Between the sheets

I have a guilty secret.  For the last nearly four months, I've been sharing my bed.  Yeah, mostly my husband is there too.  But the one I'm referring to is my son, who from day one has slept in my arms at night.

This feels to me like one of the last great taboos of modern motherhood (a potential subject there for another post).  I can live with the fact that I'm building up a dependance that will almost certainly be hard to break, but the guilt of feeling that I was putting his well-being at risk was immense.  My husband, understandably, is vehemently against sharing our bed with our tiny baby.  It's something that I haven't admitted to many people, and those who do know have been unanimously disapproving, albeit in a kind way.

And yet, falling asleep with him in my arms feels like the most natural thing in the world.  He seems to sleep better: when he's in his Moses Basket I hear him moving about throughout the night.  When he's with me, he sleeps peacefully and when he needs a feed all I need to do is move position slightly (in all honesty, the additional sleep is a major benefit).

So, I decided that I owed it to my little one to try and decode the conflicting messages and rumours floating about middle-class motherhood, and find out whether it was indeed dangerous to share my bed with him.  I contacted an anthropologist who specialises in research into mother-baby bed-sharing (not to be confused with co-sleeping, which apparently can just refer to having the baby in the same room).  His own research, and the work that he's done to collect existing research on the subject from around the world, suggests that in fact sharing a bed can have a benefit to both mother and child.  Most importantly, when the bed is a 'safe' environment (e.g. parents are not drinking, taking medicines, there aren't gaps between the bed and the wall etc.) bed sharing can REDUCE the risk of SIDS.

So one tired Mummy will be resting a little easier tonight....