My Two Cents on Co-sleeping

I was asked this question:

I'm sure you have always had people ask you if you get enough sleep? I get this question all of the time and when I tell people I actually do, I think they are more than shocked. I mean, Esther sleeps with me for right now and her feeding is really automatic, so I never have to fully awake to feed her. But I guess what I am trying to get at is the fact that she does sleep well through the night, and I don't know if this is just because we sleep together and she is breastfed, so we don't need to wake up, or if other babies that are breastfed as well are just "up" during those nighttime hours. Am I blessed with a good sleeper, or do all co-sleeping, breastfed babies just naturally stay asleep most/ all of the night?

My Two Cents on Co-Sleeping

Before I had my first child, I was SOLD on co-sleeping, and I do mean with a capital “S”!
And it went great for the first while. By a couple months old, Joshua was only waking up once or twice to nurse and immediately go back to sleep, and this didn’t require me to get out of bed, so it was fine with me. I never was one of those ladies who could sleep through the nursing session, however, as my mother had been and apparently a lot of women are, but it didn’t bother me too much because at least I didn’t have to fully awake to nurse, and I didn’t have any trouble getting back to sleep immediately afterward.

I was happy with his sleeping habits so far, and I reckoned that he would naturally just sleep better and better, waking less and less, until he was finally sleeping through the night entirely, with no effort from me.

It didn’t work out that way. Actually, at around 6 months old, he began waking up MORE rather than less. Then I went through the whole, “It’s probably teething” thought process and just put up with it. He was also getting more active by this time, including during his nighttime nursing sessions, which made it more difficult to stay at least half-asleep through them.

Another problem we began running into was that he was so used to ME being right next to him to sleep, that he would hardly stay asleep unless I was right there. This meant that he barely took naps for over half an hour or so, and at nighttime I had to basically go to bed at the same time he did, or he would wake up as soon as he realized I wasn’t there, and we would have to go through the whole “lay in bed with him to nurse him to sleep for half an hour” to get him back to sleep, and again, if I tried to get up, he would usually wake up within twenty minutes or so. It was a trying time!

So, by the time he was about 10 months old, I was very disillusioned with co-sleeping. Joshua was waking up 7-8+ times a night to nurse, during which he would flop back and forth from one side of me to the other, making it impossible for me to sleep at all. He barely napped during the day, and at night I had to go to bed at 8:00pm – or go through the LONG ritual of getting him to sleep 2-3 times if I didn’t….

However, I had very little other option at the time because we had moved to a TINY apartment at the time with some friends (in Japan) who were just one paper door away from us. I had no other place to put Joshua but right next to me, and I couldn’t let him cry or he would wake the whole house. So for the time being, I had to grin and bear it. Until he was 15 months old and we had our own place again. That is when he first started sleeping through the night, and I did too! It was not without a HUGE struggle, however, to break the habits I had trained him in all that time.

So, the next time we had a baby, I determined to not go through that again. I still brought our baby in bed with us for the first month or so, but I didn’t always let her sleep ON me or touching me, so that she wouldn’t get so dependent on my presence to be able to sleep. Then, when she was about a month old, we got a pack n play to put next to our bed and she began sleeping there. She was still close, and I still pulled her in bed to nurse when she would wake up at night, and sometimes fall asleep with her in our bed. This was okay. I just didn’t make it a rule to have her there.

Sometimes I would put her in her pack n play when she was still awake, but sleepy and recently-nursed. She thus learned to fall asleep without having the breast in her mouth. I was not strict about this either. She often did fall asleep while nursing, which was fine with me. I just wanted her to be able to do both.

This arrangement worked out well, and she even took great naps during the day, all on her own! She followed the same basic sleeping pattern as Joshua had while he was little during the night – waking up 2-3 times to nurse and immediately go back to sleep.

Then, around six months or so, she started waking up quite a lot more frequently, just as Joshua had. After a couple of weeks I realized that it was just because her awareness had increased: she knew Mommy was right next to her and that made her think she needed to be nursing all night long! So, it was at this point that we moved her pack n play into the room next door. Worked like a charm – she immediately went to sleeping through the night with the exception of one 5am nursing, after which she would go back to sleep for about 2 more hours.

Since then, I have had two more babies and have done the same thing with them. They have all followed exactly the same pattern. To a “T”.

I have talked to many, many mothers who co-sleep and have drawn a few conclusions. Babies who co-sleep when they are older, tend to wake up more than their non-cosleeping counterparts. Im sure there are exceptions to this, but these are merely the conclusions I have drawn from my very informal research. However, some mothers don’t mind this at all and claim that they don’t even notice when the baby nurses! My own mother was like this.

So, I am not against co-sleeping. I think that each family should simply do what gets them the most sleep! If co-sleeping is working out well for you, super! If it ceases to work out well, then move on to the next stage. 