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Co-sleeping

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I try to avoid giving parenting advice on this blog, because everyone's kids are different and everyone's family is different and no matter how sure I am that I'm right and someone else is wrong, what works for us might not work for anyone else. Also, if one of my kids turns out to be a mass murderer I will suffer enough without also having to feel embarrassed by my twenty-year-old blog posts boasting about my awesome parenting skills.

But I'm going to make an exception for this, it's too useful.

When the kids were small, up to the age of three and a half or four, we let them sleep in the same bed with us. I am 100% convinced this was a good move. We did it with Katara, I was 100% convinced it was a good move, and then when Toph came along and we had to make the decision again, I was 100% in favor of doing it again. There are things that, with hindsight, I might do differently; this is not one of them. If we were to have another kid (and may a merciful god protect us from such a calamity) I would do it again.

I don't know how many times, when the kids were small, I was asked by other parents “is she sleeping though the night yet?” And I would reply “I don't really know; it hasn't been a big deal.” New parents always get asked this because having a new baby is utterly grueling. New babies have to be attended to, at one end or the other, at least every hour or two. If the kid is sleeping in a crib in the next room, then when it is hungry or thirsty, it has to escalate the alarm until it can be heard from the next room, at which point it is really upset. Then someone has to get up and go into the next room to deal with it. Then they have to get a stressed-out kid to go back to sleep and then they have to sneak out of the room without waking it up again. This is very bad for everyone. Then it happens again a couple of hours later. This is very bad for everyone.

But when the kid is in bed with you and it is hungry or thirsty, it makes a small noise without really waking up, and mom, without really waking up herself, nurses it, and everyone goes back to sleep, without even getting out of bed. The situation is similar when the kid's diaper needs to be changed. Someone still has to wake up to change the diaper, but everything goes much more quickly and smoothly for everyone involved. And again, if mom is not nursing, someone has to wake up to bottle-feed the kid, but again, it is a much smaller production.

This is all completely aside from the fact that the baby really prefers to be close to its parents anyway. Older kids can negotiate. A four-year-old has fully grasped the principle that if she makes herself a big enough pain in the ass, you might give in out of convenience or exhaustion. So there is value in resisting this tactic when a four-year-old tries it, because if you give in once, you only encourage it for the next time, and the four-year-old needs to learn that the tactic is unlikely to work and will just make everyone miserable. (File under “millions for defense but not one cent for tribute”.) But babies don't negotiate. There is absolutely no value in ignoring a screaming baby in the hope that it will eventually give up on this tactic, because the baby is not using a tactic. It is just screaming because it is unhappy. You can make the baby happy or you can endure the screaming of an unhappy baby. Why not make the baby happy? There's nothing wrong with happy babies. Everybody wins.

Frequently asked questions

• Aren't you afraid of hurting the baby while you are asleep?

  No. This almost never happens, and on the extremely rare occasions when it does happen, there is always some extenuating factor: it happens to people who are severely alcoholic and have collapsed into bed in a stupor, or who are so severely obese that they don't know where their whole body is.

  Most people will not roll over onto a baby, just as most people don't roll out of bed. If you did, the baby would yell and you would wake up. Nothing like this happened to us in the seven or so years we slept with a kid in the bed. For thousands or years — no, millions — people everywhere have been sleeping with their babies. The babies are not getting squished.

  As I once put it, accurately but somewhat unfortunately, it's much harder than you might expect to smother a baby.

• Aren't you afraid the baby will fall out of bed?

  Put the baby in the middle.

• But what about sex?

  Do it when the baby is somewhere else entirely, or asleep during the daytime. You would have to do this anyway, unless you like being interrupted by a baby screaming in the next room.

• But what happens when the kid gets big and you want it to stop sleeping in bed with you?

  This is not a trivial problem. But is a much more manageable problem than the problem we avoided of having to wake up every two hours to feed the baby. The kid is older. She can be reasoned with. She may understand that the change of sleeping arrangements is part of growing up and gaining more privileges. Co-sleeping can be phased out gradually.

  As a parent you are going to have to deal with many other problems of the exact same type: the kid must learn to eat solid food, and then to feed herself. She must learn to to toilet herself and to walk on her own. Later she must learn to how to take turns, to apportion scarce resources, to handle other people being mean to her, and how to deal with a thousand variations of not having things exactly how she wants.

  This is a long process, her life's work, and you are going to be involved in most of it, so it is your life's work too. Learning to sleep in one's own bed is just one more item of the same sort.

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