My daughter’s 26 months old, and she sleeps in the same bed with me. Specifically she curls up in my arms and snuggles in tight.
She has her own bed, but she isn’t happy there. I guess she just doesn’t feel secure.
I guess I can understand this. I don’t really like to sleep alone either, and from her perspective sleeping in the arms of a warm overprotective giant must be pretty nice.
It’s a win-win situation, because I feel pretty good about it, too.
I figure she’ll want to sleep by herself in her own time, just like the way she learned to walk, talk, and use the potty.
I have no cites, but I’m of the very strong opinion (my heart tells me,) that this is the best way to do this. Very young children are best off sleeping with a parent(S) rather than on their own. The convention of putting kids in cribs or their own beds right from the get go doesn’t seem best for them psychologically.
Dr. William Sears is a strong voice for the “family bed.” He is a pediatrician who also has 8 kids!
You are liable to get some posts from people who think you’re some kind of psycho, but I don’t. My son doesn’t sleep with us, because he’s a squirmer and I can’t sleep! He & I co-slept for the first three months when I was breastfeeding, but then Daddy wanted back in!
My goddaughter and her little brother (4 & 2, respectively) usually end up in their parents’ bed at some point. I see no problem with it, up to a certain age. Then I know people start to question the appropriateness of it.
You daughter loves you and is comforted by your close presence. What could be wrong with that, especially during the “really exciting twos” (I hate the term “terrible twos”)?
I imagine there are endless opinions on this subject, so here goes mine. I don’t see anything wrong with it, for now, but there should be a cut-off age, if she doesn’t opt for her sleep-dependence soon. My boys have always slept by their lonesome, it was never really an option, since we made a big deal out of going from the crib to a “big boy” bed. My sister-i-law, OTOH, still lets my nephew sleep with her, and he’s eight. Now that just doesn’t seem right.
I agree in principle, but I also think it depends on the kid. As an infant, my daughter slept much better in her crib than she did with us. At 4 she still doesn’t like to be under a blanket most of the time. She does come into our bed about once a week, though, which is fine with us.
My son started out in bed with us, but went to the crib when I started to get kicked a bit too often. He’s still a very athletic sleeper.
Our kids seem perfectly happy in their beds for the most part. We’ve never had the sleep battles that I hear about from a lot of other parents. My son has been battling a persistent ear infection for about a month and has slept like an angel through the whole thing. I think it’s mostly luck.
IIRC correctly, there’s evidence that very young children who sleep with their parents have a significantly lower chance of dying from SIDS. No one’s sure why, exactly, but it seems to me that if it can save a baby’s life, who cares what the psychologists say? I’d much rather have to send a kid to therapy than bury them.
I think it’s fine. My son is almost 3 and has slept with us since he was 10 months. We fought it for a long time and then realized that we didn’t mind, he loved it and we all had a good night’s sleep.
My daughter will be 2 in February and she has been in a twin size bed since graduating from the crib this month. After we read a book on the sofa I ask her if she wants to go “nite nite”. She says something along the lines of “uhkay”. I tell her to go get in bed and she shuffles off to her room with me close behind. Here she wants to sing songs (her fave being Happy Birthday??). After that I kiss her and turn out the light and on the night light.
She sleeps all night long. Hopefully this will not scar her for life.
I was allowed to sleep with my parents and I vividly remember the trauma of finally being told I had to sleep on my own. I was 19. (just kidding - I think I was around 4). I would presume that if a kid never gets used to sleeping with parents then this trauma is avoided.
My son is 6 and he sleeps with me when I have him.
His mom and I are not together, and I have him 2-3 nights a week. He has just always slept with me, and I haven’t yet felt the need to change. I’ve given him the option of having his own bed, but he prefers to sleep with me. For now, it’s working out fine. He likes it, I like it.
However, I think that if I was together with his mom, or had another girlfriend/wife I was sleeping with, I’d have made the switch some time ago.
My four year-old likes to “snuggle with mommy” before being put in her own bed. Seeing as I’m almost always the last one to bed, that means that most nights my rountine incudes picking my limp daughter off my pillow and snuging her down in her own bed. She’s a sweet little angel, and it gives ne a chance to get a few things done without interference. It also ensures that my wife actually gets a reasonable amount of sleep, 'cause otherwise she’d stay up even later than I do!
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In our house the rule is “everyone starts in their own bed.”
When my son was much younger, he slept with us and seldom in his own bed. However, the lack of space and sex was distrubing to both my husband and I, so around 15 months we instituted the “start in your own bed” rule.
And I break the rule if Daddy isn’t home, then everyone gets to sleep in the “big bed.”
We often (almost always with my 2 year old, but are beginning to wean her) lie down with our kids when we start them off to bed.
On one night my son (age 3) will go down without a hitch, my daughter will need someone to sit with her, he’ll join us around 1:30, she’ll wander in at 3:00, I’ll move to one of their beds around 3:30.
The next night she might be the early arriver in our bed, and I might not get crowded out.
Then there will be a night where one or the other (and maybe both!) sleep through in their own beds.
One of my girlfriends has the belief that “whatever nets the most sleep for everyone.” Seems like a good philosophy to me.
(P.S. Cosleeping has shown to both increase and decrease the risk of SIDS - don’t co-sleep if you are a smoker or drinker - that’s where the increase has been shown to occur. However the studies are controversial - and SIDS is only a factor until 9 or 10 months or something)
Both of my kids slept with my husband and I. They are great sleepers who will nap anywhere now. We also avoided the whole getting up in the middle of the night and going into another room to nurse the baby thing in infancy.
Most cultures around the world sleep with their children. It’s primarily an industrialized society that forces children to sleep apart from their parents. To look at it from an anthropological viewpoint, sleeping with babies makes sense. You can defend them from predators and be closer if something was to happen to them.
And no, having the kids in our bed didn’t interfere with our sex life. There ARE other places than the bedroom to have sex, you know…
Harry Hill found this subject so important that he once stopped one of his shows to point out dangers inherent to taking your child into the bed too early. Thing is, there’s always a chance - no matter how small - there’s always a chance, that you just might roll on top of the child…
put your back out. OOh. Ouchy. Ouch.
The way I see it, for 100,000 years (or whatever) children slept with their parents for protection and warmth. Seems perfectly natural to me. It’s only in recent history that we have started sticking them off on their own. (I have no children, by the way, so I may be completely out of the loop.)
My 17 month old can ONLY sleep in her own bed. For a few months, when she was around a year old, we had to all sleep in one big room in a flat while we were waiting for our house to be ready. We’d just moved to France at that time.
She wouldn’t sleep alone in her cot with us in the room in the sofa bed nearby NOR in our bed. The only option for us was to go sleep in the TINY room downstairs on mattresses. At present, she sleeps on the second floor in her cot, and our bedroom is on the first floor. She just does better on her own. I am a wiggly sleeper and we don’t have a huge bed, so she prefers her own space. This is nice, too, for when we want to get intimate.
Just curious, but for those family-bedders, who do you ever get your “groove on” with all those little kiddies in bed with you? By the way, I am not pro-family bed or anti- family bed, just doesn’t work for us AT ALL.
When I was little I slept with my parents for several years.
Then, once I got older, I went through several years of absolute hell learning to sleep in my own bed without running to mommy and daddy. I wasn’t completely over it until I was at least 11 or so. (This coincided with our moving to a new house; I think no longer having my room directly across the hall from my parents’ had something to do with it.) The whole experience was traumatic and generally no fun at all for me - and my mom gets all offended whenever I suggest that I wish she’d never started it.
If you’re set on doing this, Scylla, please set a cutoff age early.
At a certain point I don’t think it’s a good idea for kids to sleep with their parents. As far back as I can remember I had to sleep in my own bed, though I remember a few times wanting to sleep with my parents. I think having to deal with being alone at night is a good experience for kids from 4 or so on up.
My stepdaughter (who’s six) always wants to sleep with her mother. She did so as an infant and most of the time when she got older, she was five when I met my wife and she was still sleeping with her most nights. I feel this contributes to her being overly-attached and clingy towards her mother. Of course she stopped sleeping with her when I moved in with my wife, but she would usually come try to sneak into bed in the early morning. When I started working nights my wife started letting her sleep in her bed sometimes and it had a noticeable effect on the child’s behavior - she would frequently start speaking in baby talk, would try to crawl into her mothers lap all the time and generally acted like she was a couple or three years younger than she was. I told my wife I didn’t think it was a good idea and the kid picked up on it too. She would ask if I had to work that night and if I said yes she would cheer, and in the morning she would brag to me that she got to sleep with her mommy when I got off work. That last part put an end to that. She started acting more like a five-year-old again after she was made to sleep in her bed most of the time, but whenever her mother gave up and let her sleep in her bed I could tell every time just by the way the kid acted, though my wife would make her get up before I got home from work. My wife finally realized that I was right about how it effected her apparent maturity level and has stopped letting her sleep in her bed completely, though for a while a couple of months ago the kid started waking up in the middle of the night and sneaking into bed - my wife would wake up in the middle of the night, realize she wasn’t alone, and send her back to her own bed.
As to the OP, I don’t think there’s any problem with it at the age he’s talking about, but when the child starts getting older they need to realize that big kids sleep in their own beds.
I slept with my mother almost every night until I was about 12 - it wasn’t until after my daughter was born that I learned this was an unusual practice. I don’t remember her telling me I couldn’t sleep with her anymore, it just sort of gradually tapered off.
My daughter is 10 and still spends a couple nights a week in my bed, give or take. She sleeps very soundly whether in her own room or in my bed. The only problem that I’ve ever encountered with her sleeping with me is that I tend not to sleep very well, especially as shes gotten bigger. She’s an angle sleeper you see, likes to sleep almost sideways on the bed. Could be worse - I’m told I used to kick violently.
I say as long as you’re both sleeping well and no ones privacy is being compromised, why not? Trust your instincts on this one - each child has individual needs.
What better way to have that extra time together each day? Those sweet quiet moments in the morning waking up together. The wriggle of a warm child snuggling against you as you doze off. Priceless.
As far as “getting the groove on”, I don’t recall having any logistical problems. We’d simply put her in her crib/bed (already asleep) for a little while or sometimes we’d do it in the livingroom. In fact, aside from the first week she was with us, that was really the only time she was ever in her crib…
Hmm. I, an exception to so many things, also seem to be an exception to this. I still sleep with my mom when she’s over for a visit, or when I visit her. When I was growing up I’d sleep with her if I felt like it, or she’d sleep with me if she felt like it. Wasn’t all the time, though. Just maybe once a week one of us would curl up with the other.
I’ve never had a problem sleeping alone, except when I was little I had to have the door open a crack for the hall light to come in. There were monsters under my bed, you know.
My anecdotal evidence is completely tangetntial to this thread. On one hand, of course, I don’t have the weaning problem and I’m not dead. On the other: who wants their kid to be like erl?
