Co-Sleeping, Sleep Sharing, The Family Bed. All of these terms refer to one thing - Sleeping with your baby, within arms reach, instead of in a crib in another room. Co-Sleeping seems like a new phenomenon, however, most of the world co-sleeps. Westerners did it for years, until the advent of the idea, in the 19th Century, that a child needed to have his or her own room and a crib.
You can co-sleep with your infant, from the day he or she is born. Co-sleeping helps facilitate parent child bonding, and also makes night time parenting easier. Co-sleeping has been proven to help prevent SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). And, Nursing mothers also report being able to get much more sleep when they co-sleep with their babies, because they don't have to get up to nurse the baby, the baby is right there beside them.
When my first son was born, my husband and I weren't confident that we should co-sleep. We thought "One of us will roll over on him", and, he needs to get used to sleeping by himself". My son quickly taught us we were wrong! Night after night, I'd get up when he'd cry, nurse him till he fell back to sleep, and then attempt to put him back down in the crib before he woke up again. Then I'd attempt to get back to sleep myself, but, invariably, the little guy would be ready for another nursing session just as I'd gotten back to sleep. Then, I read about co-sleeping. I talked with my husband about it, and he was willing to do anything to help me get some much needed sleep, especially something that had so many proven benefits for our baby. It was amazing! Neither of us felt nervous for the baby, and, all I had to do when my little guy was hungry was roll over! We also noticed that he slept better being next to our two warm bodies, than in a crib all by himself. He had just come from a 9 month body sharing stint, so this doesn't really seem like rocket science, but, nevertheless, we needed to learn and experience it all for ourselves so we could make the decision that suited our family best. Needless to say, when our second bundle of joy came along, we didn't hesitate to co-sleep with him from the very beginning. Because we were still a bit nervous about him being soooo little, and us being soooo big, we purchased a "Snuggle Nest" so that there would be a small barrier between him, and my husband and me on either side. Honestly, I don't think that it was absolutely necessary. I know quite a few co-sleeping families that never bought anything. But, I also knew others that felt more comfortable using a "side car" type of crib, that attaches to the parent's bed, like the "Arm's Reach" or something like the Snuggle Nest for added safety and protection of that precious bundle!
One of the biggest concerns many people have with co-sleeping are related in some way, to the perceived dangers of overlying and suffocation of the infant by a sleeping parent. There is a fairly large body of work, completed by Dr. James McKenna, director of the University of Notre Dame's Mother Baby Sleep Laboratory studying mother child sleep patterns. He has seen no mothers even come close to overlying or suffocating her infant during his studies. He and his colleagues have also observed the phenomenon of mothers responding to their infants, even though both are still asleep. Many have estimated that this is the reason that co-sleeping has been shown to help prevent SIDS. When the baby begins to breathe irregularly, or exhibit any other signs of distress, the co-sleeping mother will respond in the needed way, until the baby is calm again, and then they both drift off into a deeper sleep. And its not just mothers. Fathers also report a heightened awareness to where the baby is in the bed, and that they have fallen off the bed before rolling toward their infant while sleeping. What Dr McKenna and other researchers have shown, is that as long as both parents are sober (not under the effects of alcohol, or drugs of any kind, including prescription medications0 co-sleeping is the best way for infants to sleep at night.
For more information on co-sleeping, you can visit http://www.mothering.com/articles/new_baby/sleep/sleep.html. You can also visit Dr McKenna's website at http://www.nd.edu/~jmckenn1/lab/index.html
