NotSheep

This is a week old, but I’m just getting a chance to write about it now:

Children “should sleep with parents until they’re five” - Sunday Times - Times Online

ONE of Britain’s leading experts on children’s mental health has advised parents to reject years of convention and allow children to sleep in bed with them 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.

“These studies should be widely disseminated to parents,” said Sunderland. “I am sympathetic to parenting gurus - why should they know the science? Ninety per cent of it is so new they bloody well need to know it now. There is absolutely no study saying it is good to let your child cry.”

I love that last line, but what I wanted to say about this - apart from nya nya nya told ya so - is that I didn’t need “800 scientific studies” or a “leading expert” to tell me that physical contact between mums and babies was good for them. I already knew. Maybe I’ve known it my whole life, but certainly I knew it when I became a mother. I just had to learn to listen to what I knew.

When Barney was a baby, I wondered why he wasn’t sleeping through the night when all the other babies his age seemed to be - at least, that’s how it seemed. So I went off to the library in search of help. The only book about babies and sleep that I had ever heard of was Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems (Ferber), so I looked that up in the card catalogue (see how old I am? ;-)) and went to find it on the shelf. There were a couple of other babies’n’sleep books on the shelf too, and I borrowed all that was available.

I read Ferber, and it made no sense. The whole argument that a baby will be confused and upset if he wakes in a situation different to that in which he fell asleep - that was nonsense, as far as I could see. Babies fall asleep and wake up in different places all the time - they fall asleep in the car (well, some of them do - Toby doesn’t!) and wake up at home, they fall asleep in one person’s arms and wake up in another, etc. I just didn’t buy Ferber’s reasoning, and much of what he wrote felt harsh. His advice to essentially ignore a child who’d cried until he threw up horrified me. But more than that - it just didn’t feel right to ignore my child’s cries. It made my head hurt, it made my gut feel scrunched up, it made my heart pound, it made me feel terrible.

Now I know why a baby’s cries make his parents feel so awful - they’re supposed to. The whole point of a baby’s cries is to get a parent’s attention and presence - the baby relies on those things for his life. Now I wonder how we can expect our older children and teenagers to talk to us, if we spent the first few months/years sending them the message that we weren’t going to listen anyway, even when they’re trying to express their most basic needs.

(Ferber later - a lot later - said that his methods were only ever intended for babies who had been diagnosed with genuine and severe sleep problems, not for babies who just didn’t sleep as easily as their parents might like them to. And he said he wished he’d never written that co-sleeping was “not a good idea”, because he no longer believed it.)

But I digress (heh, there’s a surprise). One of the other books I picked up at the library that day was Three In A Bed by Deborah Jackson. I read it after reading Ferber, and my reaction to it was very different. I said “yes, of course!”, I nodded, I thought “that makes sense”… and it changed what I thought about co-sleeping.

That night, instead of guiltily bringing Barney into my bed as a last resort, I picked him up as soon as he woke, cuddled him beside me, and nursed us both to sleep. I no longer had the goal of getting him back into his own bed as soon as possible - or even the goal of getting him to sleep longer, because there was no need for me to be more than semi-awake while he nursed so I could put him back to his cot.

And for the first time, he slept six hours straight - though it wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t, because that wasn’t the purpose of doing it.

When George came along, intense child that he was (and is), he absolutely could not sleep anywhere except my arms or my bed. If he’d been my first baby, I’d have been convinced that I was doing something wrong. Barney hadn’t been “a good sleeper” as a baby, but George took it to a whole different level. He was over a year old before he ever slept for more than two hours at a stretch. I’d have lost my mind if we hadn’t been co-sleeping.

By the time Freddy came along, the notion of putting him anywhere other than our bed never even entered our minds.

Now I know there are some babies/children who are easy to sleep beside and some who aren’t. I know some thrash and kick etc. I think that can be worked around - a three-sided cot by the bed, for example, can give everyone the space they need and prevent bruises and broken noses. I know that some parents feel very nervous about co-sleeping - but I think that’s a product of our culture rather than an instinctive fear. In cultures in which it is the norm for babies and mothers to sleep together, nobody seems to worry about the safety of it. And I know that some parents fear that their child will never leave their bed. To them I say this: Don’t worry. Your baby will choose to sleep in his own room before he starts trying to sneak his girlfriend into the house. I promise

The article I’ve quoted doesn’t address whether co-sleeping is good for parents, other than mentioning the maternal exhaustion that can be the product of having to get up frequently to see to the baby - though the book might talk about it, I don’t know. But when I look down at my sleeping or nursing baby, snuggled up beside me, I feel a surge of “this is right” - not just for him, but for me. This is where my body wants my baby. This is where it needs my baby.

I recently heard someone say that there is no such thing as “a baby”. There is always “a baby and someone”. A baby is always part of a relationship, dependent on another person, not quite an individual entity. That makes sense to me, and fits well with what we know about human babies being born so much more dependent on their mothers than the young of just about every other animal. Our babies are programmed to want to be close to us, and we are programmed to want to be close to them.

The point of all this (see, there’s a point ;-)) is that my instincts said “respond to your baby’s cries” and “sleep with your baby”, and I’ve never regretted following them. We seem to have gone through a few decades during which parents were expected to ignore both their instincts and their babies. I’m glad that articles like the one quoted above are starting to appear in the mainstream media, that “experts” are starting to give their stamp of approval to co-sleeping. I just wish it wasn’t needed.