Co-Sleeping: Year Six

originally published January 24, 2007

Go ahead: gasp and tisk, tisk all you want. Believe me, I’d be tisking, too, if it weren’t my child. It’s true: Justice is still in the bed with us. At night as I drift off to dreamland, I know that the respite will be brief, for not only do we have a six-year-old sleeping betwixt us, but he has recently been joined by a small cat named Harold and a plastic Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger action figure. As the four of us settle in for the evening, Buzz has to be placed strategically to provide Justice with the maximum comfort, and I am instructed to “lay like a door” on my side so he can put his arm around my neck and place his head slightly above mine so my hair doesn’t get in his nose. As the cat scratches the blankets at our feet and beds down, my husband quips indignantly, “Goodnight, Buckets.”

The idea that hubby would compare our arrangement to the overcrowded conditions of Charlie Bucket’s four grandparents (huddled one on top of the other in their tiny makeshift bed) in Roald Dahl’s infamous children’s classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, illustrates perfectly just how differently mommies and daddies feel about sharing their bed with a child. To me (and to many mommies I know), there is nothing sweeter in the world than having my little man fall asleep next to me, breathing his little boy breath on my neck. To my husband… well, he was over it about six years ago.

As Jeff has lobbied to end Justice’s tyrannical oppression over our would-be love nest, I have often asked myself, how has it possibly been six years? It’s gone by so fast! It seems like just yesterday, we brought him home from the hospital and I laid him down on the bed next to me for the first time. Of course, I didn’t know then that he’d be lying there interminably. Now my visions of sweetness are intertwined with nightmares of a 16-year-old Justice, coming home from a date in the wee hours, throwing his keys down on my nightstand and demanding in a solid baritone voice, “Move over mom.” “Why didn’t we just make him sleep in his own bed?” I will sob, inevitably scooting to the side as I was directed, no doubt drifting off thinking, “Well, maybe when he goes to college….”

I have a stockpile of arguments for why we shouldn’t kick him out of our bed. He’s an only child; he’s lonely; we’re all he has; his bedroom is on the second floor and ours is downstairs; he’ll be scared. What if there’s a fire, a tornado, a hurricane, a mild fog? What if he sleepwalks out the window? Or down the stairs? Anyway, it’s perfectly normal to want to sleep with other people. I slept with my sister until we were preteens for Heaven’s sakes! This is how most of the world sleeps. It’s not his fault he was born in America with this ridiculous concept of compartmentalized sleeping quarters. Hmph.

Beyond the love of the security our arrangement provides Justice (and okay, me, too), I just really don’t want to put out the tremendous amount of effort it is going to take to get this child in his own bed. At this point it seems like a pretty insurmountable task, and while my husband is onboard with getting him out of the bed, he has no idea of the work it will take to do that, and I can guarantee he doesn’t have the fortitude to carry it through to the end. Besides, I haven’t paid any attention to any parenting opinions that have come out of his mouth since the day Justice was six months old and he suggested we leave him in his crib to “cry it out” while we go take in a movie. By the time we’d return, the kid would be asleep. Problem solved. So, you can see why I feel I’m flying solo on this mission.

Justice is attached to us, and who can blame him? Up until the moment he drifts to sleep, we are discussing all things big and small, reassuring him that monsters aren’t real, that he won’t go to hell no matter what he does, that he can control his dreams if he thinks good thoughts, and that he will one day marry Katie, the love of his life.

As I’ve been doing since he was born, I continue to parent him to sleep. Perhaps it was naïve of me to believe that when I chose Natural Parenting (also known as Child-led parenting, Attachment Theory and The Anti-Ferber), that I didn’t know what I was getting into. That’s for certain, but I also wouldn’t take it back. I kept listening to the promise of Dr. William Sears, my guru, when he said the child will eventually let you know when he or she is ready to sleep alone. Well, Doc, I’m still waiting.

Dr. Richard Ferber is another popular theorist in the art of putting a child to sleep, but his method of doing so was “controlled crying,” the polar opposite of Dr. Sears’ philosophy. This means you leave children alone at ever-increasing intervals to cry until they finally “learn to fall asleep on their own.” This seemed particularly cruel to me, and I was happy to tell anyone who would listen about the evils of “Ferberization.” I got a great deal of satisfaction last year when his revised book came out. In it he back-pedals on his original methodology and suggests that there are “more ways” than controlled crying to get a child to sleep and that what he suggested in his first book (published in 1985) was “just one way” to deal with a child’s sleep problems. He also mentioned that using his method with a particularly anxious child could lead to developmental problems. Ah-ha! Vindication! I knew there was something fishy about neglecting a baby whose only method of communication was crying, and I don’t even have a medical degree.

But no matter how strong an advocate I am for breastfeeding, co-sleeping, organic juice and natural parenting in general, it is still a pain to have a constantly growing six-year-old forcing me into neurosis over when he will be able to step up to his own bed. And no one likes to be awakened from a perfectly good slumber to the sounds of faux lasers blasting through the room and miniature space rangers ranting, “Don’t you know better than to open a spaceman’s helmet on an uncharted planet?”

I am perfectly willing to use coercion, bribery and any other means necessary to move this child on to the next phase: independent sleeping. This mommy is going to have to get incredibly creative, and uncharacteristically stubborn, but it will be done, someway, somehow. And until then: Goodnight, Buckets.

Elizabeth Deroshia