My BIL and SIL are pretty sure that kids #2 and #3 were not conceived in bed - probably the couch or the shower.
I admit, that is one of my biggest fears! Even though we never coslept, I had nightly nightmares about that for MONTHS after she came home from the hospital.
There are mornings when I bring her into bed for a bit to play if she wakes up a little too early and I’m not ready to start my day yet, and yeah, it’s tempting sometimes, when I’m absolutely EXHAUSTED, to let her have her morning nap with me, but I just cannot do it. She loves to roll around and she will push pillows etc out of her way, just to see what is on the floor. Her falling out of our bed is a terrifying thought of course, so I’ve never even tried to have her sleep with me.
Also, I just didn’t want to have to go through what my friend did when she decided she needed her own life and her own bed, and she had to transition her son into his own bedroom.* It took about a year. Hard on everyone!!!
Like Indygrrl, my brother and I were raised to respect our parents’ privacy. I think I slept with my parents once, when I had such a high fever that I was hallucinating and stuff. It was probably more for their peace of mind than mine.
- ignore the crappy grammar please.
Sure, we did it with both kids. Particularly with my daughter, who was good at breastfeeding in the lying-down position from almost day 1, it nearly eliminated the entire “frequent nighttime waking” portion of infancy for us. She’d wake and want to be fed, I’d roll over and feed her without really waking up fully, and then we’d both drop off to sleep. I cannot describe to you how excellent this was. We just felt that it made our lives easier, and made more sense than the “crib across the room/down the hall” model.
Both kids were moved out to their own beds around age 18-24 months, with a minimum of trauma.
Having sex, incidentally, was not a problem. We’d put the baby down for a nap in the papasan chair in the living room, or the baby swing, and then we’d use the bed. Infants nap a lot, you know.
Having said all of that, I will freely state that I have no problems with people who go the other route and put their kids to sleep in their own beds from day one. I don’t think that they are weird, abnormal, harming their marriages, or harming their children. I wish that all of them would grant the same consideration to us, when I think about it, which is infrequently and usually only when someone starts a thread like this.
That was beautiful.
I had a co-sleeper built to sidle up next to our bed so the babies were with us always. It just felt right. As they’ve aged the sleeping situations are definitely fluid, with kids in our bed some nights, not others. Sometimes I fall asleep in my son’s bunk while reading to him and don’t make my way to my own bed until the wee hours. The only thing I find weird is a dogmatic approach to either philosophy.
Madeline slept with my wife (and sometimes with me too; I have to get up a lot 'cause of my snoring and tossing and turning) until she was 4 months old or so, and then we began a process of transitioning her to her own bed. The Ferber book suggested she had to be at least that old to learn to sleep on her own, that before that age she just had to learn confidence in Mommy & Daddy taking care of her, and it worked quite well for us. We started moving her to her own bed until the first cry, then bringing her back for the rest of the night, working up to bringing her back to her bed, longer intervals, etc. She’s 9 months now and sleeps through the night in her crib, usually for 11 hours at a stretch. Christ, it’s a relief.
So it worked for us at first. To be perfectly honest I don’t understand why you’d want the baby sleeping with you longer than what we did. But, I’d say it’s your call. Follow your own instincts. Want to co-sleep? Great. Don’t want to? Great. Take advice from other parents, but don’t take orders.
As to co-sleeping hindering sex, I think this is really funny. Folks, when you’ve had your first kid, co-sleeping is the LEAST of the barriers to sex.
I never co-slept with my first baby, and he slept in his own crib in his own bedroom. (I was single, back then.) With my second, the only way his Dad and I could get any sleep was to snuggle the baby between us in bed, so we did, but not voluntarily. That baby liked to sleep sideways, so Dad had no room and slept on the sofa much of the time. I never slept well, because it was uncomfortable for me to worry about rolling over on the baby, and I couldn’t have my fluffy pillows and blankets all around me.
With this last baby, husband thought he could outsmart him, and bought a bassinet that we could side-car to our bed. Didn’t work, because baby #3 chose to nurse instead of bottle-feeding, so he wanted me all the time. And he kicked his Dad so much that his Dad ended up on the sofa, many nights. (Quoth my husband: “I’m damn tired of my sons kicking me out of my own bed!”) I like the snuggly baby feeling, but only for about 15 minutes or so, and then I’d prefer my husband next to me in bed, and all children in their own beds.
Baby #3 will still be in a bassinet in our bedroom for a few more months, until he’s big enough to take over #2’s crib, and #2 can take over #1’s toddler bed. That’s just because we’re too lazy/too tired to keep running upstairs every time the little one gets hungry, which is still every two hours.
As to how we got so many… #2 would sleep in his playpen for a while, before he went upstairs to bed. That’s how we got #3. There will be no #4, I am certain.
So I don’t prefer to co-sleep, but if I want to sleep at all, I’ve had to, sometimes. I can understand why some folks like to, but I’d rather not. (Now someone please tell the baby that, so I can get a full six hours of sleep.)
Another mom told me once she thought it was parenting’s dirtiest little secret. More parents probably do it than are willing to confess, because they know other people think it’s weird, or wrong, or reflects a lack of parental discipline, or whatever.
I am not sure the actual “family bed” philosophy is usually at work here (although of course some families do embrace it). I think a lot of cosleeping is done because some parents find it’s practical, it gives parents more sleep, it helps milk supply, it’s a way to address some short-term sleeping problem, etc. Whatever. It works for them.
It’s too common in other cultures for me to believe it’s wrong or harmful. If it works for a family, bless 'em; it’s not my business.
As others have said, there are other places to cuddle, have alone time, do the nasty. We don’t regularly cosleep (I’d be all for it, but my light-sleeper insomniac husband couldn’t deal) but my son has been a night owl since infancy. That’s a much bigger challenge to sexual intimacy than a lack of bedroom privacy. Consenting adults find ways, oh yes they do.
I never slept with my parents (bad dreams aside), but since I’ve gone away to school, whenever I come home I somehow end up sharing my mom’s bed at home (she’s single now). She usually asks me to, which I assume is because she misses me and doesn’t get to spend much time with me, the fact that I rarely go home, and my little brother is in the “I’m to cool to pretend to like my mom” stage.
I say its quality time away from her skeevy boyfriend.
Exactly. Before you have a baby, you can read all the books in the world, and do all the research, and have your childrearing philosophy firmly in place, but the fact is that *after * you have a baby, you do what works. And you shouldn’t ever apologize for it, because no one else has to live your life or raise your kids. For a new parent, the world is full of people just dying to tell them they’re doing this wrong. Fuck 'em.
Amen! Most of the people who have carved-in-concrete rules about child-rearing have never had kids!
As to the OP, when my babies were very tiny (less than three months), I would often bring them into bed with me for their last feeding of the night (they were all three breast-fed), and I would go back to sleep after I had moved them from one breast to the other, and they would go back to sleep, and we’d all get a couple more hours of sleep that way. But once they were old enough not to need that extra feeding at 4AM or whatever, we’d stop that.
Aside from that, we haven’t really had our kids sleeping with us. But like so many other things, there’s no one right answer. My husband and I like our privacy, and value our alone time, but if co-sleeping works for other families, then that’s fine for them. I don’t think it’s weird or harmful, just not for us.
As a voice of dissent, I slept with my parents for far too long and never really adjusted to sleeping on my own. I suffered terrible insomnia for most of my teenage years and only managed to get more than four or five hours sleep a night when I moved into the dorms and had a roommate. Hearing her breathing at night let me fall asleep quicker and easier than I ever had before. It’s funny, my boyfriend left early this morning for a job interview and I could get back to sleep because he wasn’t there.
When we have kids, I’m never going to do it, out of fear of my kids will suffer the same insomnia. Trust me, high school is hard enough without insomnia.
I know a couple who are having trouble getting their 8 year old to stop sleeping in their bed. He’s a big kid, too.
To me, that’s just weird and creepy. Littler ones I can kinda understand.
But how can you be sure that your sleep issues are a result of the family bed, and not the other way around? As a parent who parents on the fly with few actual ‘philosophies’ to follow, I’m quite sure I would have kept child with sleep issues in my bed instead of encouraging him to tough it out alone at age 3 or 4 if for no other reason than to get a little sleep myself. In hindsight one may say A is the direct result of B when it’s just as likely that B is the result of A.
I think it matters more why we are sleeping together, than it does that we are sleeping together. And I don’t think that is always as easy to fully understand as it might seem, and certainly waaaay outside the understanding of someone who isn’t in that bed, or a very close confidant of those that are.
Familial intimacy is not directly related to social or sexual maladaptive development per se. It is certainly affected by those things. I had a good friend whose family shook hands on greeting after a time apart. I found that weird as hell. I have seen one family who almost always end up piled up together as closely as possible. (Six people, most nearly adult all lounged together on the couch.) and did not find that intimacy at all weird. In fact, I was envious of the intense loving relationship that family had.
So, if your family does everything together, certainly sleeping falls easily into that pattern. Leaning to sleep alone should be a bit more of a challenge, but still not a big deal. If you are not so close, okay, you are not so close. Maybe you snore real loud, and everyone looses sleep. Maybe you just hit puberty and feel a bit uncomfortable, okay as well. If the reason for not sleeping together is known, and it should be in a very intimate family, no one is going to fight it. They might miss you though.
Tris
Just to clarify, that wasn’t my intention AT ALL when I started this thread.
On the parenting message boards I visit, I would guess 80% of those parents are FIRM believers and advocates of co-sleeping, and if someone posts for advice, their answers are INVARIABLY “co-sleeping is the answer to all of your problems”. Baby won’t nap? Oh - he’s afraid of his crib. He’s insecure. You need to always be with him. Put the rest of your life on hold and lie down with him. Etc.
I find the co-sleeping parents to be the really judgmental ones! And they are very adamant and strident in their posts.
So, as someone who knew that co-sleeping wouldn’t be an option for us, I was curious about how people in the Doper Universe felt about and handled this sleep stuff.
I hope there was no offense taken? I believe everyone who’s posted so far has been quite respectful of the choices of others.
S.
I think it depends on the kid, too.
Our daughter (first child) had a bassinet in our room then moved to a crib in her room. We had a full-wave waterbed, so letting her sleep with us when she was an infant was out of the question. When she was about 18mo, though, she came down with a very bad strep infection, and it was easiest just to let her sleep with us so that I could keep an eye on her fever, etc. Even after she got better though, she liked sleeping with us. She went to sleep in her own bed in her room at bedtime, then sometime around 2 or 3 in the morning, she would come get into bed with us.
When I was toward the end of the pregnancy with our son, there wasn’t enough room in the bed for her. The compromise was a “nest” of blankets on the floor next to our bed, so when she came in to sleep with us, she would just crawl into the nest and sleep there until morning. She did this through three apartment-moves, and was probably about seven years old when she finally stopped doing it completely, unless she was sick or scared by something in particular.
Our son, though, has NEVER liked to sleep in our bed, for any reason. In fact, he has problems just sleeping with someone else in a different bed in the same room. Funny thing is that he is hearing impaired. He has hearing aids to use during the day, but his hearing is pretty bed without them, so he wouldn’t be able to hear the “small” noises of someone sleeping nearby that might keep other people awake.
No offense taken, although a quick scan of the thread reveals that co-sleeping has been referred to as weird, overly dependent, unhealthy, and bad for your marriage. But again, I’m not offended; as you pointed out, people in this thread have been remarkably polite and well-mannered on this topic. And of course, your personal upbringing has a lot to do with how you feel about this issue, IMHO; I used to think co-sleeping was completely bizarre and unnatural before I had kids of my own, because I certainly wasn’t raised that way. So I can’t find too much fault with people who feel the same. (As long as they aren’t lobbying government to ban co-sleeping or whatever, of course.)
I’ve personally found that there’s a lot of intolerance and judgment on both sides of the fence, but of course it’s more annoying and grating when it’s coming from the side you’re not on. I’m certainly not suggesting that co-sleeping parents are never judgmental; believe me, I’ve hung out on enough parenting message boards to know that that is FAR from true, sadly enough. But they’re not the only ones.
My feeling is that parenting is hard enough as it is, without having a bunch of people accusing you of screwing up your kids for not subscribing to their particular parenting philosophy. Not that anyone in this particular thread has done this; I’m speaking more generally. And I’ll also clam up now, so as to avoid further thread hijackery. (Sorry.)
I’m firmly in the “whatever works for you and your kid” camp, of course. My son was in his own bed in the next room from day one, and that worked out fine. My daughter (born 13 years later), was in an Amby Motion Bed at the foot of our bed once she came home from the hospital, simply because we didn’t have another room to put her in. A year and some odd months later, we moved into an apartment with three bedrooms, and she got her own room with a “big girl crib” (she started standing in the Amby bed and fell out of it a couple of times, but she’s not big enough to safely stay in a toddler bed. So we got one of those 3-in-1 crib/daybed/full bed things.)
Funny thing was, although she always slept the night through in our room, she started sleeping ridiculously long hours once she got her own room. This 17 month old is sleeping for 13 hours or more at night and three hours during the day! I am in heaven!
My only concern with co-sleeping and breastfeeding is a relatively recent one: my good friend’s toddler was just diagnosed with “bottle mouth” - rampant tooth decay of his baby teeth. He’s needed extensive drilling and patching and sealing to prevent all his baby teeth from falling out too soon - and of course, since he’s 2, he’s needed to be sedated to do it. Thing is, he’s never had a bottle. But he HAS slept with mom (single mom) every night and nurses almost continuously during the night. He got bottle mouth from having breast milk pooled in his mouth all night long.
How does co-sleeping and breastfeeding work anyways? Do you sleep on your side, and the baby just finds your breast, or do you sort of wake up, stick your nipple in and then go back to sleep, or …?
DD was a major diaper-filler for the first few months of her life, so we always changed her bum every time she woke up. I couldn’t figure out how else to do it! 