I'm not trolling, nor do I feel I'm dismissing it lightly. I'd rather take a relatively minor risk of death than knowingly inflict whatever psychological trauma comes from forcing an infant to sleep alone. I think the horror of this is seriously downplayed by our society. It's relatively safe to leave a baby in a box now, but this hasn't been the case for our deep evolutionary past. If you're a baby being left in a box at night the proper response is to freak out and try to get an adult to hold you, because otherwise you might get eaten by a wolf.

Wow. Psychological trauma? Horror? Freaking out? I'm not sure what makes you think babies experience those things when "forced to sleep alone", but my two kids seemed pretty content in their cribs.

Letting your kids share your bed might seem like a lovely thing to do, but I've heard so many friends complain that their kids are still co-sleeping 5+ YEARS later, and that comes with a huge impact on stuff like sleep quality and having a sex life.

3 kids of my own, lost a lot of sleep with them early on until they got into a workable routine. I advise to be careful of mistaking the battle for the campaign. You want to win the campaign, even if it means losing some battles. In this case, turning to co-sleep is attractive because it feels like you're winning the sleep battle easily. However, in the campaign that is life with your children, this is a losing strategy if the co-sleeping has a negative effect on your relationship with your spouse, particularly when it comes to intimacy. Remember that your kids also need your marriage to work well over decades to come. Similarly, giving in to defuse a tantrum is a short term win that will cost you over the long run as your child becomes insufferable, self-centred, and fails to achieve age-appropriate levels of maturity.

Are you suggesting that parents who sleep with their babies are less likely to have a solid relationship with each-other and a working marriage?

Is there evidence for this?

There are people in this thread talking about kids 2-5 in their bed.

We're not discussing babies, solely. That's seemingly the issue/controversy.

> Letting your kids share your bed might seem like a lovely thing to do, but I've heard so many friends complain that their kids are still co-sleeping 5+ YEARS later, and that comes with a huge impact on stuff like sleep quality and having a sex life.

I haven't thought about this in years, but I believe I slept in my parents's bed until I was around 8 years old (at which point I stopped by choice). Perhaps they just never told me, but my parents seemed perfectly happy with the whole thing.

Note emphasis: this is a losing strategy IF the co-sleeping has a negative effect on your relationship with your spouse,

IIRC, the official advice is same room, separate beds. Rules out accidental suffocation and allows the child to hear and see the mom.

Are you a parent? Are these hypotheticals you're running, or speaking from your own experience?

As a parent I must say he's not completely wrong. We have decided to not co-sleep, to not get stuck with this. But quite often my wife would fall asleep without putting the baby back to the crib. At which point the baby would not cry till the morning, unless a dirty nappy started itching.

Not a parent. Have spent a decent amount of time around children. Have stayed up all night watching the door of a hospital room while my sister co-slept with her newborn child, waking her up when the nurses jiggled the doorknob.

> Have stayed up all night watching the door of a hospital room while my sister co-slept with her newborn child, waking her up when the nurses jiggled the doorknob.

Why?

Co-sleeping was forbidden by hospital. If they'd seen her sleeping with the kid they would have observed her for the rest of the stay to make sure it didn't happen again. She disagreed with this rule, as did I.

Ah, the old "ignore the rules of the medical professionals" trick.

The acronym SIDS really does a disservice to parents by obfuscating the fact that babies die as a result of being accidentally asphyxiated by a sleeping parent. How many lives could be saved by an acronym like 'Accidental Parental Baby Asphyxiation' that raises awareness of what's going on and how to prevent it?

"In 2017, there were about 1,400 deaths due to SIDS, about 1,300 deaths due to unknown causes, and about 900 deaths due to accidental suffocation and strangulation in bed." [1] which works out to be approximately 1 in 1000 babies die of SIDS.

The link you gave says 2500 per year due to SIDS - which appears overstated by 70%.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/sids/data.htm

I don't think you broke it down right, but I'll leave it to the Illinois Dept of Public Health and the CDC to determine who is right on the numbers.

Either way, it is significant.