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Every morning I wake up beside my child.  And it’s a great feeling.  He’s never spent a night alone.  Ever since he was born he’s slept with myself and/or his father.  He just cuddles up and goes to sleep.  He’s never been left to cry.  It’s all been very flowing and relaxed introduction to sleeping for him and consequently he’s a very calm, relaxed, secure little three year old and we enjoy a happy, open hearted relationship.  I once heard of someone asking ‘is it true that in America people don’t sleep with their babies?’  Eighty percent of the population of planet earth do co-sleep.  And here’s an interesting new scientific study, based upon 800 case studies asserting that children should sleep with their parents until the age of five.

“Margot Sunderland, director of education at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London, says the practice, known as “co-sleeping”, makes children more likely to grow up as calm, healthy adults.

Sunderland, author of 20 books, outlines her advice in The Science of Parenting, to be published later this month.

She is so sure of the findings in the new book, based on 800 scientific studies, that she is calling for health visitors to be issued with fact sheets to educate parents about co-sleeping.”

I think that a lot of us intuitively know that it’s right for kids to co-sleep with their parents, but we feel too much pressure not too.  What I did, from day one, was ignore any advice that didn’t feel right in my gut.  It held me in good stead.  Also I was lucky enough to tap into a health centre with doctors who backed up this instinct – in fact they encouraged parents to not only co-sleep, but breast feed on demand and wear them in slings as much as possible as years of experience and research showed the strong health benefits of doing so.

“Sunderland also believes current practice is based on social attitudes that should be abandoned. “There is a taboo in this country about children sleeping with their parents,” she said.

“What I have done in this book is present the science. Studies from around the world show that co-sleeping until the age of five is an investment for the child. They can have separation anxiety up to the age of five and beyond, which can affect them in later life. This is calmed by co-sleeping.””

Co-sleeping is very anti-industrialization.  It’s a relaxed, intuitive process.  It doesn’t involve waking every four hours to feed a baby, rather parents are encouraged to ‘lazy parent’ – breast feed on demand.  I just roll over and breast feed and fall asleep.  Yes, in the early years he woke up slightly more, but over time he gradually slept right through the night, without any encouragement from me.  I don’t know how parents do it when they’ve got to get up. Here’s another article singing the virtues of co-sleeping on a Kiwi website.

“Professor Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Washington State University, who has written a foreword to the book, said Sunderland’s arguments were “a coherent story that is consistent with neuroscience. A wise society will take it to heart”.”

I’ve wondered for years why us Western parents want to sleep away from our babies, it’s actually been proven to increase the likelihood of cot death, so we’ll cross that reason off the list.  It’s time we stopped intellectually parenting and returned to doing what feels right in our hearts – because generally this is right for our kids.  Believe me: co-sleeping feels amazing for both the children and the parents.  If you’re starting out with a new-born find yourself some literature or advice about attachment parenting to support you to learn to co-sleep.  When I first started out, an old nurse in the hospital I ended up having him in surprised me by suggesting we sleep together and she showed me how to rest my arm so that it was impossible for me to roll over onto him (here are some more safety regulations for co-sleeping).  Once I got used to this, and the feeling of sleeping with a wee human, parenting just got better and better and better.

Image source: Natural Pregnancy Mentor.com

Today’s rating: 9/10

365 Days of Fun and Chillaxation (as I raise my gorgeous son and grow my good news website to a subscription base of 100,000 people).  The Low Down on this Blog.

Check out yesterday’s blog.

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Tags: co-sleeping, parenting