It may surprise you to hear this, but my husband and I would NEVER have planned on bedsharing with our children. In fact, when we were expecting our first, we didn’t so much as buy a bassinet, because we assumed our baby would just sleep in the crib from day 1 (we ended up borrowing a family bassinet – that I had slept in as a newborn – for the first few weeks).⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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The only thing we were ever told was that bedsharing was unsafe. Full stop. Realistically though, at some point, there are many, many families who find themselves bedsharing out of a necessity for better sleep, whether they had planned it that way or not. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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As a sleep specialist, my concern is for the safety of the babies in families like mine – those who had never intended on bedsharing, and so never thought to ask or research the safe sleep recommendations. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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I think a family’s sleeping arrangements are a very personal choice – whether you room share, bedshare, use a sidecar sleeper, or have your baby in their own bedroom. However, I do find this quote from Dr. James McKenna, to be especially poignant: ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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“By refusing to point out that cosleeping, and cosleeping in the form of bedsharing, can be practiced either safely or unsafely, and that sleeping next to a baby is not inherently dangerous, especially for a breastfeeding, sober mother, the CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission) misses opportunities to educate millions of parents about how to cosleep safely. Its actions suggest instead that parents are neither educable nor intelligent enough to make their own decisions about how, or whether, to cosleep.”
