Few questions are asked of new parents more often than “Is your baby a good sleeper?” Sometimes, it can just be a superficially uncomplicated question, yet simultaneously, infant sleep comes up so often because it is a high concern for all family members. Indeed, there is a growing industry in the West for baby sleep that promotes a cadre of experts who coach and advise parents on how to teach their babies to sleep alone in their cribs and to stay that way until morning. This trend is in sharp contrast, however, with both historical and international norms.
Parental bed-sharing was common throughout most of human history and remains a common worldwide practice. Before the 19th century, for example in the United Kingdom, families slept close to one another. This allowed for the near-instant accompaniment of a waking baby by a parent. The Industrial Revolution greatly impacted this, as the new middle class placed much more emphasis on independence and undisturbed sleep, as working hours became increasingly longer. Consequently, contemporary parenting advice also often states that rigid sleep schedules and solitary sleeping conditions are necessary for infants to foster independence.
Bed-sharing is one of the contentious practices amongst experts. Some advise against this, particularly for infants younger than six months of age, due to its linkage with SIDS, while others feel it can give a child a developmental edge. What is known, however, is that there is relatively little scientific evidence regarding the psychological consequences of bed-sharing for children. This is not easily an area in which to conduct experimental research, as parenting is a very personal area. Observational prospective longitudinal studies, those that follow children forward in time, provide the most valid ways of studying this.
A recent study attempting to look at this question did so by viewing data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, which followed 16,599 children from nine months to 11 years of age. This study is representative of the U.K. The sample studied included 14,198 children throughout the UK who were born between the years 2000 and 2002, from various ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds. Parents reported whether they were sharing a bed with their baby at nine months and their child’s emotional and behavioral development at ages 3, 5, 7, and 11.
The study controlled or accounted for some factors previously associated with bed-sharing including maternal psychological distress, parental SES, parenting beliefs, breastfeeding, and infant night waking frequency, and assessed whether internalizing (depression and anxiety) and externalizing (aggression and hyperactivity) symptoms trajectories of their children changed; that is, children with the following trajectory patterns are identified:
- 56.4% had consistently low internalizing and externalizing.
- 27.2% had increased internalizing and decreased externalizing.
- 7.5% followed a moderate course for both symptoms, which was decreasing
- 8.9% reported severe and chronic symptoms with increased internalizing inflexibility and stably high externalizing inflexibility.
The most important finding was that no links could be found between bed-sharing at nine months and the internalizing or externalizing symptom trajectories in childhood. Other factors related to bed-sharing, including low parental education and maternal psychological distress, were related to these symptom trajectories. This would imply that the probability of internalizing and externalizing is determined by factors related to bed-sharing, but not bed-sharing as such.
These real findings should help alleviate the concerns of parents about the potential impact of bed-sharing on their child’s psychological development. Moreover, it confirms previous findings that bed-sharing has no impact on forming a secure infant-mother attachment.
Bed-sharing can be one alternative for some parents out of necessity or cultural reasons. As long as safety can be guaranteed, then bed-sharing will have no consequence for a child’s emotional and behavioral development.