Good Night, Sleep Tight

For many expectant parents, one of the perks of preparing for the new family member is setting up a nursery: a cheery room filled with crib, changing table, dresser, fluffy wall decorations, adorable hanging mobiles, and lots of cuddlies. This is great, and great fun. However, don't let this anticipatory decorating overly influence your choice for where to sleep baby. You might find that there are other options you like better! (And you can still decorate a nursery, even if no one will be using it. Just think of it as the modern answer to the formal living room.)

Anyone growing up in the West knows all about babies in their own rooms, so I'm not going to talk about that. Instead, I'm going to single-mindedly discuss bedsharing. It might appeal to you; it might repel you; but you owe it to yourself and your baby to look into it, if only to say "thought about it long and hard, not for us, now go away' to an overzealous Family Bedder. There's nothing fun, after all, in being caught totally unaware by someone offering an alternative - you'll certainly lose any debate with them, and more importantly, you might belatedly find out about something you wish you'd known about in the first place.

We're All in This Together

In many countries, and in many homes in this country, baby and parents sleep together in one bed (often along with older siblings, if there are any). It's a novel idea, considering what we normally think of when we think "baby sleeping", but it has many merits. This bedsharing is what we do with our youngest two (the 8-year-old has her own room and bed, though she occasionally pops in for a night or two with us). Let me describe....

We have this delectably humongous bed, which is really a queen flanked by two twins. It takes up almost an entire wall under the windows in our bedroom; this provides rolling-off-the-bed protection on two sides (and the twins are reversed, so that the headboards are at the foot of the bed), and we've put bed rails and various furniture - a soft-sided travel yard, a folded futon mattress buttressed by a side table - around the remaining open spaces. (This only prevents inadvertent rolling off; the toddler can still scale the edges if he's awake. Many bedsharing families put their mattresses right on the floor to obviate the whole question of how to prevent falling off the bed.) There's an opening at the foot of the bed without rails, right at Mommy's feet (so she can get up to pee the customary 1,000 times per night without overly disturbing the rest of the bunch); it's also where the toddler lets himself down when he wakes up from his nap. (This is a very nice, if unexpected, bonus: I never have to go get a toddler who, while pleasant upon waking, grew unhappy at being left in bed too long.)

Around the bed are a zillion pillows of various sizes; some are for sleeping on (for the grownups), and most are for padding the walls / rails / furniture. We've got two comforters and two big blankets, plus a baby-sized one for the baby. (The toddler moves around so much that covering him up with a blanket is pointless.) This is how it's been since the toddler was a baby; despite some alarmist-sounding rhetoric we read about smothering and becoming wedged under pillows and blankets, we never had a problem with this. First off, a tiny baby, who might actually smother because she's too new to be able to move herself away (or roll over or push off the smothering offender or even yell insistently enough to get your attention), doesn't move around the bed. So put her in the middle far from pillows and blankets, and she's fine. Secondly, when she gets big enough to scooch herself over to the pillows (and this is usually before she can roll or crawl), she's gotten good at hollering, and you are, of course, near enough to hear her (and you're checking on her every so often anyway). But yes, I guess there is a danger if you are the kind of parent who wants to have a baby but doesn't want to be bothered with actually staying in the vicinity while it's sleeping, or dismisses the baby's early cries as unimportant. As far as I can tell, these are the people the warnings about cosleeping are for, because for the rest of us, pillows and blankets or no, there's about a zero percent chance the baby will suffocate and you won't be there to stop it.

This brings us to the delicate topic of SIDS, which is an unpredictable and unpreventable tragedy for whom no one can be blamed. There is absolutely no evidence that sleeping with your baby heightens the risk of SIDS; on the contrary, many people feel it lessens the chance. I read one mother's story about this recently: her tiny baby made the smallest of sounds, which woke the mother, who found her baby gasping for breath and turning blue (but not making any more noise!). This mother felt certain that, had her daughter been sleeping in another room, she would have died. Instead, the mother and father did everything they could think of to help their baby breathe again; and after a few moments, she did.

On the other hand, cosleeping is not a cure for SIDS; another mother relates the death of her infant while nursing. This tragic incident just goes to show that SIDS really has nothing to do with your skills or attentiveness as a parent. Certainly, being there when your child struggles for air gives you a chance to help her, but lots of babies diagnosed with SIDS died peacefully with no sign there was any trouble.

Now that we are feeling very somber, let me say that the point of these two paragraphs is this: while SIDS can happen to anyone, anywhere, it's not more likely to happen to your baby if she sleeps with you, and it might be less likely. At any rate, if you are like me, you'll sleep better with your little one close by, where you know you'll hear him if he cries or mews or even rolls over. (On the other hand, you'll sleep worse, because every little sound he makes will wake you up. It seemed like a fair trade to me: less anxiety, more interruptions.) I honestly can't imagine having my babies down the hall in another room, even with a monitor on. That's not all out of anxiety; there are also some very sweet treats when they're in your bed, such as....

• when they wake up at 2 am, look sleepily around, pad over to where you are, and flop down on your belly.
• when they wake your husband up in the morning and say "dada hi!".
• when you wake up in the morning, not quite ready to leave the cozy bed, and spend fifteen minutes playing "where's the baby?" with the blankets, or looking at a favorite book.
• when the eight-year-old and the baby practice rolls on the bed, giggling with delight.

These moments might be even more precious to the one (or both) of you who is working outside the home and has limited time with your baby during the day.

There are also practical benefits. Babies wake up a lot at night; when they're little, this is usually to eat, and when they're older, it can be for reassurance or from gas pains or from who knows what? In any case, you're right there; you don't have to get out of bed and walk to their room, lug them out of the crib, and sit with your ankles freezing (if it's winter) while you try to feed them / calm them / get them back to sleep.

Breastfeeding in Bed

There is a myth that a cosleeping, breastfeeding mother will not even need to wake up to feed her baby. Of course, she will have to wake up, at least enough to roll over to the baby and help her latch on, then stay there while she nurses. And sleeping while someone is sucking on your breast is not really that easy; it's like sleeping while someone is rubbing your back - it's a distraction. What the bedsharing mother does gain, however, is the luxurious comfort of not leaving her bed to get the baby (a big plus on cold nights), and not having to pinch herself to stay awake so that she doesn't fall asleep before she gets baby safely tucked into his own bed again. The bedsharing mother may not sleep through nursing, but she'll still be in a sleepy state when it's over; the mother whose baby sleeps in his own bed will be more than likely wide awake.

Trust me on this. With baby #1, my first husband and I had a plan all worked out: Meg would sleep in a bassinet at the foot of our bed until she was big enough to graduate to her crib down the hall. This lasted one night. I was exhausted, my husband was exhausted, the baby was exhausted (and very peeved), and my parents (who had spent the night with us) were timidly asking as they brought the baby to their delirious daughter in bed, "We have to leave now...where should we put her?" I answered, "Here. Right here. Beside me. That way I don't have to get up." It was desperate, selfish reasoning, but it was also the best radical change of plan I could have made.

Even so, I was brand new at mothering and breastfeeding, and I still got up to sit in the rocker and nurse Meg at night. Until one day I discovered that you could lie down and breastfeed at the same time. Holy mackerel! We took to the bed and nursed until we got the hang of it, which was about three tries. From then on, night stopped being synonymous with the Eternal Down Under.

Naturally, with babies two and three, we went straight for the bedsharing, nursing-in-bed plan.

Comforting An Unhappy Baby

Another benefit of having your baby sleep with you is that, when he wakes and needs reassurance or has pains, you're right there. You don't have to assess his cries from afar, debating if they are worth getting up for. (If they are, he will be howling - and wide awake - by the time you are finished assessing.) You can sleepily (and cozily) rub his back, murmur "there there" to him, kiss his cheek, hold him to your side, or just let him know you are with him if he is thrashing about too much for any of that. Of course, you would be with him if he were screaming in his own bed, too, but you wouldn't be lying warm and cozy in your own, comfy bed.

We experienced the difference between #1 and #2, when we stopped night nursing with each one. Meg moved from our bed to her crib around six months of age. At seven months, having previously slept through the night, she was again waking to nurse, and we figured she was old enough not to need the milk anymore - we decided it was probably just habit waking. (This appears to be common among breastfed babies, according to my soldiers in the field; after a few weeks of sleeping through the night right on schedule, they resume nighttime waking to nurse again, and they'll do it as long as you oblige them.) Armed with a kitchen timer, we resolved not to go to her, on the theory that she would eventually give it up as a lost cause and go back to sleep. It worked - after several grueling minutes where we looked at each other and wondered what horrible damage we were doing to our poor little baby. (Not much, as far as I can tell now, but boy did we suffer.)

With Ben, however, it was much easier. Firstly, still being together in the same bed, I gladly obliged his night nursing through 11 months of age, when, newly pregnant with #3, I was too exhausted to keep it up. He woke, we didn't nurse, he howled and thrashed about for a while; but we were there with him, soothing and reassuring him, and he never had to feel we had abandoned him (okay, we never had to feel we had abandoned him). Though the howling lasted longer than it had with #1, the trauma to the parents (and, we assume, to the baby) was much less severe.

Now a toddler, Ben still occasionally wakes in the night, disturbed by something; left to his own devices, he can work himself into a fairly good panic. When we are beside him, however, he crawls over to one of us and puts one pudgy little arm around our neck, his face against our shoulder, and falls back into a quiet sleep. (If he's having gas pains, which you can tell by the farting going on, this takes longer.)

You may be thinking, "But this does not foster independence." The heck it doesn't! My theory is that an independent older child (and adult) is one whose needs, physical and emotional, were met as a young child. The emotional needs of the baby and toddler pretty much revolve around love and security from her caregivers. And anyway, why on earth should a little person who can barely speak need to be independent?

But What About Sex?

You will not need to worry about this for at least the first six weeks (trust me, however lusty your relationship with your partner, no woman has the energy for sex in the first six weeks; either you gave birth vaginally, and the thought of anything touching you in that general area is horrifying, or you gave birth via C-section, and you are far too sore in your lower abdomen to imagine anyone coming near it. Either way, you will be bleeding for several weeks afterward, and that is generally a big turn-off for everyone involved. But hey, Your Mileage May Vary.)

But, okay, at some point you and your partner will need each other in a big way; if there's a baby in your bed, how do you manage it?

If you have read anything about bedsharing (or cosleeping, or The Family Bed), you've probably heard the usual answer to this question: Be inventive - do it in the guest bedroom, the living room, the bathroom, the kitchen, the garage, the car, .... This is pretty good advice for any relationship (variety is the spice of life, and all that), but it's not the only answer. It might be the culturally correct answer, but it's not the only one.

Your other alternative is to have sex in the bed while the baby is there! Yes, this is a statement with very high shock value in America, but that's not why it's here. It's here because it's a simple, obvious solution to what doesn't have to be a problem in the first place. (Consider that more people in the world live in countries where entire families share a single bedroom, and this is a total non-issue, than live in America, where we are a bit uptight about sex.)But how can I say this? Am I advocating child abuse or what? Let me elaborate.

First of all, a tiny baby will sleep through everything: the vacuum cleaner, the dog barking, an argument, the radio, the telephone, and the screaming 8-year-old. (On a side note, you would be well advised to provide as much of this noise for your infant as possible; she'll sleep through it as a newborn, and if she's used to it, she'll be able to sleep through much of it when she is older, too.) She will certainly sleep through the comparatively boring sounds of you and your partner making love.

As your baby grows older and more alert, simpler sounds will wake him more readily, but your ooohs and aaahs (unless you are very vocal during sex) will not pass the waking threshhold. Our toddler has never once woken as a result of our lovemaking; he has woken for the usual reasons (gas pains, hunger), at which point we've temporarily stopped having sex, comforted or nursed him, and gone back to it once he slept again.

While we've got sex and nursing in the same sentence, let me make a brief digression. Nursing is indeed a pleasurable physical experience, but it's never been arousing for me; the pleasure has the form of scratching an itch, or getting a massage, but not of sexual stimulation. This is obviously a mental thing, because the same actions on the part of my husband are very erotic to me. Even the midstream switch from sex to nursing hasn't ever proven problematic; my brain immediately flips from regarding my breasts as "love objects" to regarding them as "feeding objects". So don't worry; you're not going to have some secret guilty sex life with your baby against your will if you're breastfeeding. If arousal from breastfeeding distresses you (as it does me), your brain simply isn't going to take you there.

Okay, back to sex around the baby. We've only had experience up to age eighteen months or so, but I've heard from others that they've made love with older children in the room, too. According to them, the older child has never woken, either. I'd imagine the same game plan could work for an older child as a younger one: put sex on pause and attend to the child. Sure, you'll probably have an occasional night when you get frustrated by a child having trouble getting back to sleep, but you can handle that, right? If you've got your ducks in a row, it won't be any more frustrating than being called away from a good book or conversation. Besides, you can always take a shower together, or move to another room, to finish The Deed. (We have used the taking-a-shower-together-quickie many times since our first became old enough to be without constant visual supervision, to satisfy daytime lust for one another.)

The only other sticky point with an older child is the possible question: "What are you doing, Mommy and Daddy?" (Or Mommy and Mommy, or Daddy and Daddy.) One couple suggested that you answer this honestly and simply: "Mommy and Daddy are spending special time together". It's true without being overwhelming, and it reassures a child who wonders why this heretofore unseen thing is going on. ("Nothing, nothing, just go back to sleep" is decidedly non-reassuring.) Your child doesn't want the whole Birds and Bees discussion, or even the name for what you're doing; she just wants to know that it's a normal thing and it doesn't have anything to do with monsters or the Boogey Man.

Naturally, only you and your partner know if you feel comfortable making love with your sleeping children nearby. We find it easy around babies and toddlers, but unthinkable around the 8-year-old; I suspect we'll cross our privacy threshhold when #2 is old enough to notice what we are doing and inquire about it. But only if he's awake....

But What About Child Abuse?

Child abuse is a terrible thing, and people who perpetrate it should have their genitals removed without anesthesia and be sentenced to hard labor for life. But that's not really pertinent to a discussion of bedsharing, any more than it's pertinent to a discussion of families sharing a hotel room on vacation. I mean, do you feel more attracted to a child just because you sleep near him? Of course not. If you are someone who finds children sexually arousing, you'll find them arousing on the playground, at school, in daycare, at the doctor's, and everywhere else. There's nothing special about the bed. And if you are not aroused by children, nothing about being in bed with them will cause you to feel more so. Imagine sleeping with your grandmother, or your sister, or your dog. Do you suddenly want to jump their bones? Then why are you worried about it with your child?

So don't get worked up about child abuse. It's a non-issue in bedsharing.

The Baby's Point of View

So far, everything I've said about bedsharing is from the parents' point of view (and as you can see, I speak for the creatures of comfort among us). But what does the baby think?

Of course, we don't really know what the baby thinks. But here's what I think the baby thinks.

All of this applies to your baby's entire day, of course, not just the nights. Sitting in a stroller, lying in a bassinet in the living room, and riding in the car seat are probably equally trying moments for your newborn. So you might consider keeping him with you as much as possible. You can't get out of the car seat thing, of course, but you can minimize the number of places he has to go in the car; and a front pack or sling is a wonderful thing for keeping a sleeping baby near Mom or Dad. Enjoy holding them close while they're little - soon enough, they'll be too heavy, too wriggly, and too independent for it!

A Few Parting Words

As you can see, I love having my babies in our bed during the night, and I've tried to show just why in the paragraphs above. Your situation, being yours and not mine, will be different, and you might find another solution to work better for your family. There are many shades of cosleeping, ranging from everybody-in-the-same-bed to a bedside cosleeper to a crib in the same room; from the first few months of your baby's life through the first ten years. Go with your family's natural flow, and take it one day at a time - whether you initially cosleep or put baby in a separate room, you can always change your mind later.