Sleeping With Kids to Parents
Your picture-perfect view of new parenthood probably combines mom and dad staring lovingly over a crib as the baby sleeps. However, you, especially as a dad, may want to evaluate sleeping options and here’s why:
1. The baby-in-crib alone is a reliably recent and distinctly American practice. If you think about it, before multi-room dwellings and back to caveman days, families used to sleep together for warmth and safety. Most of the rest of the world “co-sleeps” and finds it completely natural to do so.
2. Crib death, or SIDS, is a very American phenomenon, and perhaps can be related to the distance mommy is from a struggling baby.
3. And finally, and most importantly for dads: co-sleeping keeps mom close to baby for middle-of-the-night feedings. When we had our first and second babies, they slept with us for the first 6-7 months. In the middle of the night, the baby was hungry and baby reached out and had a snack.
My wife often said she barely remembered the feeding. Compare that with the story of some of my friends who kept the baby in a crib across the hall. Very often it was the DAD who got up in the middle of the night (wife had a baby all day after all and was still recuperating from delivery) and it was DAD who spent 15 minutes at midnight and 4 AM warming the bottle and another 15 minutes feeding and burping the baby.
Now, I will grant you that middle of the night feedings has a certain romantic glow to them – there you are, the great dad, alone with your thoughts and your new son and daughter in the moonlight … However, after a week of completely interrupted sleep, you may get a little tired of this routine, especially when you count the months before “sleeps through the night” is a reality.
