Three in a Bed

By Deborah Jackson
Issue 98, January/February 2000

My bed feels somewhat empty now. I lie scrunched up in one corner, like a kitten in an oversized basket, and I wonder how it came to this. My husband, Paul, is away again, working on the other side of the country, and my children are downstairs, asleep. There’s Frances, 12, sprawled easily across her loft bed (she’s going to need a bigger bed soon). Sharing her room is Alice, buried invisibly under the covers—she’s still small for her nine years. Then there’s Joseph, lying in his very own bedroom, his five-year-old limbs and mouth open to the world in a gesture of absolute surrender.

Joseph and Alice were born in this bed and here they slept, filling the space with fluttering movements, infant squeaks, and an angelic aroma. They suckled me to sleep every night, stimulating my sleep hormones as they fed from my breast. For a while after each weaning, I wondered how I would ever get to sleep without them by my side.

But it was Frances who started it all. She was the first one to hypnotize me in the night until I knew I just couldn’t put her down. Frances who first turned our mattress into a family bed, who showed me how to feed without the light on, and who wooed her father every morning with kisses and smiles. It was Frances who became the infant heroine of my book Three in a Bed.

Twelve years ago, people told me that I would regret the whole cosleeping thing. I couldn’t give them an adequate reply. All I knew was that I was enjoying my nighttime parenting, perhaps more than any other aspect of new motherhood. I found I was more relaxed at night than during the day. There were no time crunches, no ringing telephones, no urgent chores to complete. No health professionals or well-meaning relations to tell me I was doing something wrong. Just me and the baby and the night.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s tempting to smugly recite "I told you so," and to lecture another generation of new parents on the benefits of cosleeping. I have certainly been given the chance. Ten years after the first edition of Three in a Bed—Why You Should Sleep with Your Baby appeared in the UK, my publishers asked me to revise it. Here, you’d think, would be my moment of sweet victory. "Look!" I could say to all those detractors—the horrified journalists, the concerned aunts, and the skeptical child-care experts: "We did it and we loved it and we’ve moved on! The kids are great!" But I no longer feel the need to persuade everyone to my point of view. What we did worked for us, because it is what we wanted. That’s the key to success with any parenting theory: knead it and mold it until it works for you.

So instead on going off on a rant, the first thing I did was to delete the subtitle of the book. It was never meant to be a prescription, but the word "should" can sound terribly bossy when you’re a new parent and people are handing out advice like broth at a soup kitchen. I think if I had written a book called Why You Should Change Your Bank Account, I might have felt comfortable with such directness. But modern mothers feel guilty enough, without upstart authors telling them what to do. I’m far more interested in inspiring people to feel that they’re doing just fine than in thrusting another "should" onto them.

The second thing I did was to revisit the hundreds of letters I received from parents over the past ten years. My gentle and ever-supportive editor was surprised when I told him that they were nearly all positive. A certain amount of hate mail, he had warned me earlier, is the price most people pay for publishing their strong opinions. Over ten years, I have counted two letters of discontent—-one of which came from a hapless mom who thought the book was going to be about something else. The majority of the letters I receive are intimate and kind, food for the soul. People send me their birth stories, share details of their sleeping arrangements and marital life, swap books and pictures and poems. They share their problems, but also their joy of parenting.

From my readers, I learned that there were many different ways to bedshare. Cosleeping began to look less like a formula and more like a process, an evolving, personal thing, adapted to the needs of each family. Some people happily play musical beds all night, swapping sleeping partners in the dark. Others sleep with baby in a bedside crib. Some fathers do most of the cosleeping, others move temporarily out of the family bed. Questions about where to put the baby down, adapting to waterbeds, and dealing with weaning have flown backwards and forwards across the continents. I have learned that, no matter what the Sleep Police might tell us to do, parents are determined to discover their own solutions-—and break lots of rules—-in order to achieve sleep and nighttime harmony.

I learned just how parents deal with big bed etiquette, discouraging their children from squirming or adopting the infamous "crucifix" position (where the child stretches out in the middle of the mattress, leaving parents clinging to the edge.)

I heard from mothers who wanted their own bedspace after six months, and from others who still snuggled up to a six year old. I read some wonderful strategies on weaning, including the delightful trick of tidying up around the bedroom where your child is learning to sleep alone. I discovered that cosleeping children evolve into amazingly secure individuals and that there are as many methods as there are children to challenge them. And all these wisdoms, gladly given to me over the years, I was able to share in my new book.

Cosleeping Gains Scientific Support
My next move was to talk to the scientists. Cosleeping research was in its infancy (much like Frances), when I first wrote Three in a Bed. My skill then was merely to gather together all the disparate strands of evidence that I found in the medical library. I read through papers by clinical researchers, anthropologists, psychologists, and childcare nurses. As a journalist, I was used to filtering out salient information from specialist texts, and considered that was all it required to bring my argument together. I began this work in a spirit of enthusiastic inquiry, and finished it as a convinced amateur.