What Co-Sleeping With Kids Is Really Like

When lifestyle content creator Hunter Premo first posted video the massive bed she sleeps on every night with her husband, 2-year-old and 5-year-old, she didn't expect it to generate thousands of comments from other parents influencing her opinion. co-sleeping. From messages of support to comments like “I'm so glad I never did this,” it was clear that people thoughts.

The family's bedtime routine looks like this: They read books together, then tuck their five-month-old baby into the crib right next to the bed. Then around 8 o'clock they all fall asleep. And Premo is adamant that this is the right choice for her family.

“For me, I look at it as an opportunity to spend more time together when they're little and one day they won't want to sleep with us, so we just enjoy these moments while we can,” she tells POPSUGAR.

Sharing a very large bed with children wasn't necessarily something Premo had on her parent bingo card, but when her eldest was about 14 months old, he fell ill on holiday. Premo and her husband let him sleep in their bed the entire trip, and “everyone slept a lot better,” she says, so the habit stuck. When her middle son turned two, he wanted to sleep with them too, so “there were four of us in a huge bed.” Premo assumes that when her youngest child grows up, she will want to join, too. “What is often seen as a 'last resort' has ended up being one of my favorite parts of motherhood,” she says.

Social media is filled with a variety of ways parents are trying to manage sleep, whether it be diligently adhering to a bedtime routine. sleep training methods for example, the Ferber method or attachment style sleep practice. For many millennials who grew up with parents who had a “taboo” mentality about children sleeping in their bed, co-sleeping can feel especially “unusual”—raising questions about the actual mechanics of bedsharing, how couples make time for intimacy, and whether it's beneficial for children's development.

Technically, co-sleeping refers to any situation in which families sleep in the same room, and in co-sleeping, parents sleep in the same bed as their children. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises against bedsharing until your child is a year old or older. This is also reports About 3,500 babies die each year from sleep-related causes, including sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). When it comes to safe sleeping conditions for infants, the AAP recommends: “lying position; using a firm, non-sloping surface to sleep on; Sharing a room without sharing a bed; avoiding soft bedding and overheating.”

Experts featured in this article

Craig CanapariMD, Director of the Yale Pediatric Sleep Center. He is the author of “Train it's never too late to sleep“and podcast co-host”Dream Edit“

Director of the Yale Pediatric Sleep Center Craig CanapariM.D., always advises families to follow AAP guidelines when it comes to safe sleep. He says the research on co-sleeping after infancy is mixed, with little data on whether co-sleeping is a developmental disadvantage or whether it has specific benefits.

“This is a problem: different families make different choices,” Dr. Canapari says. But there are a few questions parents can ask if they're considering co-sleeping. “Everyone in the family deserves a good night's sleep. So, if there is a baby in a parent's bed, is he sleeping well? Do both parents sleep well? Is there enough space for everyone to feel comfortable? And is the child able to successfully separate without tears and anxiety?”

For the families we spoke to who chose to share a bed and sleep together, the answer is yes. Natalia Castellon, an actress who also runs her own boutique digital marketing agency, says that when she was pregnant with her four-year-old son, she did “a ton of research” on the best way to get him to sleep, and everything she saw was about sleep training. She tried Ferber method – which encourages children to learn to self-soothe through brief, timed check-ins – but remembers that there is a lot of “anxious energy” around bedtime. When her son was about 9 months old, he outgrew his crib, and Castellon and her fiancé bought a Montessori floor bed that was big enough for her to lie on, too, and it stayed there until her son fell asleep.

“And with that, everything I had worked so hard for to sleep on the train went out the window,” she says. “It’s not that I thought co-sleeping was good or bad, it was just my journey.”

These days, Castellon stays up all night with his son, but they read him a bedtime story, talk about his day and play music until he falls asleep. “Sometimes I fall asleep and stay there, and then wake up at 1 am and go out,” she says. “Or he falls asleep and I go out and he’s left alone.”

For Castellon, this routine has reduced her own anxiety about putting her son to bed. How did this affect her relationship with her fiance? “Dad is actually very happy,” she laughs. “It doesn’t take up much of my time at night. This helps with my relaxation after he passes out – whether I'm watching the show with my fiancé or just chilling. I'm not wasting time. If anything, it improves my time because I know he's well rested.”

Rachel Shepard-Ota, co-host Podcast “You're So Right”I had a similar experience. She tried to sleep train her now 8-year-old son, but after a “traumatic” 11 months she didn't want to do the same with her second child. She began studying co-sleeping and eventually enrolled in a sleep consultant certification program. When her two youngest daughters were born, she began sharing a bed soon after giving birth. “I would bring them to bed, put them in bed, they would fall asleep next to me, and I would scroll through my phone, watch a show, and then go to bed too,” she says. Shepard-Ota and her husband's three children began sleeping in their own rooms at different ages quite easily, she said. Her youngest daughter is 3 years old and still falls asleep in their bed early in the morning.

“It was just life-changing,” Shepard-Ota says of her family sharing a bed. “I felt a lot less anxious, I felt a lot more rested, they were doing well, my husband was very supportive.”

Again, Dr. Canapari cautions against bedsharing until children are at least one year old. “The problem here, especially in infancy, is that the risk of suffocation or SIDS is very real,” he says. “And it's such a terrible outcome that it's really hard to recommend, even if there are things that reduce the risk.”

Shepard-Ota, a parent influencer who talks about sleep practices online, is aware of the criticism surrounding co-sleeping, but believes Child-guided sleep And Holistic sleep sleep certification programs she has completed and books she has read (including “How do children sleep” Helen Ball and “Safe children's sleep” James McKenna) provided her children with a safe sleeping environment. Her followers also tend to wonder about other potential downsides to bedsharing: Shepard-Ota gets a lot of questions about intimate time, for example.

“For me personally, postpartum was not a time when I was most interested in intimacy, so I was fine with that,” she says. “Our child did not threaten my husband. He viewed this period as a very short period where our relationship could come second and the baby's needs could come first and my sleep could come first. I think he knew that my sleep – and therefore my mental health – was critical to the well-being of the entire family, so he was willing to do whatever it took to make sure that was a priority during that short time. And I think you also learn to be a little more creative. It doesn’t always have to happen in your bed at night.”

Ultimately, these parents found that time spent with their children (falling asleep, hearing about their days, waking up, cuddling) outweighed the potential downsides. “We can never get those moments back,” Castellon says. “So whatever the consequences are, I'm ready for it because now it's worth it, not only for me, but for him too. And yes, there are occasional bruises—sometimes you get kicked in the chest. But I just think it's worth it.”

Lena Felton (she/her) is the Senior Director of Special Projects at PS, where she oversees sponsored packages, large-scale projects, and editorial partnerships. She was previously an editor at The Washington Post, where she led a team covering issues of gender and identity. She has been working in journalism since 2017, during which time her focus has been on writing and editing feature stories and elevating historically underrepresented voices. Lena worked at The Atlantic, InStyle, So It Goes and others.