Can co-sleeping cause long-term damage to children?

Take your crying kids with you to bed, and you are condemning them to a future of behavior difficulties and weight struggles, say the authors of a new study.

The study authors state, that babies who got used to falling asleep with a parent in the room, being held until they fell asleep, or being taken into a parent’s bed when they couldn’t sleep, were more likely as older children to have trouble falling asleep and to sleep fewer hours during the night.

Since inadequate sleep in childhood can have long-lasting health effects, including being overweight and having emotional and behavioral difficulties in adolescence and adulthood, parents should only comfort the child for a short period of time, but then allow him “to develop a capacity to comfort himself on his own… parents and pediatricians should keep in mind that children have to develop the capacity to regulate their own sleep early in life and self-soothe themselves during the night.”

Of course, “crying it out” is not a new concept. But this study tells parents, from an authoritative, scientific point of view, that when they listen to their instincts and comfort their babies back to sleep, they are causing them permanent, long-term damage.

I dislike the term “self-soothe.” I don’t self-soothe. I have family and friends whom I turn to when I need to be comforted. When I wake up at night after having a bad dream, I totally do not self-soothe. My husband is there to soothe me.

When the term is applied to young children, I am even more suspicious, because I feel that while it is certainly a parent’s job to gradually allow her kids to become independent and self-reliant, when your baby or toddler wakes up scared in the middle of the night and cries out to you, it is not the best time for teaching self-reliance skills.

This is admittedly purely anecdotal, but although we limited co-sleeping (using a co-sleeper attached to our bed) to the first six months, we always comforted both our kids during the night and never allowed them to cry or “soothe themselves” back to sleep. At the ages of 6 and 8, they are healthy, well-adjusted kids who sleep very well at night.

Does co-sleeping work for you? Please share your experiences.

Photo by MarkyBon

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