Sleeping with…Baby

I mentioned in an earlier post that I’m not a terribly crunchy person.  I stand by this, though I recognize that there are certain choices I make in regard to mothering that might give one a different impression.

I have chosen to stay home as long as I had babies and toddlers in the house.  This has put me out of the work force for nearly a decade, but since I’m not in a fast-paced career field, I’m not worried.  Baruch Hashem, the Cap’n’s salary is enough to keep us fed, housed, and clothed, they’re panting for English teachers in Israel whenever I choose to go back, and my children are more important to me than other people’s.  Call me selfish.

I nurse my children exclusively.  While this means no formula, it doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally make a desperate effort to get an infant to take pumped breastmilk in a bottle, always with zero success.  I also nurse discreetly in public.  Women in the modesty-obsessed Orthodox world go off to other rooms, drape blankets over their shoulders, and turn their backs to company when they nurse.  While this is okay, I think it calls unnecessary attention to the fact that one is breastfeeding.  With appropriate clothing, one can nurse a baby without looking like one is nursing a baby, and keep right on living without interruption.  I was once holding baby Beans in the cloakroom at our shul in America when a man came up to talk to me.  We chatted for a moment, then he looked down and started to stroke Beans’s head gently.  “Is she sleeping?” he asked.  “No, she’s nursing,” I answered.  The man’s smile disappeared, he colored slightly, then excused himself.  (Note to self: When someone asks if your nursing baby is sleeping, you say YES.)

And my babies sleep in my bed.

This last one is a controversial issue.  In America, I was scolded by Beans’s pediatrician for doing Beans a “disservice” and not sleep-training (aka Ferberizing) her.  Here in Israel, too, co-sleeping seems to be rare.  The children’s health clinic nurse asked at what temperature “his room” is kept, making the assumption that Bill sleeps in a different room.  She gave us a SIDS talk in which she stated firmly that he should sleep on his back on a hard mattress, NOT with his mother.

In my opinion, the people who should sleep on their backs on hard mattresses far away from any comfort are convicted murderers.

Given my experience of nighttime parenting, I’ve never understood having baby sleep in a crib in another room.  My newborns wake up every two hours to eat, and somehow the room in which I sleep is always the coldest room in the house (great if I’m in bed, not great if I’m having to get out of bed multiple times per night).  If the baby is in the bed with me, I don’t have to get up at all; I simply plunk the little runt on the breast and go back to sleep.  Baby’s fed, warm, comfortable, and happy, and I’m not making regular trips in the cold to a crib somewhere to fetch a hungry little malcontent every few hours.

People ask all the time, “But don’t you worry about rolling over onto the baby and crushing it?”  No.  I’ve slept beside another human being for nearly nine years, and the Cap’n can attest that I have yet to roll over and crush him.  Don’t most adults know where the edge of the bed is, and successfully avoid falling out at night?  A baby is the same.  My friends who co-sleep with their babies agree with me that our awareness of the baby in the bed compromises the quality of our sleep to a degree, but isn’t that part of the experience of being a parent of a newborn?  Show me a mother who has crushed her baby in bed and I’ll show you a mother who went to bed inebriated.

This post is not intended to persuade people who are sold on cribs to give them up, but there are certain advantages to co-sleeping that are worth noting.  Babies breathe better when sleeping next to someone else who is breathing.  (This can help babies with apnea jump-start their own breathing.)  They settle down and go back to sleep faster.  They sleep on their backs and sides more often than babies who sleep in cribs and can roll over onto their stomachs.  And for mothers who work and are away from their babies for much of the day, co-sleeping can be a way to share closeness with their babies during the time they’re together.  (These ideas are articulated on the website of my own parenting gurus, the Sears family.  The article about co-sleeping is here.  Google “co sleeping baby advantages” for more information about the benefits of sleeping together for mother and baby.)

In the interest of full disclosure, I never planned to co-sleep with my babies.  When my in-laws came to visit before Beans was born, they took us out and bought a lovely cherry crib.  But the night Beans was born in the hospital, the Cap’n and I watched her, swaddled but wide awake, gazing at us with her large navy-blue eyes through the glass side of the bassinet, and couldn’t bear to have her sleep alone in a hospital-issue Pope-box.  The Cap’n lifted her out and gave her to me to cuddle in my capacious hospital bed, and the rest was history.

Whenever I encounter someone who tries to tell me that I’ve done something seriously wrong as a parent, that I’ve screwed up or was irresponsible (and believe me, co-sleeping has earned me lots of raised eyebrows and scoldings), I remember my American OB-GYN who gave me heaps of good advice in the years he cared for my health.  Perhaps the greatest thing he told me was that “The best parenting book you can read is the one you write yourself.”

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