Co-Sleeping and Dragon Slaying.

My wife and I have a pretty good idea of who we want to be. We also have a pretty good idea of how we want to parent. But sometimes the who-we-want-to-be butts heads with the how-we-want-to-parent, with the victor being anyone’s guess. This has been the situation of late when it comes to getting our nine-month-old to sleep. Non-parents beware: there is virtually no aspect of parenting that rouses the vitriol in parents more than their beliefs in baby sleep.

My wife and I spent a summer working in Tanzania, and among the many images grafted to my memory is that of the myriads of mothers using their colorful khangas to strap their babies tightly to their bodies. And I don’t mean Baby-Bjorn-carrier tightly, I mean so tightly that baby could only exhale while mama was inhaling.   Everywhere we looked there were women with infants strapped, tied, and otherwise secured to their hips, their backs, their chests. In fact, when the infant was strapped to the mother’s front, the form of the child silhouetted in the khanga looked as if it were still in the womb.  This approach is practical, and looked hell of comfortable for the infant, a smooth transition from the aqueous womb environment to the minimal-gravity suspension on his mother’s chest.

Indeed, throughout human history, children have often been regarded as mere extensions of their mothers up until they were two years old or so. It is only recently in human development that we began to separate ourselves from our kids, putting them in different rooms, weening them from the breast before their first birthday, and teaching them to be “independent.” This cultural change, from one of communal living to one of shared independence,  has come with parents being increasingly busy, with  households requiring dual incomes to function, and of course, with the wealth that affords us the second and third room to house the rocking chair and baby crib.

My wife and I decided to opt for the communal living, extension-of-her-mama approach to parenting, and thus have a guest room/gym in place of a nursery, use our extra bedroom for family or tenants, and, obviously, opted for the communal bed.  Now, I am a BIG believer in co-sleeping, and much research has shown the positive benefits for children of sleeping in the same room or in the same bed as their parents.  These children have a reduced risk of dying from SIDS, can have significantly higher self esteem, are less uncomfortable with physical contact, and feel more satisfied with life (1,2).  Plus, if you think about it, sleeping alone kinda sucks. I much prefer to sleep with my wife than to spread out on an empty bed, and I don’t depend on her for sustenance and protection in the way our daughter depends on us. Thus, for our daughter to want to sleep with her parents only makes sense: it’s warm, it’s crowded in much the same way the womb environment was not 9 months ago, if she wants to nurse, she can turn her head and nurse, and if she wakes up because of bad dreams, she has  two larger-than-life giants by her side to protect her from the scary dragons.

That’s the idea anyway. What it means in practice, well, there are a bit of not-so-colorful details that go along with it. You remember when you first started sleeping with your significant other how hard it was to get back to sleep? It’s kinda like that with a baby, except that you were never really scared of dislocating your spouse’s shoulder if you rolled over too fast. One of you moves, and everyone wakes up. One of you rolls, and everyone wakes up. One of you (see: infant) cries, and everyone wakes up.  One of you (see: infant) pees in bed, and everyone wakes up. It makes for many nights of broken sleep.

The alternative: “sleep training.” (I was unfamiliar with the term, as my Hispanic, communal-living family have one sleep rule: once you get your GED, you can no longer sleep with your parents). Sleep training is basically teaching your child to self-soothe by letting her cry herself back to sleep (3). It is the parents’ responsibility to create an environment in which baby feels safe and secure and is thus able to play herself back to dreamland without needing the breast or the rocking chair to do so.  So mama dims the lights, daddy puts on soft music, baby puts his thumb in his mouth, and drifts away to play with the sheep that he is too young to count. Baby wakes up at night, sees dimmed lights, hears soft music, puts thumb back in mouth, and mom and dad get a few solid hours of sleep.   This seems to work VERY well for some of my friends, and I hear rumors of 6-9 hours of sleep at a time. I haven’t had this amount of sleep straight in at least 9 months, and good god would it be wonderful. BUT the initial training part has absolutely no appeal to me. Both parent and child are instinctively grated by the lung-busting cries of a fearful kid. And its completely illogical to expect a child to want to go to bed alone, when he has been held tightly in the womb for 9 months.

So, let me summarize. I am drawn, completely, 100%, to co-sleeping, for health reasons, for cultural reasons, and for reasons of personal significance. I am against sleep training (for me) (4,5), because I don’t dig letting my daughter cry and think it only logical that she rely on her parents for comfort and want them nearby.  But, here’s the thing, my life, our life, is not always conducive to the whole communal-sleeping thing. My wife is getting a graduate degree, and I am working full time, and we both like to pretend we are serious athletes. So we tend to work a lot.  And we like to train a lot. Thus, we tend to need a lot of time to think, to work, and enough sleep to put in long bike rides on the weekend. Basically, we need to be on our game. And not being able to sleep through a night? Yeah, that can really hinder said game. But we also travel alot, and to have a daughter that relies on the routine of mommy and daddy, and is indifferent to where she sleeps, the brightness of the lights, or the volume of the music, as long as its in the arms of her dragon-slaying parents, makes for a very travel-friendly baby. We can be anywhere, and when its bed time, we can put her to sleep quickly and pretty painlessly. But when we are not “anywhere,” when we are at home, what I wouldn’t give to be able to put on some music, dim the lights, and let her fall asleep to the cloud shapes daddy sponge-painted in her aviation-themed nursery.

We want to live communally, to co-sleep and have our daughter feel the same safety and security that she felt in the womb when snuggled in between mommy and daddy.  The thing about being the “safety and security” for our daughter is that in our absence, she doesn’t feel particularly safe or secure. Something will probably need to change,  and either we will need to accept the fact that,  our “safety and security” provisional abilities are on call between the hours of always and often, or we will need to clench our fists and grit our teeth as we teach our daughter that she can put herself back to sleep without her parents. I don’t know, I want to be a  writer and an athlete, but I kinda like being a dragon-slayer too.

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1-For an excellent and open summary of child sleep research, check out  McKenna, J. J. & McDade, T. (2006).  Why babies should never sleep alone: A review of the co-sleeping controversy in relation to SIDS,  bed-sharing and breast feeding.  Paediatric Respitory Reviews, 6, 134-152.

2-Admittedly, these conclusions are drawn from many different studies, with the sample different between studies. Thus, “children that co-sleep” could mean, males only, females only, or children from certain racial or ethnic backgrounds.   The definition of “co-sleeping” may vary from study to study as well; so, while one cannot definitely say that co-sleeping is universally healthier than sleeping separately, one can say that co-sleeping has many positive health benefits.

3-I welcome a good sleep training reference…. I admittedly have not done enough research on it to give it an adequate defense.

4-I cannot emphasize enough that I am making no judgment about what is better or worse here, only what is better or worse for my wife and me. Parenting practices, as long as they are healthy, require the parents to do what is collectively best for the family. Sometimes you must even sacrifice the ideal for good enough, if the ideal makes you miserable. A happy parent is a good parent, after all.

5-  I readily acknowledge that I do not know much about sleep training, and the fact that my wife  worked with Dr. McKenna (ooo the bias is out) and that we have spent much of our time working with khanga-clad mamas has definitely biased my opinion.

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