Fact: A child’s sleeping in the parental bed is an important fulfillment of a basic human need.

Sleeping with the newborn is comparable with keeping vigil at the bedside of someone who is dying. Rather than easing someone out of life, you are holding the hand of someone slipping into it.... Both birth and death require the support of those who care for us. These are the most vulnerable periods of our lives, and no caring society leaves an individual alone at the beginning or end of his time. —Deborah Jackson, Three in a Bed

Rich or poor, black or white, large or small, families all over the world sleep together—in Japanese futons, on the bare African ground, in large four-poster beds, in queen-size beds, and under arctic caribou skins—and have done so since the beginning of humankind.

It is only in the Western world, and only in the past 100 years or so, that separate sleeping has become a norm. Despite the taboo on parents sleeping with their children, many more than will readily admit to it, do it—out of need, desperation, or common sense.

In a culture largely distrustful of nature and natural timings, a culture obsessed with independence and adequate control, parents fear that if they succumb to their infant's desire to share mother's breast and bed, or to be held and carried on her body, the child will come to rule them. In this way, parent and child are established as adversaries. Yet nature has designed mother and infant so that their needs are complementary. Her need to hold and feed and nurture her child is symbiotic with the child's need to be held and fed and nurtured. Postnatal depression may well be largely the result of the nocturnal separation at a time when the two are hormonally programmed to be together.

It was around 11 PM on the evening of Siena's birth when we finally found ourselves in bed. Exhausted? Yes. And reveling in the wonder of it all, the deep joy and satisfaction I felt in my whole being as we lay nestled together—Siena, this tiny little being who had just entered our life, Jack, and me (newborn as a mother).

It has not always been easy. I remember nights lying awake, feeling squashed between husband and daughter, not daring to move lest Siena wake. Her waking would mean no more than having to draw her to my nipple, but there were nights when I did not want to nurse anymore—at least, not at the moment. I was exhausted. I wanted to be left to myself. But those moments fade into insignificance seen alongside the deep pleasure that fills my heart as I look to all the other minutes and hours and nights we have shared. As to the exhaustion—parenting the very young tends to be exhausting. Co-sleeping, if anything, eases the exhaustion. When baby wants to nurse, there is no need to climb out of bed and find the way to the kitchen to measure formula and warm bottles. There is no getting out of bed to comfort or feed a child; no lying in bed, heart torn open by the sound of a child crying in another room.

Siena is ten years old. We three still sleep together—other than on those nights she has friends for a sleepover - and are in no hurry for this to change. It feels so right, for all of us. If the day has been a tough one, here now, we are all at peace with each other. If the day has been a special one, here we lie in deep contentment with each other. Either way, I am deeply grateful for her presence, here, now with us: The fascination of this experience has never waned for me. I love to wake to her sleeping alongside me: The sound of her breathing, the touch of her body, so trusting, so precious, so close. This is a part of parenting I would not have missed for the world. She began sleeping in her own room when we moved a year later, but there is still the odd night she comes to join us in our bed.

The Value of Touch

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