Children 'should sleep with parents until they're five'

[Nebraskamom]

ryan has co-slept with us much more than the others did. And now I'm going through "heck" trying to get him out of my bed and into his own. While I love snuggling with him, I don't know that it is has been a wonderful experience for us. I am ready for him to be OUT of my bed.

[Miranda]

The ONLY way we got Kaelyn out was we had to buy this almost $50 Mickey Mouse bedset for her "big girl bed" and that is the only thing that made her want to sleep in her room with Dakotah. Now I will say they girls have been bunking up in one bed. I have no idea why we put them to bed in their own beds and Kaelyn always ends up sleeping at the foot of Dakotah's bed and sometimes Dakotah will wake up and go down and cuddle with her.

[Larissa]

I've done a mixture with my babies. The research presented in that article doesn't really fly with me, to be quite honest. . . and I am very AP minded. I tend to look at research and expect the research to be scientifically grounded - and it just wasn't.

What seems to make the most sense to me in regards to sleeping arrangements for a baby is to meet the needs of the baby. If a baby really is in distress, it's not likely that a baby will sleep well. So, meet that baby's needs. I coslept when my baby needed co-sleeping, and I let him/her sleep in his or her own bed when he was able to do so. If baby needed me, he got me. I can't see how a certain sleeping situation is going to contribute to whether or not a baby becomes a well adjusted adult.
My mom didn't even hold my sister and I when she fed us because her mom told her that it would spoil us. So, she would prop a bottle up and we would eat. She let us cry it out plenty of times. She offered that advice to me when I first had a baby, but it wasn't right for me. I consider myself a well adjusted adult and I certainly don't have digestive problems! LOL My point is that the whole approach of AP, and the reason I love it, is because it's all about meeting the needs of the individual baby/child. And we all know that those needs vary from child to child.

[Lisa]

We co-slept with all of our kids for the first few months. It's just so much easier when you are nursing and everyone seems to get more sleep that way. But, I agree with Larissa, every baby is different. I think Jantzen would have stayed in bed with us forever if we had let him---I spent HOURS and HOURS rocking and pacing with him and every time he would fall asleep and I would lay him in his crib he would wake right back up screaming. By the time he was 13 months old, I had had it and finally let him cry it out one night for 50 minutes. He slept through the night and never looked back. That was hard, but it's been so much better for all of us. Now, Keison on the other hand, NEVER slept well co-sleeping. He was in our bed for a while and then in a crib in our room until he was a year because the house we were in at the time only had one other small room. When we moved into this house I was finally able to put him in his own crib in his own room and he went right to sleep and slept all through the night. He was just such a light sleeper that he needed the quiet and stillness of his own room to be able to sleep. So, I guess my point is, I totally agree with Larissa that every child is different, and I don't think you can make blanket statements that co-sleeping for long periods of time is what's best for all children.

Oh, and I also agree that I can't see how co-sleeping until the age of 5 can possibly be good for a marriage! And good grief, we would have had 3 children in our bed by the time Adrik was 5!.....or maybe we wouldn't have! No, this is not a theory that would have worked in our house.

[Anna Marie]

I totally agree, you need to meet the needs of the baby/child.