A Common Sense Defense of Co-Sleeping

I keep running into this stereotype of the co-sleeping (that is, bed sharing) family. I'm sure you've heard it and maybe you even hold these assumptions yourself: Mom is codependent and clingy and smothering, asexual and child obsessed, not mention utterly exhausted to the point of insanity. Dad is put out and excluded, resentful and sexually frustrated. Child is spoiled and rules the roost. Everyone here is miserable and subject to the mushy gushy delusions of the AP-crazed mama.

Except for the people who actually do have baby in bed, this seems to be the prevailing view of co-sleepers (permit me to use that term for bed-sharing please, though I know it also applies to people whose baby is merely in the same room). I'm sure there are some living stereotypes out there, but a lot of us are pretty normal. So I would like to present a defense of co-sleeping that is not an Attachment Parenting manifesto but simple common sense and practicality:

1. I am still breastfeeding, which only 14% of mothers are still doing exclusively at 6 months. So we're not typical in a broader sense but maybe we're typical for breastfeeding pairs at this stage. When Miles wakes up hungry in the night, I can roll over and give him the boob as soon as he says, "Ehhh." He barely wakes up, I barely wake up, Mr. Ibis doesn't wake up at all, we nurse, we go back to sleep. Compare that ease and convenience with the idea of putting him in his crib. He would start crying, I hear it on the monitor, he continues crying as I walk all the way downstairs and across the house to his room, during which time he becomes fully awake, I become fully awake, Mr. Ibis surely awakens, we nurse, and then everyone takes a long time to fall back asleep again. The amount of sleep lost would be much greater if this happened more than once per night.

2. I am not sleep deprived. We probably have, on average, one "bad night" a week. At worst two. This is still the most sleep I've gotten at any other time in my life aside from when I was pregnant and regularly slept 9-10 hours a night and sometimes napped too. I get more sleep than I did when I was in my 20s and went out drinking & socializing on weeknights, and more than I did in high school when I stayed up past 1 am watching Conan on school nights. True, I sleep in 2-4 hour increments. But when morning rolls around I am usually well rested.

3. Guess whose idea it was to have baby sleep in our room? Mr. Ibis's. Guess how long he said he expected to keep baby in our room at night? About a year. So much for the domineering crazy mother imposing her child-mania on the family.

4. We still have both sex and intimacy in our marriage. Guess what I don't find romantic? Laying down in the bed together at bedtime and saying "Hello, it's sex time now, let's do it." Guess what is more romantic? Walking by my husband in the middle of the day and having him grab me and pull me onto his lap for a kiss and then taking advantage of Miles's next nap to get some sexitime in. I don't buy for one minute that keeping the marital bed child-free is essential to a good married sex life. Spontaneity is.

5. It's working for us and we're happy. We have our sleep challenges, but I'm pretty sure all parents do in the first year, in some form, at some point. Right now I'm working on getting Miles to nap on a stationary, flat surface (bed, crib, etc) and I'm trying to transition him to his co-sleeper to see if not being right next to me at night will allow him to sleep more hours at a time. It's always an ongoing process but if the goal is to have a well rested baby, mom, and dad, we're doing well.

I know that co-sleeping isn't for everyone - as I've said, this isn't a manifesto. But too often I see the "whatever works for you is fine" attitude followed by "except for those crazy people with the family bed" and I feel the need to explain, it's just another normal if that's what works for you.