My husband and I recently read The Well-Behaved Child, by John Rosemond.  Overall, it was a very good book, and we would recommend it.  There was one small section, though, with which I disagreed.  It wasn’t even in the main part of the book; it was in a Q&A section at the end.  But it bugged me enough because of what I believe was a lack of differentiation between two things that I thought I should write about it.

The question is “What do you think of parents and children sleeping together?”  Dr. Rosemond’s answer:

I am an outspoken opponent of what’s called “co-sleeping” or the “family bed.” While this arrangement may seem warm and fuzzy, it often devolves into chaos.  Despite the claims of “family bed” advocates, not one study done by an objective researcher has demonstrated benefit in either the short or long term to children so bedded.  The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends against the practice, noting that infants are sometimes smothered by parents who inadvertently roll over on them in the night or as a result of getting tangled in the large sheets and blankets.

It’s almost always the mother who has bought into the propaganda that this promotes parent-child bonding.  And if other moms in her social group are bedding with their kids, she feels the additional pressure of not wanting to be the most “unbonded” mom in the neighborhood.  But there is no two ways about it: a child who sleeps with his parents develops a dependency upon sleeping with his parents, one that comes back to haunt all concerned when the parents decide the child’s presence in the bed has become inconvenient.  Meanwhile, this child has been deprived of the inestimable benefit of learning that he was not a member of the wedding, that the marriage is not a threesome.

Now, my husband and I are not proponents of “the family bed.  If it’s working for your family, more power to you; the purpose of this post is not to debate that.  But it’s necessary for me to point out that we do not recommend “the family bed,” because we do bring our infants into bed with us (and view this as good), and I think it’s significant that Dr. Rosemond does not make a distinction between these two things.  Sleeping with your infant in your bed is not the same thing as a full-fledged “family bed.”

If we agree that there is a distinction (or at least concede this temporarily for the sake of argument), we’re left with three questions.

1. Is there any benefit to having the baby in your bed?

2. Is it dangerous?

3. If it’s good to have the baby in bed with you, but not your older children, how do you transition the baby out of your bed?

The first two questions are issues for another post, but I want to address the third today.  I don’t often feel that our family has very helpful insights when it comes to parenting – we don’t seem to have found a lot that really works yet.  But we have successfully transitioned our babies out of our beds, consistently.  All three of our babies have slept with us.  The older two girls sleep fine on their own.  Livia is still a baby, and I wouldn’t say she’s fully transitioned out of our bed yet, but she sleeps just fine when she’s in her own bed, and she sleeps alone more often than not.  How did we do this?  It’s really very simple: put them to sleep in their own beds from the beginning.

“But you just said your babies sleep with you!”  They do.  But they rarely go to bed with us.  They’re babies.  They go to bed earlier than we do, and they take naps more often.  This means they often sleep without us!  At naptime, they sleep in their beds.  At bedtime, when they’re first going to bed and we’re still up, they go to sleep in their own beds.  When they wake the first time to nurse, I bring them to bed with me, and they stay with me ’til morning.

Using this method, we have never had any difficulty with getting our babies to sleep away from us.  (We did have one daughter who struggled to get to sleep at night, in general, but no more than any other baby who uses only a crib.  Actually, this is my one baby who rarely slept with us, because of our bed situation at the time!)

I’m certainly not saying we’re experts or something.  But I want to reassure parents that it is possible to allow your baby to sleep with you, and not still have him in your bed when he’s five.