Co-sleeping has much more of a basis in human history. The challenge is transitioning.
I would recommend co-sleeping to almost anyone.
I actually sleep about 9 hours per night, after which I naturally wake up.
I would also recommend going to bed at the same time as the children. Painful from one perspective, but always rested in the morning.
My wife and I had many reasons for why we ultimately chose not to co-sleep. One of those reasons was our sex life. I don't pretend to know what the "norm"/average is, but it's frequent for us, 3-4 times per week, and at the risk of TMI, it can be fairly... involved. We know a few couples who co-sleep and I've always been curious how, or hell, even if, it has impacted their sexual relationships. Clearly it works for them (and you) and that's great! I would just be interested, if you're comfortable sharing, to hear what your experience has been here.
From personal experience: after we had kids, sex became a lot more about opportunity than any particular place (our bed) and time (at night). It was that way for a while. Now, they're a little more grown up, and things are the way they were before. Everything is a phase.
Of relevance here, it depicts a married couple co-sleeping with their small school-age son. They have sex while he's asleep in the bed with them.
It isn't the job of any expert to tell you if you should or should not do something. Humans have been cosleeping with their infants since time began. Clearly there are some serious pros to it. An expert who is truly good will never tell you what to do. They will only inform you of the pros and cons and let you arrive at your own conclusion.
It's the same deal with lawyers, dentists, accountants, security folks, UX designers, engineers and everything else. I mean, could you imagine what a product would look like if you only took input from your lawyer?
Take a look at a graph of infant mortality rates since time began, chief. Appealing to "this is how things have always been" does not really work in this case.
Sorry the statement is not wrong, but it made me laugh a bit, the rates are probably all messy across the years.
Thats cool. I have. But we co-slept anyway because for us the benefits outweighed the risks. Especially while breastfeeding... Raw facts and data alone are not the only things required to make an informed decision on any subject. They only serve as inputs.
Also, population-level data should not be the only input into an individual decision.
Does your wife share your enthusiasm for co-sleeping?
And to answer your question, my wife is even more gung-ho than I about co-sleeping. She actually had to convince me to start doing it in the first place, because I shared the concern of lot of commenters here with regards to SIDS.
I hope this isn't patronizing. If you want it to work you could put the little one on your side of the bed instead of in the middle. A mattress on the floor next to you can make rolling out of bed a non-event.
Or sleep on a futon / remove the bed stand. There are many variations that work.
Not that I saw.
The change in sleeping habits due to public health campaigns seems to have cut frequency roughly in half, maybe even as much as 75% depending on how much reach you give the education credit for. Still the #1 cause of death for infants, but a lot less so now.
My spouse and I were really surprised by the actual research when we looked closely at it. It's much murkier than is commonly believed.
My experiences in research and with pediatrics has led me to be deeply skeptical of a lot of common claims about infant and child sleep.
I think a healthy dose of caution is warranted but I think a lot of this area is not quite what it seems I initially ( which I think is part of the point of the article).
Covers most of this. And with education campaigns and shifts in habits, overall mortality not just ‘SIDS’ rates have dropped a lot.
As to risk/reward, long term implications of things, etc. - I don’t know, and I don’t know anyone who reasonably can claim to know, but I also haven’t seen any reason to be concerned overall.
Plenty of bigger, more concerning issues - like lack of healthy socialization among kids, etc. in many environments, reduction in exercise, anxiety issues, social media, etc.
I will not trust medicine on this. It's just too vague and enough babies have been killed because "sleeping face down is better".
If one of the strongest parental instinct is sleeping with your baby, I'll trust mother nature this time.
Sorry, I'm particularly bitter about this. We have been pushed away from Co-sleeping due to poor education and when we did, we got from 2 hours of sleep per week to 8 hours per day, and a lot more cuddles.
Co-sleeping, generally, is much more dangerous than sleeping on their own in a proper crib. If it works for you, great. Some people take extraordinary steps to ensure it's safe, like removing pillows or fluffy comforters. It should not be generally recommended though.
Any parent knows that nothing is entirely binary.
Research doesn't account for what happens when baby is in the crib and it doesn't sleep.
So sure, you might have avoided SIDS, but the baby might die because the parent fell asleep while standing with the baby in their arms.
P. S. Again sorry for my tone, I'm super angry for how the entire medicine treats Co-sleeping like a horrific thing
So the research from my perspective is highly insufficient to prove anything.
And yes, you can sleep while standing in the subway, by the way.
The only point I was making is that it is generally agreed upon that a crib is safe for babies to sleep in. They can't fall out, get smothered, etc.
Medicine treats co-sleeping horrifically because, by any measure, it's less safe. Few medical professionals will recommend, generally, anything associated with such risk.
If you choose to co-sleep, I believe you should simply accept the risks. We can't pretend there are none. We can't reasonably ask the medical community to stop being harsh.
Perhaps co-sleeping hasn't had it's "fed is best" moment that we've seen with bottle v breast, but I'm not sure it ever will. It's simply more risky.
Then again, the risk factors of Co-sleeping are known and can be eliminated: put the bed on the floor, remove extra pillows, use light covers or no blankets, set the room temperature to something you can sleep well while naked, no drugs/alcohol.
There is also a whole thing about the skin-to-skin sleep providing to the baby regulation for breathing and circulation (no idea about the scientific base of it, but it was told by doctors, so I assume there is some), which seems to help for other issues too, as well as being a known way to prevent SIDS.
I apologized in a separate comment.
Yes, we did a risk assessment (we were literally terrified of having the baby sleep with us), I read ~5 books about the topic before the baby was born and talked to various professionals. It was a weighted risk: me and my wife don't roll while asleep (I sleep tummy down and she sleeps tummy up), and I wake up when I have to roll.
We also adopted various strategies to check on any babies movement: for example, I had an arm in physical contact with baby's body. Later on the baby just slept on mom's breasts, in which case she had full control (any movement would wake her up) at that point.
This is not my field of expertise, so of course my knowledge is limited.
I won't give recommendations from the medical perspective, but I will strongly suggest to reconsider the stance toward co-sleeping.
Parents are sleep deprived, under incredible stress, and trying to avoid judgement from any number of other parties. Asking for survey responses ain't going to help, and even if they are trying to be fully transparent, they won't be able remember half of what is going on anyway.
This is a theme across all kinds of expertise. In my opinion a good expert will understand that the world isn't black and white. They'll understand that there are many, many more variables that go into a decision than their particular line of expertise. They'll understand their job is to clearly convey the risks and benefits that fall into their scope and more important they'll clearly state that they alone cannot make a decision for you.
Bad medical professionals think their expertise is all that should go into a decision. Good medical professionals will understand that there are countless other factors that go into a person's decision that fall well outside of the scope of their expertise.
Based on what I've observed over the last 3 years, there are plenty of "experts" out there who seem to think that only their line of expertise should go into any decision.
Knowing all the shades of grey, what do you tell folks in the 15 seconds of attention (at most) that you’ll be able to get that may produce a better outcome.
It definitely doesn’t include much grey.