Our son was about four months old. Up until that point he had been spending his nights in an Arms’ Reach mini-co-sleeper, a type of three-sided crib designed to attach to the side of our mattress. For four months, it had worked well. Then, one day, we realised he was close to outgrowing the mini and, unfortunately, our bedroom was not large enough to fit a full-sized co-sleeper.

It was at that point that we tried what I well knew parents had been doing all over the world for thousands of years – we put the baby between us. Co-sleeping, I strongly believed, was the most natural thing in the world — our culture one of the few intent on quartering newborns off in a separate nursery for them to sleep (or cry) in isolation from the rest of the family. In other words, I wanted to co-sleep, and my husband was willing to give it a try.

But at some point between, say, two and four a.m., one of us turned on the light and uttered the three words that would eventually be spoken every time thereafter that we attempted what was supposed to be this very natural and nurturing act: “This isn’t working.”

Maybe it was us. Both my husband and I are light sleepers. We toss and turn. We talk in our sleep. We live with a spoiled dog that whimpers and whines if she’s not under the covers, between someone’s feet.

Or maybe it was the baby. He’s big. By the age of four months he’d reached the ninetieth percentile for height and weight. And, like his mama, he snores. Throughout the night he often wakes up and cries for a minute or two, then falls back asleep. Even though he was too young at that point to move himself around much, he consistently and miraculously ended up sleeping horizontally in the center of the mattress, arms and legs splayed, smacking or kicking us in the face, chest, or groin, every ten or so minutes.

It seemed to us we had two choices. We could move to another unit, with a larger bedroom – and buy a Super King-sized mattress, or we could move him into his own cot. We chose the latter. There was no way around it; we were bad co-sleepers.

I probably would have chalked this up as a personal failure, just one of the many reasons no one was going to nominate me for the attachment-parenting mum-of-the-year award. Only after talking to a number of friends who’d had similar experiences did it occur to me that something more might be going on.

It was this suspicion that led me to Eyal Ben-Ari, a professor of anthropology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who has observed first-hand how co-sleeping works in Japan, just one of many Eastern countries where it is the rule and not the exception.

In one of several articles on the subject, Ben-Ari describes how among Japanese families, a child sleeps with its mother until the next child is born, and then she or he relocates to sleep with the father or one of the grandparents. It is not unusual for this pattern to continue until the child reaches the age of ten. Such ‘overcrowding’, he explains, is not a function of lack of space, because even when there are enough rooms for all of the family’s members, many families prefer to sleep in the same room. Whereas many Western parents view a child’s sleeping in his own bed as an important milestone on the way towards independence, the Japanese emphasis is on promoting a sense of closeness and security in small children to help them become more confident and capable in the long run.

So what, I wondered, did the Japanese know that I didn’t? Is there something about Western culture that makes us (some of us, anyway) so ill-suited to the practice? According to Ben-Ari, there is. As he sees it, our comfort level with co-sleeping is not something that begins to develop when we become parents, but much earlier, when as babies and children ourselves we learn or intuit the cultural norm for relating to other bodies.

“We all walk around with this assumption that the body ends with the epidermis,” he explains. “But in societies that are much more relational, there’s a stronger link between caretakers and their children. From a very young age, you learn a way of relating to the world that is very much physical. In Japanese culture, they learn from a very young age to relate to other bodies. For example, from what I’ve seen, Western mothers tend to be much more verbal with their children while Japanese mothers tend to be much more physical.”

For someone like myself, he implied, who grew up sleeping in my own bed, in my own room, wiling my way into my parents’ arms after a nightmare or a spotting of that daunting monster in my wardrobe, but generally confined to my own, private, at times, lonely space where there was no tossing and turning, no snoring, no stray elbows and ankles with which to contend, it should be no surprise that trying to get a decent night’s sleep with another tiny (or in my son’s case, not so tiny), body in constant contact with my own would prove challenging.

“Did it prove challenging for you?” I asked the anthropologist. I assumed that he who had devoted himself to the study of Japanese sleep patterns would have practised them with his own family.

“No,” he said. “Because we didn’t try it.” It turns out Ben-Ari grew up with a sleeping arrangement about as far from the one he studied in Japan as one can get. Growing up on a kibbutz in Israel, he not only slept in a separate bed from his parents, he slept under a separate roof in a “children’s house,” the customary practice of the time. For him and his family, such a reversal simply didn’t feel right. Regardless of how engaged he was by the Japanese model, by how well it worked and how deeply ingrained it seemed for the families he studied, when it came to his own family, he says, “we had to do what felt natural to us.”

And as for me and my family, I suppose we’re doing the same, juggling what sounds good with what feels right, hoping for the best as I rock my son and sing to him and wish him the sweetest of dreams, and then close the door between us.

Meekel McCleave was just two months old when her mother, who had also co-slept with her other children, woke up and found the small newborn face down. Public health officials are once again decrying the practice of co-sleeping, precisely because of outcomes like this.

The death of these five babies is a complete tragedy — sad, heartbreaking and avoidable. But what gets me, an experienced co-sleeper, is that co-sleeping is taking the blame and getting the headlines in these deaths. But a closer look sheds a little more light.

In Meekel’s case, a medical examiner’s report indicates the baby was found face-down on an adult-size pillow. That’s hardly safe co-sleeping. And face down? The baby was two months old. What two month old can roll over? Just based on the information in the article, there was a lot going wrong in that family bed, though Meekel’s mom disputes the pillow situation.

What about the other four cases? Here, read for yourself:

On March 8, 6-day old Ceianna Buchanan died while sleeping on a couch with her mother. The mother admitted to police she got drunk the night before.

On April 5, 3-month old Kymarius Hunt died sleeping on a couch with his grandmother. She later admitted to drinking 8 beers.

On April 19, 2-month old Tyler Winston died sharing a bed with his mother.

On April 25, 6-week old Demetrius Kimble died sleeping in bed with both parents. His mother admitted to drinking prior to falling asleep.

So, drunk, drunk, unknown and drunk.

Was co-sleeping the problem in any or all of these cases? Or was it booze and/or unsafe situations.

For many families, co-sleeping is the one way everybody gets sleep. And done safely, it’s safe. But what is safe co-sleeping? For one, no drugs or drinking. For another, no babies on or near pillows. And also, don’t sleep with babies on a couch or in chairs. How about an information about that, instead of just saying no, don’t do it?

I mean, my motive isn’t just to defend the practice of co-sleeping. I don’t want to learn of any more kids dying as a result of some stupid form of it.

Photo: Todaystmj4.com

After some struggle, we finally purchased a bed, got him a dinosaur bedding set with a matching pillow (which my son loved), and eventually moved him out of our room into his own room. To everyone’s surprise, my son didn’t give any resistance about sleeping on his own. He was very excited to be a big boy and sleep in his dinosaur bed by himself. He still woke up at night to go pee, or to drink water, or cry, but once he was out of our room, I was able to get a little bit better sleep at night.

It’s been couple of months since my son has been sleeping on his own. However, a couple of times, my husband has decided he wanted to co-sleep with our son and tried to get him back into our room for the night. I gave my husband the ultimatum that he needs to choose who he wants to co-sleep with: me or our son.

After years of suffering through endless nights of waking up frequently, I am sick of co-sleeping. During the past three years, my husband never got up to take my son to the bathroom or to grab water, or to calm him down during his night terrors; it was always me. I’m afraid that if we let our son know that he can push his way into our bed again, he won’t go back to his room.

My husband thinks just one time will be okay and it doesn’t matter. For me, especially since I also have an eight-month-old baby girl in our room, I don’t want our toddler son to come back to our room. Between two of them, I will never get enough sleep.

Thankfully my daughter is much better sleeper and only wakes up once a night, but when my son used to sleep with us, his crying would be so loud it would wake up the baby. Do you think co-sleeping once in a while won’t matter and it won’t be habit forming, or do you think this will doom me to sleepless nights again? — No-Co-Sleeper

Dear No-Co,

We want to congratulate you on what sounds like a great transition! As your friends warned, moving from the family bed to a big kid bed can be very hard. But your son was clearly ready and able. And you handled the move with sensitivity and respect. Good work. But it sounds like there is someone else in your house whose not quite ready to separate.

Your husband misses his little boy: after all, for him, co-sleeping didn’t involve endless wakings and feedings. He got to lie back and enjoy the rustle of tiny footsied feet nestling under the covers. We can see why he loved it so much. But there’s more to this than just your husband’s needs. Your son has shown he’s happy sleeping on his own. You want and need to get more sleep. Your husband needs to see the big picture and start to think about ways to feel connected and bonded to his son during waking hours.

It’s not that we have no sympathy for your husband. Weaning from an intense connection with your young child can be torture. Raising children is all about moments of attachment and separation. There’s a constant re-adjusting of connectedness and independence. This happens with feeding, with sleeping, at the playground, when school starts. We all tend to focus so much on the child’s developmental needs, it can be easy to forget that there is another person involved in the attachment equation: the parent. Plenty of child-rearing choices are made in the service of parental wants and needs. But in this case, it’s clear that your husband’s needs don’t jibe with yours, and they don’t seem particularly aligned with where your son is developmentally, either.

Yes, it’s sad to move on and lose the cosy parts of co-sleeping. But it wasn’t working for you, and you’re the one who was doing all the work. Which to us means you’re the one who gets to call the shots.

Your husband might be right that a few isolated nights with you won’t unravel into full time co-sleeping again. Non-co-sleepers often manage to break the rules on vacations or when the child is sick without long-term repercussions.

But he might be wrong. And that’s a risk we don’t think that you — mother of infant and needer of sleep — need to take. Insomnia is one (very common) byproduct of the frequent waking you’ve been enduring. Resentment is another, and you’ve already got quite a handsome load of that weighing you down. Not to mention another baby who will be reaching a stage of separation anxiety herself soon enough. Our advice is to hold your ground, and maybe hold your husband a little more to help him deal with his own separation anxiety.

Have a question? Email parentaladvisory@babble.com.au

On the one hand, the official word from many co-sleeping advocates is that it should only be the mum (and only a breastfeeding mom at that, yo). In fact, they even say that a co-sleeping baby should not be placed between mum and dad, but between mum and a bedrail. Folks taking this position generally say that breastfeeding mothers are more "tuned in" to their babies, aware of their location, instinctually place them in a safe sleeping position, and wake in tandem with them throughout the night. Certainly if you are breastfeeding, one of the points of co-sleeping is having the breastfeeding mother right there to increase lactation and nursing frequency and duration.

On the other hand, I haven't actually seen any studies of specifically dads and co-sleeping, but I've certainly known plenty of dads who describe for themselves perfectly my own experience of being hyper-aware of the presence and location and motion of their infants, even as they sleep. Is it possible that advocates on the defensive against "cosleeping = death"
hysteria are being overcautious/biased on this one?

It's worth noting that dads, at least engaged ones, do actually go through hormonal changes themselves as they begin to parent, including modestly increased levels of prolactin, the lactation hormone. (I'd wager this probably also happens for non-bio mums in queer couples.) It's not like we're talking random person off the street here. But it's also not biological motherhood either.

What do you think? Is the only-mums-should-sleep-next-to-baby thing an acknowledgement of basic biology, or just more sexism trying to sneak in under the cloak of science?

Photo by davef3138, via Flickr.

This quote from a Ft. Myer, Florida, newspaper really takes the cake though:

"Substance abuse is the leading factor in the harm caused to children. It's
been linked to abuse and neglect, such as the cases of co-sleeping -
where parents or other relatives sleep with children – which has led to
infants suffocating."

 OK, let's break this down:

Cosleeping while abusing drugs or alcohol is dangerous. Absolutely, no question, no argument.

But saying substance abuse leads to "cases of co-sleeping, which has led to infants suffocating" is like saying irresponsible drinking causes cases of driving, which has led to fatal car crashes. It's nonsense that implies it's sleeping next to an adult, not the drugs (or anything else about the context), that's dangerous.

Safe sleeping depends on all kinds of things. Bedsharing can be safe. Cribs can be unsafe. And vice versa. The search for the universal right answer keeps us from making both safer and identifying when is the right time for each.

Photo by matsuyki.