Experts do not all agree on the age at which you should stop sharing a parental bed with a child. Caroline Ferriol, educational psychologist specializing in sleep, explains the “warning signals” to spot.
It’s a question that many parents ask themselves: until what age can you sleep with your child? And the least we can say is that opinions differ. At birth, most parents opt for a co-sleeping bed, which is more practical for breastfeeding or bottle-feeding your baby at night without having to get up. But this habit can sometimes last: some children end up sleeping among mom and dad until the age of two or three, or even older. And among the experts in pediatrics and infant sleep, there too, no one can come to an agreement. If the WHO recommends sharing a room (and not a bed, due to the risk of unexpected infant death) until the baby is six months old, there is no evidence that one practice is truly better than another for growing children.
“As long as the sleeping environment is secure, that everyone sleeps sufficiently well, and that this choice is assumed by the parents, there is no age beyond which we could say that it is ‘abnormal’ to share the parental bed”assures us Caroline Ferriol, educational psychologist specializing in children’s sleep*. As the specialist points out, there is no study that has proven that late co-sleeping is responsible for developmental or behavioral disorders in children. On the other hand, there is a time when this cohabitation in the parental bed can prove problematic.
“What can be a problem is not so much the fact of sleeping together as the way it happens and what it produces on a daily basis”explains Caroline Ferriol, preferring to talk about “warning signals” rather than a specific age beyond which this configuration is no longer desirable. First of all, the first point to note is that of poor sleep, both in the child and in the parents. Waking up several times during the night or becoming restless may be an indicator. If the parents sleep poorly but do not dare to change things by “fear of the frustration or anxiety that this could produce in their child”it is also a sign that the situation is no longer favorable, especially if it results “a climate of tension, reproaches or conflicts within the couple around this subject”.
But the most important thing to watch out for is when the child is in “the total impossibility of falling asleep or going back to sleep other than in the parental bed”. Whether for a nap, in the car, or in any other situation, if the child never manages to fall asleep without his parents, we must start to alert ourselves. “In these cases, shared sleeping is no longer a peaceful choice, it is an arrangement that no longer works”underlines Caroline Ferriol. Although it does not represent a “risk” strictly speaking for development, bed sharing can still become “a factor of chronic fatigue, family stress, strong tensions and sometimes difficulty in developing other resources for falling asleep in the child”. In some cases, this can also lead to separation anxiety, difficulty managing emotions and concentrating for the tired child, but also (unintentional) anger from the parents towards the child.
In short, there are no immutable rules when it comes to whether or not to sleep with your child. “There is no universal age beyond which sharing the parental bed would become ‘bad’ in principle. There are questions of safety to respect, sleep realities to listen to, attachment needs to honor, and benchmarks to give so that the child can, little by little, also appropriate his own sleep space when the time comes.”concludes Caroline Ferriol. The most important thing is to respect a certain consistency, and to make a smooth transition from the moment when co-sleeping no longer suits the whole family.
*Caroline Ferriol is an educational psychologist specializing in children’s sleep and founder of the Fée Dodo collective, also author of the book collection “Une mission pour Fée Dodo”.
