In most countries, sleeping next to your child is a neccesity, but in the West, the practice is highly disapproved. The problem is that many studies have shown that it is quite common nowadays.
When asked about sleeping habits, parents will not accept that their children sleep with them. This is seen as an unhealthy custom. However, a study conducted in Britain using infrared cameras, showed that children may start sleeping on their own, but at some point during night, they go to sleep with their parents.
When I was pregnant, I became addicted to reading magazines specialized in parenthood. Thanks to those magazines, I understood beforehand, that sleeping in the same bed with my baby would be quite dangerous for him. The first two months he slept in a bassinet beside my bed. I made sure that when he woke up in the middle of the night, after feeding him, he went back to his place. After this time, since my house was like a small apartment, he started sleeping in the kitchen in a travel bassinet (it was easily dismantled). When he was eight months old, he had his own bedroom on the other side of the house. He may have come to my bed 20 times in 7 years, more due to my wishes than his willingness. In fact, sometimes I want him to stay with me at siesta time, and he is reluctant to. He prefers sleeping in his own bed, away from us.
In a paper in Infant and child Development, Dr. Kathleen Dyer, an assistant professor of child, family and consumer sciences at California State University, Fresno, proposed that co-sleeping families can be divided into three categories: Intentional co-sleepers, reactive co-sleepers, and circumstantial co-sleepers. The first group is constituded by those who want to sleep with their children, the second, by those who do not want to sleep with their children, but the necessity obliges them, and the third by those who sleep with their children only ocassionaly because they are on holidays or a relative is staying at home leaving no beds left.
Either way, it is seen as a taboo nowadays to accept that you sleep with your children. Moreover, some parents who publicly recognize it, generally start and finish their stories by saying “I don’t know what can I do to change this situation,” when in fact they do not truly wish it. In today’s families, the main issue is not the child’s dependance on parents, but the parents’ inability to be independent from their children. This is clearly shown in these cases where parents still co-sleep with their children.
Name: Patricia Romano
Date: October 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/health/23well.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5087&em&en=610ece6cab261445&ex=1193630400
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