The Family Bed
Mar 1st, 2007 at 6:52 am by Susie
I don’t get the whole “my kids won’t go to sleep in their own beds” thing. I never did. I used to have a neighbor who’d say, “You’re so lucky that your kids go to bed!”
I’d say, “Luck has nothing to do with it.” And it didn’t. They got into bed, I read them a book, they said their prayers and the light went out. Period. I noticed early on that all the parents who complained about sleep also complained about not being able to go to the bathroom alone, not being able to leave the kids with a babysitter, and a myriad of other seemingly unrelated problems - or so they thought.
I’m not saying I was a perfect mother; God knows, I wasn’t. But my kids did go to sleep every night, in their own beds. They didn’t disturb me when I was in the bathroom. There wasn’t a scene when we left them with a babysitter - and they never, ever threw a tantrum in public. (And rarely in private, now that I think about it.)
Some years ago, I was visiting with my downstairs neighbors and they said their two-year-old daughter simply wouldn’t go to sleep, it took hours and it was exhausting. Oddly, they seemed almost proud at how difficult she was, what a “strong personality” she had - as if it justified the utter lack of control they had.
“Let me try,” I offered. They smirked. “Sure, go ahead,” the father said.
I returned 20 minutes later; the little girl was asleep. They were shocked. “She’ll be awake again soon,” the father insisted. When I left two hours later, she was still asleep. So what did I do?
First of all, they had too many bright lights and loud, distracting toys in her room, so I put all that stuff up on a high shelf. I talked to her in a low, soothing voice while I rocked her, and when I put her in the crib, I stood with my hand rubbing her back until she was settled in. (No more talking.) Then I left. Basically, I controlled the situation; I didn’t let the kid control me. It’s not rocket science:
Neil Newman, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in Manhattan, treats parents and children over 5 years old, many of whom are struggling with sleep battles. “If I had to generalize,” he said, “I’d say it usually has something to do with separation or boundaries. It might be a problem of anxiety, but mostly the origin of the problem is the difficulty parents have in setting appropriate limits. It’s commonly believed in the mental health field that it’s important the children learn to sleep on their own. Not doing it often generalizes to other problems, because it’s about a fairly important way that parents say no to their child.”
Sorry, but all this is really Eurocentric - in my culture, children have slept in the same bed as their parents, or other siblings, for pretty much, forever, without emotional or behavioral consequences. My kids go to bed when they’re tired - some alone, some with us, and it changes on any given night.
Maybe the real problem is not co-sleeping itself, but the subconscious guilt Euro-American families feel when they engage in it, since they’ve been so socialized to believe it’s bad. The children pick up on those feelings, and that’s what causes their behavioral problems, not the fact they co-sleep. (BTW, the vast majority of non-Europeans around the world co-sleep and most are pretty well adjusted despite it.)
I don’t care one way or another; it’s a matter of personal preference.
But the parents in this article are COMPLAINING their child won’t sleep in his own bed, or even go to bed. So it’s not simply a matter of sleep arrangements. It’s a boundary issue, particularly when it’s accompanied by out-of-control behavior in other settings.
My trick was to get them in bed, read a story and turn down the temperature in the house so they stayed under the blankets.
All of what you describe sounds very sensible to me.
Parents need to be in charge.
Duct tape and Benadryl works too!
in the end it is the parent that can’t seperate from the child, not the other way around.
It hurts the parent too much to say no. To hurt the childs feelings hurts them and they just can’t do it.
That is why more and more you see kids best friends with their parents. There are no boundaries anymore.
My oldest daughter is “enmeshed” with her mother. It is a terrible thing when they get older. She is in therapy for it, but ultimately it is her mother that needs to be there. The parents don’t see the long term damage they are doing to the children.
the children can’t seperate or mature properly.
ugh….you totally hit a nerve with this post.
Boundaries, in control, parents can’t separate, children can’t separate and we wonder how we’ve become a nation of fascists. Look no further than the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Psychology/Psychiatry.
Then the parents unleash these brats on the world. We have to finish the job of parenting….
You guys really do need to read a little Alice Miller. Your kids won’t grow up to be fascists or sociopaths by sleeping in your bed. Are you all effin Mormons?
Both Susie and the first poster are right. Good parenting helps kids sleep in their own beds. And separate beds is Eurocentric. Many amilies around the world sleep together and it’s considered the norm.
Bottom line: if everyone is sleeping fine and happy, who cares? But the parents in the story weren’t sleeping well and they weren’t happy.
My kids are now teenagers. But when they were babies, the Bible for us was Richard Ferber’s book, Solving Your Child’s Sleep Problems. Ferber said teaching a child to go to sleep on their own was a great gift and parents should do it. He had a whole system that we used to called Ferberizing. It was basically Susie’s method/ You had a bedtime routine. you did it, kissed them goodnight and left the room. if your kid was crying, you let him cry for two or three minutes before you went in and briefly comforted him and then left again.
Gradually, over the course of a few nights, you built up the length of time between leaving the room and going back and comforting the kid….and then leaving again.
It basically put parents on a program to manage their anxiety about letting their children cry and protest–and it taught parents to teach their kids how to sleep in their own beds and put themselves back to sleep if they woke up.
The Ferber method worked for us— there were a few rough nights. But in the long run, it was worth it.
By the way, though, no one started using the Ferber method until they’re pretty desperate. People forget how absolutely exhausted and sleep-deprived young parents often are. These parents put up with all kinds of insanity because they’re so tired, they just look for the shortest, easiest way to get their kid to go to sleep so they can go to sleep.
So the bad sleeping habits first start out as part of the chaotic, crazy life of raising a baby or a toddler. Your kid get a run of bad ear infections. You tell yourself the family bed thing is only temporary, but the crises keep coming and you get more and more tired, etc, until finally one or both parents can’t take it any more and is willing to do something to get the kids back into their own beds.
I belonged to a parenting group in a big, mega-Lutheran church at the time. There were about 30 women who got together to talk up the ups and downs of raising babies and toddlers. Any time a woman brought up the problem of being exhausted and having kids out of their beds and rotating all over the place, a few dozen women would practically start shouting, Read Ferber! Read Ferber. It was almost cultic.
On the other hand, his method worked. So do some of the methods in the newer sleep books.
Again, if both parents are happy having the kids sleep in a family bed, who cares? And no, kids don’t keep sleeping with their parents until they’re teenagers. Most kids are out of their parents bed by the time they’re six or seven, no matter what.
But if either parent isn’t happy or isn’t sleeping, you got a problem. And then the adults need to be the adults and get the kids back in their own beds.
Alice Miller bitches, Alice Miller!!!