Co-sleeping - My Experience
An article in Huffington Post that I accidentally stumbled upon drove me into writing this post.
This article showcased a shocking, controversial health ad by the State of Milwaukee in the US that warns parents on the dangers on co-sleeping. In the advert, the baby is showing sleeping next to a big knife and it says,"Your Baby Sleeping with You Can Just be as Dangerous." I could not believe my eyes and read and re-read the article and the ad to make sure that I had understood them correctly.
Both my children have slept with us on the family bed so I was curious to know - can it really be that bad? I researched some more and realised it was all about taking a few simple common-sense precautions. Click here to read my article on Co-sleeping pros and cons published on the Rise& Shine website.
My Personal Experience with Co-sleeping
The article and the advertisement also brought back memories of when I had a brush with this Western concept or rather stigma that they attach to co-sleeping. I gave birth to my first child in London, UK and I was warned in the hospital not to make my baby sleep with me.
But, in the wee hours of the morning post the delivery night, when for the umpteenth time the nurses gave me my son to nurse and calm down, I was just too exhausted to put him back in the crib again. I also did not want to press the help button and call the nurse (with the ''there you go again'' look) anymore. So I just lay my baby next to me and for the first time in so many hours, my son calmed down and slept and so did I. I didn't care what this was called but to me it was instinctive and it seemed logical to have the baby right next to me where I could reach him, soothe him if he cried, nurse him if he felt hungry and knowing that he was right next to me allowed me to close my eyes and relax for a while.
Of course even in sleep, my maternal instincts were at work....my arm was holding him firmly and there was no way I would have let him roll off the bed or would have climbed over him (which the anti co-sleeping proponents fear). Predictably, the morning nurse doing the rounds was shocked at seeing this and chided me like I was a five-year old caught being very naughty. But I couldn't care less- I needed this, my baby needed this - I had spent the whole night either listening to him bawling helplessly or pressing the call button for the nurses to attend to him or pass him to me while the other mothers glared at me.( I was sharing a room with 5 other women and their newborns because NHS hospitals are badly over-stuffed and understaffed and they had no single bedded room vacant.)
This article showcased a shocking, controversial health ad by the State of Milwaukee in the US that warns parents on the dangers on co-sleeping. In the advert, the baby is showing sleeping next to a big knife and it says,"Your Baby Sleeping with You Can Just be as Dangerous." I could not believe my eyes and read and re-read the article and the ad to make sure that I had understood them correctly.
Both my children have slept with us on the family bed so I was curious to know - can it really be that bad? I researched some more and realised it was all about taking a few simple common-sense precautions. Click here to read my article on Co-sleeping pros and cons published on the Rise& Shine website.
The article and the advertisement also brought back memories of when I had a brush with this Western concept or rather stigma that they attach to co-sleeping. I gave birth to my first child in London, UK and I was warned in the hospital not to make my baby sleep with me.
But, in the wee hours of the morning post the delivery night, when for the umpteenth time the nurses gave me my son to nurse and calm down, I was just too exhausted to put him back in the crib again. I also did not want to press the help button and call the nurse (with the ''there you go again'' look) anymore. So I just lay my baby next to me and for the first time in so many hours, my son calmed down and slept and so did I. I didn't care what this was called but to me it was instinctive and it seemed logical to have the baby right next to me where I could reach him, soothe him if he cried, nurse him if he felt hungry and knowing that he was right next to me allowed me to close my eyes and relax for a while.
Of course even in sleep, my maternal instincts were at work....my arm was holding him firmly and there was no way I would have let him roll off the bed or would have climbed over him (which the anti co-sleeping proponents fear). Predictably, the morning nurse doing the rounds was shocked at seeing this and chided me like I was a five-year old caught being very naughty. But I couldn't care less- I needed this, my baby needed this - I had spent the whole night either listening to him bawling helplessly or pressing the call button for the nurses to attend to him or pass him to me while the other mothers glared at me.( I was sharing a room with 5 other women and their newborns because NHS hospitals are badly over-stuffed and understaffed and they had no single bedded room vacant.)
Back at home, we had a Moses basket generously gifted to us by our landlady and we used it occasionally but most of the time my son slept with my husband and me. I still remember when the NHS nurse came to check where and how the baby slept two days after my discharge, we quickly shifted him from our bed to the basket and lied to her that he sleeps in the basket all the time!! We were petrified- as we had heard of cases where they deem the baby is at risk and they issue a warning to the parents or even take away the baby. What a shame, we thought!...nevertheless we could not bear the thought of our little one being taken away from us for something which was so personal and so natural in India and so we were forced to lie unabashedly about it.
What angers me most about this whole hullabaloo over the supposed dangers of co-sleeping is how little faith the medical system in the Western world has in parents and their own sense of love, protectiveness, responsibility and parental instincts. Whatever happened to the concept that "parents know best?" I was livid because they assumed I was at par with the lot of teenage mothers (UK has a huge population of young, teenage mothers) who may be too immature to take care of their babies or worse still, they assumed that my husband & me would smoke in bed with a newborn on it (didn't they also have it on record that we were both non-smokers) or we would be so inebriated that we would roll on the newborn in sleep or suffocate him with our heavy comforter.
Now of course with all the hype on Attachment Parenting, caregivers are rising to the fact that co-sleeping with certain common-sense precautions may not be so bad - in fact it may even be important to allow the physical proximity, the bonding between the mother and child, it may be helpful in establishing breastfeeding and may even prevent SIDs by attuning the babies' sleep and waking up patterns to the mothers' pattern in the initial months post-birth.
Both my children have shared our bed when they were young - my elder one slept with us till he turned 3 after which we slowly trained him to sleep on his own bed in his own room - he is 6 now but often wakes up in the middle of the night, walks to our room - and curls up anywhere he finds a little space. My younger one, who is 16 months old sleeps with us and will do so for another year after which he will share his elder bro's room. I did try to make him sleep in a separate cot at the bottom of our bed for a while, but finding it really cumbersome to feed him at night, shifted him back to the bed.
Not to say, that there aren't any days when we do wish for a little more stretching space on the bed, a more relaxed sleeping experience and some privacy but at the end of the day we won't have it any different than what it is now- an arrangement that accords peace of mind to us as parents and a halo of loving security to our children!
This was my story, my view-point. Do share your views on the subject with me...your own experience on where you made your children sleep and why....
What angers me most about this whole hullabaloo over the supposed dangers of co-sleeping is how little faith the medical system in the Western world has in parents and their own sense of love, protectiveness, responsibility and parental instincts. Whatever happened to the concept that "parents know best?" I was livid because they assumed I was at par with the lot of teenage mothers (UK has a huge population of young, teenage mothers) who may be too immature to take care of their babies or worse still, they assumed that my husband & me would smoke in bed with a newborn on it (didn't they also have it on record that we were both non-smokers) or we would be so inebriated that we would roll on the newborn in sleep or suffocate him with our heavy comforter.
Now of course with all the hype on Attachment Parenting, caregivers are rising to the fact that co-sleeping with certain common-sense precautions may not be so bad - in fact it may even be important to allow the physical proximity, the bonding between the mother and child, it may be helpful in establishing breastfeeding and may even prevent SIDs by attuning the babies' sleep and waking up patterns to the mothers' pattern in the initial months post-birth.
Both my children have shared our bed when they were young - my elder one slept with us till he turned 3 after which we slowly trained him to sleep on his own bed in his own room - he is 6 now but often wakes up in the middle of the night, walks to our room - and curls up anywhere he finds a little space. My younger one, who is 16 months old sleeps with us and will do so for another year after which he will share his elder bro's room. I did try to make him sleep in a separate cot at the bottom of our bed for a while, but finding it really cumbersome to feed him at night, shifted him back to the bed.
Not to say, that there aren't any days when we do wish for a little more stretching space on the bed, a more relaxed sleeping experience and some privacy but at the end of the day we won't have it any different than what it is now- an arrangement that accords peace of mind to us as parents and a halo of loving security to our children!
This was my story, my view-point. Do share your views on the subject with me...your own experience on where you made your children sleep and why....
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| This is a recent pic of both my sons sleeping cosily on our bed |
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