I think it’s been pretty obvious in previous posts that A has not made it a priority to spend any great amount of time asleep either at naptime or at night. In fact, there have been times when I’ve wondered if even as a teenager he would be waking ever hour or two for something. I know that’s not going to happen, but sometimes it’s hard to see further ahead than the next day or week or month.

So, in a (successful) effort to get more sleep, we decided that we would start sleeping with A in our bed. There were definitely mixed reviews on our decision, although we weren’t really asking for others’ opinions. We heard things like “Oh, do you really want to start that?” “That will be a hard habit to break.” “Oh, you should get so much more sleep that way!” and a few other variations of those sentiments. After about six months, I ended up sleeping on the couch for several days while I suffered through some pretty annoying allergies. A slept in his bassinet in our room for those nights and seemed to do better than he had been in our bed, so we went with his cues and kept him in there.

Because we were a sleep sharing family, I have been reading other people’s thoughts on co-sleeping and sleep sharing with a different point of view lately. I have been noticing that there are usually a few people in any discussion or debate on this topic who offer the “I knew someone who slept with their children, and now they are four and seven and still can’t sleep well” point of view. Hoping that wouldn’t be me, I got stuck thinking about it over and over.

One day, I realized something. Many parents who sleep with their children, don’t set out to have that happen. I think a lot of parents visualize a child coming home from the hospital, sleeping in the bassinet for a couple weeks or months, and then sleeping in their room after that. That’s what I thought would happen. It did not. So, many parents who sleep with their children start out doing so because their children are not great sleepers. They sleep with them because it’s the only way anyone gets any sleep. They have a family bed for a while, then eventually, the child goes on to sleep in their own crib or bed. Will this child suddenly become a great sleeper? Probably not. Will they still struggle getting to sleep or staying to sleep? Maybe. Will they be a “bad” sleeper? Possibly. Will the fact that they are not a good sleeper or some may even say bad be because they shared a bed with their parents for a couple weeks or months? No, not in my opinion.