Our bedsharing journey

My eldest has just turned four years old, and I always find it interesting to look at the way our family set up works – what we love and what we don’t – and think about my pre-pregnancy self, and if I would have guessed that this is the way we do things.

We are a bedsharing family, and I often wonder how people can be anything else. One big reason is because when I’m in bed at night, the absolute last thing in the world that I am willing to do, is get out of bed. I can happily fall back to sleep with a full bladder because walking 3 steps to the en-suite in the middle of the night is just… not happening. And if your children sleep in a separate room… I assume you have to get out of bed at night to tend to them. To me, that is a wild concept. Getting out of bed is just. Not. Happening.

One of the first people I knew to have a baby was my older sister Indi, and what she did with her children hugely shaped how I am as a parent. At the time a lot of the stuff she did felt very out of the norm – she co slept, did baby-led weaning (I will never, ever forget her handing her 7 month old baby a steamed vegetable and smiling and encouraging him while he gagged on it, while our mother hopped about in an anxious tizz, and I thought wow, this girl knows how to do things her own way!), she didn’t bother trying with naps in a cot, no sleep training, breastfed without introducing bottles. But this approach didn’t seem to come from her trying to follow a certain ethos, or the effect of reading books about attachment parenting etc. It simply was the way that she found it easiest to parent. She followed her instincts and that’s where her instincts led her.

I had my first baby by the time Indi had had three, and as soon as my baby was born it became very clear to me why she parented in the way that she did. Because, it feels normal. And the easiest way to do things.

Winter, my daughter, was born early at 37 weeks. I had felt reduced movement, went into the hospital for monitoring in the morning, and she was born via emergency caesarean about 45 minutes after I stepped foot in the hospital. While she was technically “full term”, there’s a very real possibility that had all been well, she would have stayed in my womb for another five or six weeks, so I consider her birth to be premature. But hey ho, semantics.

She was also small – just 4.4 pounds, or 2.02kg. But Indi had had two premature babies (born at 29 and 30 weeks respectively) so I was quite used to handling tiny babies. Our first few weeks at home with her saw lots of different sleep set ups. Some of them not very safe. The first night or two she slept in the bedside crib while I shivered and sweat my way through the release of adrenaline that came after her birth. Then, we put her in a sleepyhead, in between us in the bed. Not safe at all. After about a week, I fully accepted chest sleeping, and that’s where the magic began.

By this point, I had read up on bedsharing and I knew about the safe 7. One of the rules is to not bedshare with a premature or low birth weight baby, which is what Winter was. Call me reckless, but I went against the research and chose to bedshare. If anything, it felt even more important to me to have my very, very small baby close to me. But while I saw plenty of information and images of safe sleeping in the bed, I couldn’t see any information about chest sleeping, which was the best way for us all to sleep at that point. Tiny Winter took up hardly any space on my chest, and I felt so comfortable and able to sleep propped up on pillows with a hand knitted blanket made by Mum on top of us both. Winter fed regularly through the night, then we fell asleep again. It was bliss.

As Winter got a little bigger, she started to sleep next to us. We would breastfeed through the night, and had some good patches and some really bad patches. The worst was from 12-15 months. My husband was away in Spain, and only home on the weekends. I could not get Winter to sleep before about 11pm, and all night she would wake and cry. It was awful and I spent many nights on the phone to my husband, because even though he couldn’t do anything from over a thousand miles away, I needed him to go through this with me.

Those were some of my first moments as a parent that I felt real shame about how I was parenting. I would pick her up crossly and take her to another room, plonk her on the floor and let her play for 30 minutes while I seethed and tried my hardest not to cry (I should have just cried). In the night, I had moments where she would be laying on the bed screaming, wanting to be picked up and I would just sit there, staring into space, ignoring her. I look back and feel really sorry for us both. It wasn’t her fault or mine.

Winter is now 4 years old, and has never spent a night sleeping alone (or sleeping through the night). It’s just… not who she is. If she wakes up in the bed alone (before we’ve come up to bed) she screams and cries for us until we come running up. At least once a week, she’ll wake in the middle of the night, kick my husband while screaming “I want MUMMY!” and then come and sleep with me and the baby. In bed with me, she sticks to my back like Velcro while I’m on my side often feeding the baby. It’s not that comfortable but I sleep soundly through most of it, feeling a duality of emotions. Some annoyance because how nice would it be to sleep on my back, which I love, and be able to move around as I please. But also immense gratitude and love. My children feel so safe, so close, so content. I imagine what it must feel like for Winter to cuddle up next to me. I am at least twice her size, probably more. I am a huge, warm, cuddly, pudgy, familiar body that used to be her literal home when she was in my womb, and now I’m her home outside the womb too.

Now, a lot of people will read that and think – well that’s because you’ve just let her sleep with you her whole life, so she knows to expect you there, and as a result you’ve got a child on your hands who at four years old wakes multiple times a night and screams bloody murder if she’s alone. Firstly, I don’t actually think that’s the case. I think her sleep habits are far more a results of who she is as a person, as opposed to how we’ve set up our family sleeping. And secondly, even if that was the case… so what? I remember meeting a woman when we lived in Spain – I think she was from Austria, maybe Germany. She told me that where she was from, they all put their babies in nurseries at 3 months old so the babies never get used to being at home with their parents, and then the whole “nursery transition” is much easier. I never forgot hearing that, and how sad it made me feel. Putting your child in nursery as a baby because you need to is one thing, many don’t have a choice. But doing it so that the baby never knows the comfort and safety of babyhood at home, so they don’t know what they’re missing, it quite another. It also assumes that babies don’t have the innate knowledge that they’re supposed to spend their days and nights with their parents and other trusted family members, which I think they do. It’s the one thing that they really, truly know.

I really think the way that we set up our children’s sleep space should be guided by our children’s personalities rather than looking at guidelines. Yes, the recommendation is to keep your baby in your room until 6 months of age. Does that mean that it’s a goal to get your baby sleeping alone at 6 months. Maybe not.

Most children are sleeping in a bedroom alone from about a year or two old. Does that mean it’s what you should be doing? Or that you should be embarrassed if you have a child who still wakes frequently and needs to? No. It means that all children are different, and we shouldn’t be trying to shove them into categories or certain milestones depending on the amount of time they’ve been alive.

Some children express that they want to sleep alone when they get a bit older. Some children like to give their parents a cuddle in the night then go back to their own bed. Great! But if your child doesn’t want to, please don’t think they’re behind, or that they’re too clingy, or that they really should have learned by now to sleep alone. They’re a tiny tiny person, in a very big and scary world. They might be at nursery in the day and want to connect with you at night. My bedsharing daughter doesn’t love bedtime because for her, sleep is still a separation even when she’s in bed with a parent every night.

If your family’s sleep set up looks different to others, please don’t feel like you’re doing it wrong. It’s such a cliché but different things really do work for different families. Each child is unique too. I sleep with my 15 month old every night, but now on the weekends, my husband sleeps with him, and I’m in with my four year old. The baby sleeps really well with his Dad, having odd sips of milk (from a cup) in the night if he wants it. And I get to cuddle up with my daughter, which I've really missed. I could never have done this with my firstborn. She would have gone insane if I wasn’t with her. The baby is just different.

Confidence in our decision making as parents is a skill that grows, if you work on it. Our confidence is eroded in pregnancy before we even have our babies, and we are often coerced into making fear-based decisions about how, where and when we birth our children. This can mean the start of parenthood is really tricky as many parents already feel they have failed when their journey has barely begun. This sense of failure is then heightened when we try and breastfeed our babies with little to no support, and often don’t meet the goals we had. Mixed messages, terrible advice, judgement all around – it’s not easy to cut through all that. It’s the same with sleep. We’re asked how our babies are sleeping constantly. We are given disapproving looks if we mention they wake a lot, or sleep in the bed with us. God forbid our children should actually need us.

This is a huge part of the reason I love my work as a postnatal doula. My focus is not on a certain method of infant feeding, or on helping your baby settle into a routine. It’s on you, and how you want to parent. Lots of people don’t even know, and that’s where asking the right questions helps.

I’ve been on my own journey as a parent, and I am so passionate about supporting other people on theirs. I started this business from my hometown of Notting Hill, London, and I run Baby Massage and Infant Care sessions, Breastfeeding Masterclasses and support new parents in their own homes with their new babies.

If you would like my support in your journey, please get in touch. Us parents have to stick together!