How our babies should be sleeping (and co-sleeping in particular) has become a huge hot topic. The method that seems most common in the last 20-30 years is sleep training your baby. This means training your baby to sleep alone all night. We, as parents, were made to feel that we were spoiling our babies by tending to their needs. The ease of parenting somehow became more important than what was best for our babies. So, yes, sleep training your baby may make your life easier but do you really want to do this at the expense of your child? Studies have shown that babies don’t learn to self soothe. They essentially just learn that you won’t be there for them. In the study, after a few nights of babies sleeping alone, they did indeed fall asleep without assistance but their cortisol levels (stress hormone) still remained very high. This shows that they didn’t suddenly become comfortable being alone, they simply gave up thinking anyone would be there for them.
Yes, there are downsides and risks to co-sleeping with your baby as well and it’s not for everyone. You should do your own research on this and find out what works best for you and your family. There is a “safe” way to co-sleep (research Safe Sleep 7). Did you know that research has shown that SIDS is lowest in cultures where co-sleeping is most common? There is also research showing that co-sleeping with your little ones creates more confident, independent, and self-reliant children.
With our little Stinky Minks, we do a bit of both. We do NOT let him just cry it out on his own until he wears himself out and falls asleep. He does however have his own sleep space in his room. As a newborn, he would start out in a bedside bassinet at the start of the night and if needed, during the night I would move him to our bed to nurse or to just let him be close to me. When he was about 7 months old, we set up his crib in his own room. We would rock him to sleep then lay him in his crib. He would usually sleep in there for at least a couple hours which was nice because it gave me and Daddy Minks time to ourselves to do whatever we wanted in the evenings. In the middle of the night, I would get up with him to feed him and then usually just put him in bed with us for the rest of the night. This worked out pretty well except in the mornings when Daddy Minks got up and ready for work it would often wake up Stinky.
I came up with a plan to compromise. Stinky would still get his own sleep space and I could sleep with him when needed without being disturbed by Daddy. I started looking into floor beds for co-sleeping. Floor beds have become fairly popular as co-sleeping is starting to become more common again. It made sense. Have a firm mattress on the floor so if baby falls off, they’re already on the floor. Plus, there is room for me to lay with him if we get a bigger mattress. We still preferred to have some sort of barrier around the mattress so he couldn’t just wake up and start roaming around the room while we were sleeping. Here is our setup.
- Play Mat
- Wooden Bed Slats
- Railing
- Mattress
It’s a medium firm full size mattress (6 inches thick so it’s not too tall) sitting on wooden bed slats with a railing tightly surrounding it. The railing has a gate that opens which is handy if you want your child to be able to get in and out of bed on their own or it can be latched shut to keep them in until you are ready for them to get out. We put this all on a play mat to keep it from sliding around on the slick floor. The reason for the bed slats under the mattress is to prevent molding of the mattress. A mattress sitting directly on the floor can cause the bottom of the mattress to mold so it needs to be just slightly elevated to allow air flow under the mattress. This particular railing fits perfectly around a full size mattress so that there are no gaps for Stinky Minks to get trapped in. This setup has worked wonderfully for us. We still put him to bed like we always have (although sometimes I put him to bed by laying in his bed with him until he falls asleep) and he has a safe place to sleep while we enjoy the rest of our evening. During the week when Daddy Minks is working, I will get in bed with Stinky when he wakes up in the middle of the night. That way he doesn’t get woken by Daddy in the mornings. On the weekends, I usually bring him to our bed with us at some point in the middle of the night. It’s really incredible how much better he sleeps and how much more at ease he is when he’s next to one or both of us. Plus this bed will work for him as he grows. Once we don’t need the railing anymore, we can easily remove it and he can just use the mattress without the railing. When he’s older and doesn’t want to be on the floor anymore, we can buy a full size bed frame and put that mattress on a frame.
I’m not here to tell you the right way to have your baby sleep. I can say though that the biologically normal way for infants to sleep is with their mom. Every other mammal on Earth sleeps with their young. Why are we told that it’s a bad thing and that our babies need to learn not to be dependent on us? Human infants are physically more dependent on their parents than any other creature yet we’re being told to let them learn to be ok without us. They are only little for a short while. I promise when they are teenagers they are not going to want to sleep with you. I highly encourage you to check out this article on co-sleeping by Diana Divecha, Ph.D. She is a developmental psychologist, an assistant clinical professor at the Yale Child Study Center and Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and on the advisory board of the Greater Good Science Center. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_cosleeping_can_help_you_and_your_baby