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.