Parenting is all about choose your own adventure. Your choice of sleeping arrangement is a major one.
People get militant and fired up if you sleep wrong as per their custom.
There’s a whole something movement based around locking your infant in their room from X months onwards to get them used to being on their own. They’ll stop crying eventually after weeks, having absorbed a crucial lesson right into their DNA:
I’m on my own in the Universe and no-one’s coming to help me
Our son was born premature into intensive care and we brought him home after six weeks. When he was very young, he slept in a basket in our room before graduating to sleeping in his cot in his own room.
At some point soon after that, he started sleeping with us. There was more than enough room in our enormous king size bed. I think it was mostly about being together. After leaving him in a hospital every night for six weeks, we felt better having him right close to us.
Often it was far from convenient. I was working office hours in Sydney, being woken through the night by a toddler punching me in the face or kicking directly into my spine. Kids sleep sidewards between parents, it’s a law of nature.
When he was two and a half, we moved into a new house that didn’t really have a suitable bedroom for him. And so we kept on sleeping all together in one room. His bed was against the wall, and we’d put him in there earlier in the night. Through the night he’d wake up and crawl up between us.
In our new place, he has his own bedroom but still sleeps with us. And really, we don’t care. It’s become our habit born out of an extreme experience when he was young.
It’s possible we’ll face a challenge when moving him into his own room but that’s just how it’s been.
