In the comment thread of The Family Bed, Christianne referred to a link to a New York Times article about ways to solve the problem of children wanting to sleep in their parents’ bed. I just read the three-page article and I am aghast.
1) Child sleep specialists and consultants, and sleep centers?
2) And these professionals suggest solutions like giving the child a bear as a substitute for mommy?
2) Giving a little girl a princess bed or a little boy an airplane bed to entice them to stay in their own beds?
Unbelievable!! Even if we follow the logical order of things… look at it this way: inside the womb, a child is tied to his mother through the umbilical cord. The tie is physical and emotional. After birth, doesn’t it follow that the separation from the mother should be gradual and in stages? Doesn’t it follow that the child will naturally seek the warm and safe comfort that he had known for nine months? Does it make sense to suddenly disrupt the child’s psyche by insisting he has to stay alone in his bed in a separate room? How long the gradual process of getting a child ready for the separation will differ from one child to another.
The funny thing is that most parents treat the situation as a problem because it DISRUPTS their own sleep. Well, shucks, children are distractions — that’s a fact. That doesn’t mean they’re bad or maladjusted. We can’t place our kids in one corner and expect them to stay there until it’s convenient for us to get them and spend time with them.
I see it this way. Children’s instinct to seek their parents’ bed is part of an emotional need — the physical presence of the parents is reassuring to them. Humans have an innate fear of the dark for some reason. You put a child in a room full of inanimate objects and not one of them will provide that reassurance if he wakes up in the middle of the night.
Children have tactile needs. A parent’s hug or cuddling is NOT a bad thing. I don’t know why a lot of Westerners have this aversion for showing emotions to their children. A macho thing, perhaps? They think that by kissing, hugging and cuddling their kids, the little ones will turn out to be sissies? Really, now!
Children will stay in their beds in their own rooms when they are emotionally prepared for a certain amount of independence from their parents. They will not wake up, walk into their parents’ room and climb into bed with them in the middle of the night when they are ready for the physical separation. The solution really is to prepare them to become ready. Why rush them?
Seems to me that it is the parents who need to get re-oriented to set them straight about their children’s needs.
{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }
sexy mom 03.13.07 at 12:52 pm
yes, it is preposterous. but then, what separates the westerners from us asians is the culture. what for us is a natural tendency becomes for them a problem. say for example, midlife crisis. while we filipinos face it in stride, coping the best we can, what do they do? they go to shrinks and they load themselves with prozac, hormones and anti-depressants. i am not surprised why we filipinos are happier than them, despite the fact that economically, they are the leaders.
Brian 03.13.07 at 2:15 pm
I am a westerner and my wife is filipino. My daughter Alex has been sleeping in our bed since she was born, she has just turned 5. I really enjoy having her in the bed to cuddle everynight and it easily makes up for a disrupted nights sleep.
I know I will miss it whe she eventually decides she no longer wants to climb into bed with us at night. Until that day comes I will continue to welcome into our bed.
fengbrum 03.13.07 at 2:54 pm
agree with you connie. our love affair with our kids starts at their very conception and it’s somewhat a mortal sin to me forcing my kid to sleep by all by himself, in a room separated from ours.
noemi 03.13.07 at 3:08 pm
Makes me wonder why they had kids in the first place. I can see the wonderful effects of co sleeping with my kids. They are so adjusted with their dorm life and their semi independence .
sage_mum 03.13.07 at 9:35 pm
There is actually a term for parents who use the family bed (among other things): Attachment Parenting. I find that it’s usually followed by thoughtful, educated parents who trust in their parental instincts rather than allowing mainstream culture to dictate what they should do. We are the only species that would allow our children to sleep away from us. I don’t think this is what nature intended.
Here in the West, it’s a cultural expectation that kids should sleep in their own rooms from infancy. The reasoning is that this will make them more independent and adjusted adults. How ridiculous! The people who do “allow” their children to sleep on their bed even temporarily talk about it in hush-hush tones with a guilty look on their face. Children don’t need fancy beds with expensive bedsheets. What they need above all is their parents’ constant love and reassurance. On the contrary, children who receive this kind of parental attention are the ones who will grow up to be the most independent and secure adults. When the child is ready to be independent, they are the ones who will be begging for their own bedroom. Childhood is so fleeting that we should cherish every single moment with them. My best memories with my kids are at night, when they whisper “I love you” as they fall asleep in my arms and when we wake up, we give each other kisses.
I often admired the bond you have with your two daughters. Now I have a better idea why. What you reap with your children when they are young, you will sow once they are older.
kat 03.13.07 at 11:25 pm
the hispanic culture is also big on co-sleeping and sleeping in the family bed. as are black families. i think it’s a matter of social standards and upbringing. here, many parents are hung up on statistics, the latest trend in parenting, and what everyone else is doing. they spend tons of money to try to get their kids into the best pre-school, overschedule kids for a gazillion classes, and so on and so forth.
what they don’t realize is that they should let kids be kids and let them grow without restriction. and that includes letting them sleep in their bed if they want to.
JMom 03.14.07 at 12:07 am
The rationale is, that by teaching them to be independent when they are young, you are raising them to be independent adults. Perhaps this is also why so many families with adult children are disfunctional….the children were raised to dis-connect and so they do.
My children slept with us, and still do on occasion, and I think they are more independent and well adjusted than most kids.
d0d0ng 03.14.07 at 12:27 am
exactly….WHY RUSH?
one of the best moments in life
when kids grow up, you lost your chance forever
wondering why westerners keep on saying, “I WISH I SPENT TIME WITH MY KIDS”… too busy even to cuddle
too bad…… these kids will decide the parents nursing homes and funeral arrangement
julie 03.14.07 at 12:40 am
My 11yo started sleeping in her room more than a year ago. My youngest who is 4 sleeps with her in the “girls’ bedroom”. Before that, they were sleeping on a mattress in our room, together with their 5yo brother. What prompted the little girl this independence? She wanted to be like big sis though lately she has been falling asleep on our bed first before we bring her to her bed. My 5yo son? He co-sleeps with my husband and I. Because of his asthma, it is necessary to have an adult stay with him because more often than not, if he has difficulty breathing, it happens during the wee hours of the morning. He said he likes to sleep in the other bedroom, but he will do so only when he is ready. A sick child stays on our bed. When it is cold we all cuddle on the family bed. (When it is brownout, we bring the mattress to the living room to sleep together.)
This kind of set-up make children feel secure and loved, knowing their parents are just there, even when they are all asleep.
KK 03.14.07 at 2:26 am
#1 Anything they can make money on- they will, so it really doesn’t surprise me to have sleep experts, heck I can sleep like a log- can I become a consultant too?
I don’t have anything against co-sleeping, if it works for you then that’s great. We didn’t co-sleep with our daughter in our bed. There are times like when she was sick and I would co-sleep with her in the extra bedroom but most of the time she slept in her crib for safety and health reasons. Safety because I was very concerned that I might roll on her and hurt her. Health because my husband gets migraines if he doesn’t get sleep, he can easily get distracted with light peering through the windows which has blinds and curtains. He would have been very conscious making sure not to roll on the baby too and would not get any sleep. My daughter grew out of her crib before 2 years old, it can be converted into a toddler bed but she wouldn’t take it(I think it was the bars that she didn’t like). So we bought her a simple bed from Ikea, and she slept happily there.
rolly 03.14.07 at 4:25 am
Experts? What do they know, eh?
Tin Tin 03.14.07 at 8:33 am
Looks as though they are trying to distance themselves from their own children, physically AND emotionally. How sad. Why have kids if you end up treating them like belongings to be put away when you tire of them? Children need their parents, not toys or their “own space”. That changes only when they realize that there’s a whole world to explore out there, beyond their moms and dads. Come to think of it, a number of Westerners put their aged parents into homes for the elderly — some sort of reciprocal behavior, perhaps?
categorically imperative 03.14.07 at 2:52 pm
The thought of having a nursery has always been alien to me. D-uh. Why walk to another room to pacify a wailing child when you can just have her/him right beside you in bed? I can’t believe a term had to be coined for something as natural as this.
analyse 03.14.07 at 6:43 pm
We co-sleep with our daughter only on weekends, and some cuddly nights during the week, and when she’s sick. It’s the best balance we found for the whole family.. and since i’m with a frenchguy, this practice is being criticized by his family and some of our friends/colleagues. So I just told him to shut up and tell anybody anymore. It’s not their business anyway…
Jon Limjap 03.14.07 at 10:54 pm
And then Westerners will wonder why their children learn to say “I hate you mommy” at such an early age.
Well, if my wife and I want to have the bedroom by ourselves, we just bring my daughter to my parents next door. They’ll happily oblige having her on their bed.
But she sleeps with us most of the time.
OT: I only recently found out (thanks to National Geographic) that early humans usually slept near bonfires not only to keep themselves warm: the fire usually scared predators away and allowed humans to sleep on the ground and be more restful than other animals who had to sleep up on trees. So humans evolved to sleep “with the lights on”.
Perhaps this is the reason for man’s innate fear of darkness, even during sleep?
d0d0ng 03.15.07 at 1:51 am
“The thought of having a nursery has always been alien to me”.
Hmmm…..
Parang karma.
If you can think of NURSERY for the kids. DISRUPTION OF PARENTS SLEEP.
Then you can think of NURSING HOMES for the aged. DISRUPTION OF GROWNUPS LIFE.
lady cess 03.15.07 at 7:58 am
co-sleeping is one of the musts in attachment parenting, a method hubby and i are currently practicing (i even have a book about it). and i guess even if i dont know this attachment parenting stuff, we would still want our children to sleep with us.
Sidney 03.16.07 at 7:54 am
And what about the privacy of the parents? I don’t see the purpose of having a fifteen year old boy (or) girl sleeping between mom and dad!
Tsk,tsk… we also love our children. It is a cultural thing which started not because the Filipinos love their children more than Westerners but because of lack of space in many pinoy family homes.
Connie 03.16.07 at 12:10 pm
Jon, re the bonfire. Now, that is a very interesting perspective, indeed! Makes sense.
You can view it from the converse, perspective too, Sidney. The cultural practice of separating infants from parents at birth developed because it is an effective way to scream the message, “Hey, look, we have space because we have a big house because we are rich!”
Westerners do love status symbols.
Fifteen-year-olds? We were talking about babies and toddlers.
ruth 03.19.07 at 10:36 am
i’m not sure if the reference to westerners is valid (just because the writer was one doesn’t mean its representative). my husband is a european and fully believe on co-sleeping. in fact there might just be as much pinoys, especially among the affluent, who let their kids sleep on their own rooms (or with their yayas) as in the west.
bw 03.26.07 at 12:18 am
I think there is no rule carved in stone re children sleeping with parents but at one point, a separation must happen. I say a young child of 3/4/5 who shows he/she can take care of herself and WANTS to sleep in her own bed must be allowed to. My 5 year old has her own bedroom but she wants to sleep with us. Sometimes she asks to sleep in her room which I think is perfecty fine. Where she gets this urge - I don’t know. Must be from her SK day care school and it’s not necessarily bad.
With regard to sleeping in the dark it is a matter of preference I think and darkness induces a person to sleep much quicker. A night light or a small lamp shade as light source ensures that when one wakes up in the middle of the night he doesn’t need to grope around for the light switch.
The least I would do is babysit my daughter forever to become a wimp and as Sidney says a 15 year old sleeping between me and my wife would be total a disaster, LOL
nancy 07.20.07 at 10:23 pm
I know of a couple who let their child sleep with them until
age 11! Now they are divorced and at 14 she still sometimes sleeps with mom. How well adjusted is that?n Do you think she will be emotionally ready for the “big world” at 18?