The Family Bed

By Michelle Wallace

"The kids at school were amazed to hear I share a bed with my brother and sister. I never told them about the times we'd squeezed five in that bed. All my own class mates had their own beds, some of them even had their own rooms. I considered them disadvantaged. I couldn't explain the feeling of happy security I felt when we all snuggled in together."
My Place by Sally Morgan

When I tell people we sleep with our baby the responses have ranged from a silent lift of the eyebrow to "wait until he gets a bit older", which I figure means you'll wish you'd never gone down that path. I respect people's diverse thinking, well in fact I welcome it, but I get the recurring message that within a thin pendulum exists a status quo standard of parenting which draws fairly rigid lines in the sand. Of course the family bed is not for everyone. I know of many parents who would endure sleepless nights if they were to bunk up with their wriggling babies, or who rightly want one room in the house that is a non-negotiable space of their own.

The best thing we can give our children, after all, is happy parents. I'm sure like me though, there are many parents who have or have had an innate urge to keep their children at a breath's distance during the night, but who allowed the tenacious hum of social convention to drown out their whispers of wisdom; the all important instinctual knowings that spring from the very varied and unique connections of mother and child. Despite the party line, trumpeted by many a mainstream parenting advice book, there simply can be no, one, right way to love and parent our children. Not without mashing together the vibrant colours of children and families to make a cloudy, indistinct shade of pale.

I stumbled across attachment parenting (of which I might add I am no glowing example), well after a dear friend with four grown children told me of her baby-at-the-reins parenting style. More than just a feeling of rightness in my gut, her ideas spoke of a harmony that can only come from being at one with our babies. It made perfect sense. Since then a small cache of people and pages have grown around me with attachment insights, enough for me to assume that sleeping with one's baby is no big deal. It seems, though, the research that has long shown the benefits of co-sleeping is buried deep in the sand. Jean Liedloff details her research based on the optimistic and well-adapted Yequana Indians in her book The Continuum Concept. She stresses the importance of the 'in arms phase', day and night, that must be fully satisfied before the infant will progress fulfilled and adapted to the next phase of their development.

Dr Michel Odent, author of Primal Health, travelling in China in 1977, asked medical professionals about the phenomenon of cot death. He found it was unknown and attributed this to the wide practice of mother and baby co-sleeping. He wrote, "…cot death is a disease of babies who spend their nights in an atmosphere of loneliness." Dr McKenna, whose prolific research on SIDS found that rocking, touch and body heat all promote the health and easy breathing of an infant, and although he does not directly link cot sleeping and cot death, considers that constitutional weakness may combine with solitary sleeping habits to make death more likely.

The author of Three in a Bed, Deborah Jackson, contributes postnatal depression to the pain of nocturnal mother and baby separation, when the mother is hormonally programmed to be with her baby. In addition she reveals that co-sleeping is shown to increase tenderness, bonding and touch, all integral to a child's sense of self-worth, while in turn decreasing aches, pains and illnesses later in life. She writes, "So often we hear that babies need to be left alone to learn independence. The opposite is true. Offer a child security, and he (or she) will grow up to be more secure.

" My own baby had been an arm's breadth away from me for the first six months of his life and for half of every one of those nights tucked somewhere within the curl of my sleeping body. The grave advice from many a mothering oracle warned that at six months a baby's demands become learnt, attention seeking behaviour rather than an innate and justified need for comfort. I'm not sure exactly what marks the shift between the two, but the deluge of advice (books, early childhood nurses and other mothers) sounded convincing and I guessed it had something to do with my baby wrapping me around his little pinkie. I was beginning to learn that a baby is a force to be reckoned with. "Sure they might look cute but don't let that fool you. They are, by all accounts, cunning and manipulating and once you weaken … watch out, a baby dictatorship is likely to ensue!" We were given a cot early on in my pregnancy. The cot concept had kind of crept its way into the popular thinking centre of my brain, almost like some unquestionable piece of baby rearing truth and this was despite that I had long thought it a beautiful thing to sleep with one's baby.

The cot became a centrepiece around which we played out a big part of our nesting ritual. I got it set in my mind that some kind of nursery painting was imperative to good nesting protocol and so my lover and I, not a handy bone between us, spent the next six months of my pregnancy, procrastinating the mammoth job of sanding and painting the new nursery attire. The day we finally tackled it, wasn't quite the expectant-couple, cutesy, canoodling of my long-held nesting fantasies. The two dollar paint brushes kept losing their bristles amid the strokes of sunny-yellow paint and the resultant hair scattered paint job created of me a raving paint-perfectionist loony.

Thankfully my dear wise woman confidante, the one with the four grown children, had shared with me her ruthless and uncompromising ways of mother love. Kate was a lioness mother who revelled in the daily magic of her children. I held her stories dear. Along with the pottery wheel that took pride of place on a spread of newspapers in her lounge room and the free for all graffiti walls, was the one about the home built bed base and custom made mattress that accommodated at one point her family of five. It was here some of their most cherished memories were played out. An endearing place within me was thereafter opened for the family bed. So it was with a dutiful reluctance that I went ahead and assembled the cot. My partner and I had joked for ages about how no baby of ours was sleeping behind bars and the association must have stuck because when I looked at the rectangle space festooned by bars it held a scent of coldness and isolation.

It surprises me now to think I even bothered at all. From the first night that my baby slept outside the womb his body fell finally into rest only after I took him from the hospital crib and into my arms. Ever since, the closeness of my body has been his preferred state of slumber and he was not planning on giving it up without a fight. Finally after a fortnight of me stumbling out of bed and sidling up to the cot for a time, I decided it was time to give up the cot.

The next day we dismantled the bed base and arranged the mattresses on the floor to make a king of kings' bed and now all the nightly antics of feeding, occasional consoling and nappy change happen in a sleepy reverie on the family bed. Our baby is learning he doesn't have to cry to have his basic needs of food and love met. In the mornings he can crawl off the bed at his leisure and play with the throng of toys that adorn the bedroom floor, occasionally permitting us to continue snoozing. I can honestly say the only time since having my baby that I have felt truly sleep deprived and sexually out-of-bounds was when we introduced the cot.

The times I question the rightness of co-sleeping, which grow rarer and rarer, I look at my son who thrives on the wonder of life and whose daily happiness is infectious. His dad and I laugh more than we ever have and I hear myself say with his first birthday approaching, it has been a beautiful year. I figure that we must be doing something right.

Michelle Wallace has a BA in Psychology/Social Science and went on to become a trained teacher. She left the school class-room to work as an educator in the field of sexual and reproductive health and now juggles this with a freelance writing career, and her biggest challenge yet, motherhood.