We compromised. We have the crib in our room, but then the real reason is we have had so many kids, our house got too small. We need a barracks to house them all.

Posted by: Genuine | Oct 28, 2005 1:31:00 PM

Okay, I am just not seeing anywhere in that link that the AAP says bed-sharing raises the SIDS risk. They recommend against it in this new statement (developed without input from their own breastfeeding division, whose members are not pleased with the result), but I know of no data to say that safety-conscious bed-sharing raises the risk of SIDS. And the link between crib manufacturers and the CSPC study leaves me skeptical about its validity.

You shouldn't share a bed with your infant if you're a smoker, if you're chemically impaired one night, if you're on a squashy waterbed, if you're napping on the couch, if your 2yo is squeezed in there too. And if you don't want to sleep with your child -- hey, no argument here. But as far as I know there is no research documenting SIDS rates among non-smoking, breastfeeding families making sensible co-sleeping choices. It's alarmist to say co-sleeping is always hazardous.

Posted by: Jamie | Oct 29, 2005 12:46:27 AM

You write "To me, co-sleeping would be a real handicap--always having to be in bed when my kid's in bed; always lying down with him so he can fall asleep; never being alone in bed at night with my spouse."

Fair enough. To me, not co-sleeping was a real handicap, because I was in and out of bed all night long otherwise, taking care of restless triplets. Every reputable book I read (Brazelton, the AAP Baby & Child Care Book, Spock, and of course Sears) pointed out that kids require "re-training" in sleep habits for the better part of at least two years, and then you hit nightmare time. I thought: hmmm, I can spend months of my life standing beside a crib, patting someone's butt, or I can just put them to bed together in a mattress on the floor and crawl into bed with them if someone wakes up. Decisions, decisions.

Sleep deprivation equals depression for me, so really, the choice for me has been and will always be: what gets me more sleep? Standing beside cribs in the wee hours whenever someone teethed, learned to stand, learned to walk, learned to talk, or hit some other disruptive milestone wasn't going to cut it.

As for your other points, twenty minutes snuggling with the kids while they drifted off together doesn't seem like a big deal now, except insofar as I miss those long-ago little bodies. Even at the time, it was often the best part of my day, a welcome chance to rest and recover (or, yes, to fall asleep for two or three hours). I never, ever slept all night with the babies, nor did they need me in bed to remain asleep. I was in bed alone with my spouse, it just wasn't the bed where the kids were.

If I'd waited to have sex until I was climbing between the sheets to get some shut-eye, in those first few years, I would never, ever have had sex. Getting into bed triggered an immediate, emergency response: become unconcious now. So yhe implication that bed and sex and marital intimacy are all necessarily intertwined mystifies me. We bought a king-sized bed years before the babies arrived precisely because my husband likes his space (and of course, that's why the babies' king-sized bed was in their nursery).

Ultimately, it's all about what works best for each of us.

Posted by: Jody | Oct 31, 2005 12:39:55 AM