Where do babies sleep? Challenging the narrative on baby and toddler sleep

Many years ago, my husband and I visited a couple I knew from college that had just become parents. At the time, their baby boy was 10 months old, crawled all over the place and got into drawers and closets creating a mess in the cutest way possible.

Our friends shared their perspective on life with a baby.

The love they have for him.

The fun they have exploring the world with him (they have since had 2 more children).

The exhausting 24/7-job it can be.

And the success they have had with training him to sleep on his own.

This success had a cost, though.

The mom told us all about how they followed the conventional sleep training protocol where a baby is put down in a crib in their nursery when they are ready to sleep and parents are required to leave them there by themselves and come in in response to their cries in specific, pre-described intervals only.

The mom had tears in her eyes as she described how it broke her heart to hear her son cry for her. But there was nothing she could do but listen to the cries through the closed door and the baby monitor.

Her heart was telling her to go pick up her baby and soothe him, to abandon the training.

But her mind reminded her of all the reasons she ‘should’ stick it out: babies have to learn to sleep by themselves; if they don’t learn it now, they might never learn it; if she gave in to his cries, she’d spoil him. That’s the advice she had received from her doctor, from well-meaning friends and read about in books.

Her heart and mind were battling it out, and her mind won.

She cried, she went to another room farther away from the nursery and put a pillow over her head.

And, on some level, she closed her heart. So as not to bear the pain.

I have heard many similar stories since.

There are many reasons why parents choose to have their baby sleep away from them:

They are told it is dangerous to sleep with their baby.

They are told children become spoiled if they indulge them in providing closeness, safety, and comfort.

They are told that co-sleeping hinders children from becoming independent.

They are told that the bed is a sacred place that should be reserved for the (marital) couple only.

This advice is doled out by doctors with so much confidence that many people don’t even think to question it. In the US, for example, parents often receive brochures from their pediatrician explaining the importance of training their baby to sleep independently.

Despite the fact that pediatricians have no formal training on anything parenting-related. They also have no training in safe infant sleep.

They merely state their opinion (i.e., what they have learned from others in their profession).

The American Academy of Pediatrics, among many other professional bodies from other Western countries,warn against co-sleeping. You may have seen some of their ads shaming parents that allowing their baby to sleep in the same bed with them is akin to murder.

And family, friends, and neighbors freely offer their view on the matter too. I remember how a neighbor scoffed at us when she learned our baby daughter is sleeping in our bed with us. She warned us that we are spoiling her, and told us of a friend whose 13-year old was still sleeping in her parents’ bed.  

All these different groups of people warning against co-sleeping act as if it was some irrational, irresponsible, unnatural thing to do.

Even though co-sleeping is the most natural thing in the world. 

It is what we have always done (over 99% of human history).

It is what is still the norm in many, non-western cultures around the world.

It is what ALL other primates do.

It is what all mammals do.

We have evolved to co-sleep.

It’s even odd that we need a specific word - ‘co-sleep’ - for it - at almost all other times and places in human history, it was simply sleep!

Co-sleeping is nature’s way to ensure that babies stay safe throughout the night. For most of human history, babies sleeping on their own, would have become dinner for a tiger.

It is also nature’s way to help with many other functions that young babies cannot reliably do on their own such as regulating their breath and temperature.

In fact, human babies are far less developed than other mammals at the time they are born (because our heads are much bigger than that of other mammals, relative to their body size and would not fit through the pelvis, if they were to stay in utero longer).

Nature has come up with a neat trick to solve the problem of human babies being in a sense all pre-term: The mother’s body provides the habitat for the baby and co-regulates many different functions.

And because it is so important for babies to stay close to a caregiver throughout the night, babies have evolved to really really want to sleep close to a caregiver.

In other words, evolution has made sure they are MOTIVATED to seek close proximity to a caregiver.

This is why they feel distressed and cry when we leave them alone.

And if they eventually stop crying the motivation to be close to us hasn’t disappeared. Nor have they learned it is safe to be alone. It is written in their genes to feel safe only when with a caregiver. All they have learned is that it is pointless to cry and that they should rather be scared in silence…

But evolution doesn’t shape only babies.

It also shapes the psychology of parents.

And because the goal of evolution is ultimately that we survive and reproduce successfully (so as to get our genes as far into the future as possible), parents have also evolved to enjoy sleeping with their babies.

It helps us fall in love with them more deeply.

It helps us to bond and connect with our child.

It strengthens our maternal (parental) intuition.

It helps us get to know our unique child on a deeper, better level.

It helps us communicate better with our child and understand their needs and signals more easily.

It helps us to connect with our child from the heart, to feel compassion rather than annoyance when they struggle.

It sets us up for a loving, collaborative relationship.

When we convince parents they shouldn’t co-sleep, we take all of this away from them.

As a result, they end up closing their hearts, just as my friend did.

And when the noise of our culture drumming against co-sleeping is loud enough, parents may truly come to be annoyed and inconvenienced by the idea of having their babies sleep with them.

It’s not that parents who sleep train are bad parents.

The cultural narrative around where babies should sleep is just simply out of touch with a scientifically informed view of parent and child nature.

It’s also not that all parents ‘should’ co-sleep.

Parents should do what is in the best interest of themselves and their families.

The trouble is when parents - and I am convinced my friend may have been one of them - decide to sleep train and sleep separately based on incomplete, misleading information.

What parents deserve is the chance for a fuller, more balanced, scientifically informed, and frankly true education on the nature of baby sleep, the different sleep options available to them (and their costs and benefits), and practical help implementing the sleep set-up that works best for their family.

Part of the roadblock here is a misconception that sleep training is harmless.

However, this paints an incomplete picture.

There are, in fact, many studies suggesting the benefits of co-sleeping.

Lots of studies show that children who co-slept when they were younger are independent sooner, they were, for example, better able to dress themselves or make friends on their own at a younger age, engaged in more social activities, required less of their parents’ attention while playing, had fewer tantrums and were less fearful and anxious, and had higher self-esteem.

It should be obvious to us that these benefits of co-sleeping are - at the same time - the costs of NOT co-sleeping.

One study, for example, looked at the stress levels in mothers and babies both during and after babies were sleep trained. Not surprisingly, both mothers and babies had increased cortisol levels during the sleep training showing that they were stressed. But once the sleep training was “successful” – success meaning that they stopped crying – the babies continued to have elevated cortisol levels. This means they were just as stressed as they were when they cried, they just stopped alerting their caregiver. They had not learned that they can self-soothe or that they are in fact safe, they had learned that no one will come to safe them in their distress! We don’t know what the long-term consequences of this are, but I think it is safe to say that they are unlikely to be the kinds of things we hope for our children.

In general, sleep training appears to make children feel less safe, less safe in their bodies, in their relationships with their caregivers and other people, and in the world at large.

Again, parents need to have access to this more complete picture when deciding where their baby will sleep.

So, I think it is time to stop pressuring parents to have their babies sleep by themselves.

To let parents make that decision by themselves.

To give them correct information.

To change the narrative to reflect the truth: Co-sleeping is normal and natural.

To silence the noise of our culture getting into their heads and convincing them co-sleeping is inconvenient, annoying, and wrong.

To allow them to listen to their own inner voice and do what is right for their family.

To tell them how co-sleeping can be done safely (as beds in the West are often not set up for co-sleeping, there may be some adjustments that need to be made).

To support them in whatever decision they want to make.

To provide ways to help their baby feel safe and bond if they choose not to co-sleep.