Co-Sleeping
Let me just put this out there: What you do when your kids are awake is much more important than what you do when they are asleep, and even more importantly, you are much more likely to do more stuff with your kiddo when you as a parent get good sleep.
The idea of co-sleeping is one that parents often grapple with, whether culturally or due to preference. Is it easier to just roll over and feed baby in the middle of the night while you both are lying down than having to get up and pick them up out of the bassinet or crib? Of course, it is. (I mean, they do make bassinets that directly hook up to the side of the bed nowadays to provide that ease with the bonus of safety, but I digress.) The idea of co-sleeping is much more of a comfort for the parents rather than a comfort for the kiddo. If all the kiddo knows is sleeping in the bassinet or crib, then that is how they will sleep. Of course, they will prefer to sleep being held if given the chance, but who wouldn’t? Setting up safe and healthy separate sleep areas from the get-go leads to a lifetime of good sleep.
As a pediatrician, I have seen lots of kiddos who are still sleeping in their parents’ beds when they are 3 or even 13 years old. I can tell you from my experience that none of them were kids who initially slept in a bassinet. I also know that with new data and research over the years, if kiddos are not sleeping in their own crib or bed, they have a higher risk for anxiety, insomnia, and social phobias (such as sleepovers with friends) than kids who learn to sleep on their own. There is something about the stress and recovery response of waking up at night and then being able to soothe and calm and go back to sleep with minimal intervention that is utilized throughout the kiddo’s life as a way to self-calm during new and stressful situations. An infant or toddler who can self-soothe and sleep on their own will have the best shot at being the teenager not freaking out in high school with that pop quiz in physics.
In terms of parents’ sleep with co-sleeping, yes, it may seem like you will get more sleep in terms of hours/minutes slept if baby is right there for feeding, but sleep research in parents who co-sleep shows that the time in restful deep sleep is actually a little bit lower when compared to parents who do not co-sleep, possibly due the brain having to be just that bit more engaged at all times of the night to avoid accidentally rolling over onto or knocking baby off the bed.
Speaking of which, the safety concerns with co-sleeping are real but thankfully rare. The studies show though that if the parent is overweight, has sleep apnea, or is under the influence of drugs or alcohol, there is a much higher chance (50 times higher!) of smothering baby during sleep than a parent who is not overweight, does not have sleep apnea, and is not under the influence of drugs or alcohol. That is on top of the 50 times higher likelihood of SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) in parents who co-sleep in general. But again, that risk is still small (1 in 16,000 vs 1 in 46,000 for otherwise healthy babies). As a bonus treat for the data nerds out there, a pediatric group in New Zealand came up with this evidence-based SIDS co-sleeping risk calculator just to give parents a sense of the risk of co-sleeping with their baby: http://www.sidscalculator.com/
However, I do want to admit that as a pediatrician, I have been at the bedside doing cardiac compressions in the emergency room and ICU for at least 4 babies who were rolled over onto during co-sleeping. So though the danger is low, the outcomes are very real.
This is why I like to meet families in the middle by getting a co-sleeper: a bassinet that attaches to the bed and allows for safe and restful sleep for everyone while keeping baby only an arm’s reach away. And again, my major concern with co-sleeping is that when baby is big enough to not need to feed at night anymore, those that co-sleep will often still rely on breastfeeding as a calming mechanism and not a nutrition source, making mom the pacifier when she doesn’t need to be. This is also a time when kiddos should be learning self-soothing mechanisms that will last them a lifetime of good sleep.