have children in their bed. Those who sleep on mattresses on the floor of their children.
"It's interesting and increasingly frustrating for me to see how much space is occupied with people convinced that there is one way that is better than another way,” explains Dr. Jen Wills Lamacq, a psychologist specializing in early childhood. they have to do. What I say to parents, when they make a caring decision that they believe will have long-term consequences, is that you are making this caring decision to meet the needs of your child. And meeting a child's needs - physical or emotional - provides a good foundation for adulthood. Bearing in mind the specific warnings about safe infant sleep - it can mean sharing a bed, it can mean putting them in their own bed - you know your child and you know your own family.
Sarah Ockwell-Smith, author of The Gentle Sleep Book says, “I have four children, I've been a lifelong working mother; I understand that it's exhausting and that our society is crap for parents. I just think there has to be a middle ground. It's really hard to be a parent and we need more sleep. So if bed sharing means you get more sleep, then go for it. »
It must be said that co-sleeping is not always a choice. Many parents do not have the financial means to put their child in a separate room. Some parents, due to experiences in their own lives, including disability or work habits, will not want or be able to sleep together. Some, like me, will start from one edge and move on to another. Also, the picture will look very different for single-parent families, large families, foster and adoptive families, and families from different cultural backgrounds.
Maybe the Bigger question, then, is how long-term does bedsharing or co-sleeping have on a child's development? Again, the answer is not simple. "Later co-sleeping [in the US and UK] is something we don't have a lot of data on," says Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown University who wrote a bestseller...
A passing comment by Hollywood actress Christina Ricci that she shares a bed with her eight-year-old son became international news last month. While she has her bed invaded by her eldest, her youngest is sleeping soundly alone. "The fact that I can put her in her crib and she falls asleep while my eight-year-old daughter is still sleeping with me is amazing," she told People magazine.
Few things in the parenting world attract more opinions than sharing a bed with your baby or toddler. And that's understandable: according to The Lullaby Trust, around 133 babies die every year in the UK in co-sleeping situations. The death of a baby is an incomprehensible tragedy and I was so afraid of the possibility that I spent the first two years of my son's life stumbling in the dark and miserably trying to get him into a bed. , mind-blowing with fatigue and vibrating with adrenaline. Until he got big enough and mobile enough, after moving on to his first bed, to keep him from invading ours, it was like trying to keep the Atlantic Ocean out of a beach.< /p>
But things get less clear as kids get older. The five, seven, or even 10-year-olds who creep under the duvets of their parents' or caregivers' beds like a tarantula while barely conscious. Do you do a rod for your back letting them sleep with you? Are you just catering to the needs of your particular child? Has this sweet parenting gone crazy?
That is, of course, an extremely Western debate. In large parts of the world, co-sleeping (which tends to mean sharing a room but can also mean sharing a sofa) and bed-sharing (more explicit) are ubiquitous to the point of being innocuous. Janhavi Jain, who is 23 and grew up in India, describes the practice of sleeping alongside parents as "very common" until late childhood. “I grew up in a close-knit family. We slept with our parents until we were five or six,” she tells me on the phone from Delhi.
Talk to your parents for a while out of sleep and resounding the truth will emerge; that we all feel judged about it. Those, like me, who put their children in separate bedrooms, did sleep training and locked their bedroom doors. Those who have children in their bed. Those who sleep on mattresses on the floor of their children.
"It's interesting and increasingly frustrating for me to see how much space is occupied with people convinced that there is one way that is better than another way,” explains Dr. Jen Wills Lamacq, a psychologist specializing in early childhood. they have to do. What I say to parents, when they make a caring decision that they believe will have long-term consequences, is that you are making this caring decision to meet the needs of your child. And meeting a child's needs - physical or emotional - provides a good foundation for adulthood. Bearing in mind the specific warnings about safe infant sleep - it can mean sharing a bed, it can mean putting them in their own bed - you know your child and you know your own family.
Sarah Ockwell-Smith, author of The Gentle Sleep Book says, “I have four children, I've been a lifelong working mother; I understand that it's exhausting and that our society is crap for parents. I just think there has to be a middle ground. It's really hard to be a parent and we need more sleep. So if bed sharing means you get more sleep, then go for it. »
It must be said that co-sleeping is not always a choice. Many parents do not have the financial means to put their child in a separate room. Some parents, due to experiences in their own lives, including disability or work habits, will not want or be able to sleep together. Some, like me, will start from one edge and move on to another. Also, the picture will look very different for single-parent families, large families, foster and adoptive families, and families from different cultural backgrounds.
Maybe the Bigger question, then, is how long-term does bedsharing or co-sleeping have on a child's development? Again, the answer is not simple. "Later co-sleeping [in the US and UK] is something we don't have a lot of data on," says Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown University who wrote a bestseller...
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