I've been meaning to post about co-sleeping.
We came to co-sleeping as a family in a very scary way but it turned into something joyous.
First, I want to say that when our second daughter was born [now 16 years old] for some reason neither me nor her dad could let her sleep somewhere other than right beside us. NO idea why. We had a 13-year-old daughter already. We were not inexperienced. Our guts told us NO.
It makes great evolutionary/survival sense for a baby to object to being put down. Before nurseries, doors, and modernity, to be put down was tantamount to dying of cold, predation or being stepped on.
Babies, when left to cry rapidly begin to show signs of shutting their systems down to conserve resources. They have no concept of the future. They don't know "They'll come back when it is light." They go into shut-down survival mode. When I read that some years after we started co-sleeping I felt gut wrenching empathy. It made absolute sense.
Cot deaths are far more common among societies that practice remote sleeping and almost non-existent in cultures that practice co-sleeping as the norm. But where those cultures have begun to adopt Western sleeping practices cot death rates have begun to rise. {Another factor to factor in here is maybe they are also adopting Western vaccination practices. The correlation between vaccination date and sids occurrence is very worrisome}.
A few of the factors they think reduce cot death in co-sleepers are:
- Carbon dioxide exhaled by parents stimulates the baby to breath.
- Movement & proximity of the parents stimulates breathing of the baby.
- Parents are in tune with their baby and awake if they are not doing well [*This is our personal one].
[I'll lob you a link to Dr Sears, who has researched and reported this stuff well ... but I learned most of what I know about co-sleeping originally from Three in a Bed by Deborah Jackson. I learned about it after doing it for some time.]
When our 2nd daughter was born she didn't breath until 8 minutes after her cord was cut. Her cord was twice round her neck and cut to enable her to be born. She just stared around being disinclined to breath. Luckily she seemed to be fine. However, we noticed she didn't seem to have the same reflex under water that would make you desperate to breath. [Baby's naturally will have an instinct to hold their breath under water when they are very small ... but this went a whole lot further.] If she was upset as a toddler she would breath hold and you only knew if you turned her around and looked at her face. She'd go blue and collapse. We needed to guess from the situation if she was likely to be upset before she collapsed. Then I began to wake with her at night 'imagining' she'd stopped breathing, but it eventually became quite apparent that she DID routinely stop breathing and needed to be stimulated to get her to breath again. I got very used to waking on hearing a deep exhale, monitoring her in my sleep.
I went to my doctor after one occasion [May 1st when she was 18 months old] when I was absolutely sure [no longer could I put it down to my nerves ... and I'm not a nervous type of mother] that she had stopped breathing. On this occasion it was light enough outside to wait and check her before shaking her. She was clearly waxen and had no muscle tone.
I was afraid to go to my doctor. The previous time we'd gone when she was 8 months old she had campylobacter poisoning and they had done a bunch of painful procedures for which I'd had to hold her down. They'd then told me that it was ok none of them worked out as they were 'only box ticking'. My daughter was petrified of doctors since. I cracked at 2pm thinking "I can't let her sleep another night without something to keep her safe".
I suggested to my doctor that perhaps I'd rolled on her and co-sleeping was the reason. He said "NO! Very clearly she is alive precisely because you co-slept with her and you should be sure to continue doing so."
We subsequently went through years of her wearing a monitor that set off an alarm when she stopped breathing for more than 45 seconds. She finally took it off at the age of 5 when we'd seen no problems for quite some time [after homeopathic treatment. It is one of the reasons I became a homeopath]. At one point we had to get a monitor for her new baby sister from The Red Cross as we were refused one because our other daughter was a 'Missed-SIDS" case [ie, she didn't die] and she's have had to die for us to be entitled to a monitor for our newborn. So, we had two monitors and a big family bed.
[There's a ton more to that whole story, including an unpleasant run in with an infamous paediatrician who had a hair trigger for suspecting Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSBP) ... but luckily he was under investigation at this point and we had an EEG result that showed she had unusual brain activity that could be causing the problem.]
Bed-sharing became joyous. We had another baby and we had a bed made for us to fit a kingsized plus single mattress [we use memory foam mattresses as they fit together seamlessly]. We still have our family bed. DD16 of course moved out some time back. One of her sisters is definitely just about on the way out. We still have one in with us full time. They all have their own rooms if they want them and for when they have sleepovers, etc.
It is cosy.
I have always considered it a best part of my parenting because there is so much proximity and cuddling whilst sleeping, I'm optimising my time by parenting in my sleep!
[* ps. There are other rooms in the house for marital shenanigans & we have a hat on the door just like the Fockers!]
