People often ask me how they can help their newborns, infants, or toddlers get to sleep and sleep through the night. I have always favored the simple solution: take your child into bed with you. So-called "co-sleeping" is the natural way, the way parents and children slept for eons, before the advent of separate bedrooms, before there even were bedrooms. And it works.
I just found a delightful 1997 piece on Slate that nicely makes all the arguments for co-sleeping. Please read Go Ahead—Sleep With Your Kids by Robert Wright, if you're interested in this issue.
"For our species, the natural nighttime arrangement is for kids to sleep alongside their mothers for the first few years," explains Wright, a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
"At least, that's the norm in hunter-gatherer societies, the closest things we have to a model of the social environment in which humans evolved. Mothers nurse their children to sleep and then nurse on demand through the night. Sounds taxing, but it's not. When the baby cries, the mother starts nursing reflexively, often without really waking up. If she does reach consciousness, she soon fades back to sleep with the child. And the father, as I can personally attest, never leaves Z-town."
Thanks, Robert Wright! I couldn't have said it better myself.
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