mandarine

Co-sleeping is bad for you and your kids. You will stop making love and they will grow more dependent. It will undermine your couple and hinder their balance as future adults. At least, that’s what mainstream health & psychology professionals want us to believe.

A local and recent practice

But when you take a wider view over countries and times, you will find that an overwhelming majority of babies sleep or have slept in the same bed or the same room as their parents. This fact was a revelation to me as a young parent, as I was totally unaware that there were other reference models than our cultural cocoon with its arbirary rules.
This epiphany was obvious in its simplicity, as is many a scientific revolution:

• who in the world is confident enough to leave a helpless infant in a remote room?
• who in the world is rich enough to have a second room, let alone a heated second room?
• who in the world is heartless enough to think that a tiny infant will enjoy eight hours in the dark, away from a mother?

We can also try to find out what our species must have been doing in prehistoric times, by having a look at our closest relatives: apes. Why do our babies, when left alone in the dark, cry their lungs out until overwhelmed by sleep? Could it have something to do with their not being very fond of predators? Would chimpanzees exile their babies to a remote branch so that they can sleep quietly while vultures have their share?

As often, I had discovered that what I had held as a universal golden rule was in fact a very recent and local habit, a 50-year-old bourgeois western practice that we had relentlessly assimilated and justified until we had forgotten that it might be otherwise elsewhere, that it might have been different before.

A personal experience

When we had our first child, he would wake up four or five times each night to feed. We started to get worried that he was not abiding by the three-hour normality rule until we found serious breastfeeding resources mentioning this as a very normal pattern for breastfed babies. Sleeping in the same bed, and then in the same room when he was older, was quite a relief in this respect: we did not have to wake up too much, and everyone would return to sleep within minutes.

We co-slept for eight months until the time he was weaned. By then, our son would sleep through his twelve-hour nights uninterruptedly — something I have never achieved myself. Moving him and his crib into his room was a non-event.

Now he is two and a half, and it never takes more than ten minutes to have him go to sleep. When he feels sleepy, he asks for his bed. A story, a song, a kiss good night, no fuss. Maybe his confidence and peace with his bed and sleep have something to do with the love and warmth he experienced as he started out in his life.

Or maybe not: as always, a personal experience proves nothing.

Read on

An apologia of the scientific mind

Read away

Co-sleeping on Wikipedia
Co-sleeping resources

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