Oh, please March 4, 2007 zuzu If you let your 11-year-old kids sleep in your bed every night even though you don’t want them to, you might want to consider growing a spine. Just a thought.
Huh – we still have the occassional co-sleeping night with our younger son (6), though it’s rare now – less than once in a month. The spine in the one case would be pushing back when the kid starts taking up so much room the parent has to move beds. The kid gets whatever leftover room he wants to wedge into once Mommy and Daddy are comfortable. Generally unless he’s pretty freaked out about something, the extra room and comfort is worth more than being in our bed.
I vaguely remember (and have heard stories about) when my parents kicked me (the oldest child) out of their bed after my younger sister was brought home from the hospital, and them finding me curled up on the floor outside their bedroom door the next morning. As I recall, I slept with them on occasion after that (I’m pretty sure I was in bed with my parents the night my mom went into labor with the next sister), but I don’t carry any scars from the banishment experience.
The only times I can remember being in my parents’ bed were during particularly loud and scary thunderstorms. And I wasn’t the only one in there with them.
The only times I can remember being in my parents’ bed were during particularly loud and scary thunderstorms. And I wasn’t the only one in there with them. Parents were swingers, eh?
My parents let me sleep with them when I was little if I had a bad dream or trouble sleeping. But it was a pretty rare thing. I enjoyed having my own bed and my room. These parents, on the other hand, need to grow a spine. They don’t look like the kind of parents that are in the business of denying their children anything (are you kidding me? a princess room?). Who wants to take bets on which one of these kids will be starring in the next spoiled teenager reality show on MTV?
When I was a kid I slept first with my mom, then with my older sisters. We didn’t have enough beds to go around so my sisters had to take turns sleeping with me. I didn’t get my own bed–or bedroom–til I was in middle school. Perhaps it’s this very positive childhood experience that makes me feel pretty much okay when my kids have slept with me. Course, the operative term is that I’m okay with it; if I wasn’t, trust me, they wouldn’t have been there.
when the only people interviewed for an article are rich people (I mean, c’mon, a sleep consultant? princess beds?), the article is most likely pretty darn irrelevant to most people. that said, my kid sleeps with us, and it’s fine. I sleep well, and the cuddles help make up for the fact that I spend all day at work while she spends all day at preschool. We’ve talked about moving her into her own bed, but I’m not actually ready. but I also know that when it is time, we’ll work it out without spending thousands of dollars we don’t have for faux solutions, and if we (her parents) weren’t getting enough sleep, the situation would change. AND it helps that we have a king sized bed.
The house my mom bought a house after my parents got divorced seemed, to my five year old mind, to be under renovation for centuries. I distinctly remember that at least for a good chunk of time there just was no opening the door to my supposed bedroom (get this – the original wallpaper had spikes. like, sharp, weird, centimeter-long spikes sticking out of the wall. Yeah, that had to go. Or rather, the walls had to be plastered over with an inch of non-spikiness). So my sister and I slept in my mom’s room, rotating one on the floor and one in the big king-sized bed (we probably woulda both fit, but we reallllllly didn’t get along as kids). The main thing that sticks with me is having to fall asleep to Married with Children, which coincided with my nine o’clock bedtime. Even as a wee little feminist, that show bugged the crap out of me. /relatively OT anecdote
which makes no sense what with the first comment being in moderation. Anyway, the sentence should begin “The house my mom bought after…” Hang in suspense for the rest, because for some reason a continuing theme of this weekend is my mystification with modbot lists, and I have no idea how to safely summarize without getting flagged again. Sorry my posts are being a pain in the ass, moderation queue reader 🙂
The kids are probably frightened they’ll get lost and never see their parents again. At the point they described her daughters QUEEN SIZE BED I was pretty sure we were talking about people in a McMansion who have no real clue.
Well, my brother co-slept with my parents until about age 2. I don’t think there were any real issues, though now that he’s an adult (and has been for almost 8 years), he’s having a hell of a time becoming independent. My mom just won’t … cut the cord, so to speak. And why on earth would he want to move, when he lives by himself in our old house, rent free, with my mom paying any utilities he can’t afford because they’re still in her name? I doubt it was co-sleeping that did it, but it sure is the same kind of mindset of not wanting to refuse the kid. I didn’t co-sleep, and now as an adult, I can’t even stand it to have someone else in the same room I’m sleeping in. And I’m the independent one. I don’t think this means anything at all, but it certainly is interesting. And those parents need SPINES. What the hell!? It’s the same way I feel about my mom dealing with my older brother. She complains and complains about how he’s not ready in the morning and makes her late, says every day that she’ll just leave him if he’s not up in the morning, and she never follows through. When you’re the adult and you’re the one with the power, you need to STAND UP at some point. Don’t crush the kid (or adult kid) or be an ogre, but just teach some damn proper behaviors. Yeesh.
The kids are probably frightened they’ll get lost and never see their parents again. At the point they described her daughters QUEEN SIZE BED I was pretty sure we were talking about people in a McMansion who have no real clue. Actually, they’re talking about people who own brownstones, however small, in the West Village, which run about $5 mil.
OK, my little rant about brownstone: whenever I go up to NYC to see my poor, ailing grandma,there’s a bunch of the things (brownstone boulders) popping up out of the ground in every park we see, especially in the surprisingly large garden walk outside of Co-Op City. They look much nicer as part of a natural setting (or what passes for one in NYC) than carved up and plastered back together into bizarre geometric structures. But of course, we humans can never leave well enough alone…
I slept in my parents’ bed when I had a bad dream, and only then. Why is this such a hard concept for people?
When my younger son was born, we let him sleep with us because the kitchen, where we kept the formula, is much closer to our bedroom than to his and his brother’s. (They share a room.) Andy, the older boy, was three at the time and felt left out, so we made him a pallet on the floor next to me. They stayed there for two years, until finally Aaron decided on his own that he wanted to sleep in his room and Andy didn’t want his brother to be lonely. Still, the difference is we were okay with this arrangement, and they were really little kids at the time. 11-year-olds? The parents don’t need a sleep consultant, they need a clue consultant. [snarky mean-spirited comment tag.] Of couse, these people named their innocent little baby “Harrison,” so we can’t really expect all that much.
When I read “stuffed animals to stand in for the parent”, I thought I was seeing some good sense there. Give the kid a bear to hug, go back to your own room, and let them learn that they are in fact fine by themselves. Then I saw the part about getting bears made with the parents’ hair that can play recorded phrases in the parents’ voices, and I despaired. Then again, if you’re completely sabotaging your own efforts to get your kids to let go of you, at least you don’t have to wonder why it’s not working. I’ve been told that when I was a toddler I used to get up in the middle of the night and go to sleep lying across my parents’ doorway. I’d generally be put back in my own bed before morning. When I was older, it was understood that if I had a really terrible dream I could wake up a parent, who would talk to me either in the living room or in my own room until I was ready to go back to sleep by myself. If something truly extraordinary were going on — natural disasters, that kind of thing — my parents might offer to let my sister and me sleep in their bed, but otherwise it was understood that the options were a) sleep in your own bed or b) fine, don’t sleep, but do it in your own bed. For all that I was a skittish kid and afraid of the dark, I did fine with it. I think the key was that the arrangement was clear and unchanging, so even if I didn’t like it I knew that wouldn’t get me out of dealing with it (which is, coincidentally, one of those things that you’re supposed to learn growing up anyway). And I still have yet to be eaten by a monster, so evidently they knew what they were doing.
Hey! I have a little second cousin named Harrison. Ohp, wait, on second thought, they named his little brother Nolan. ’nuff said. ;D [the girl with the name no one can pronounce and the sister with the guy’s name = not one to talk, but shhhhh.]
My seven-month-old sleeps with us on occasion, and in his own crib on occasion. I will admit that it’s what’s most convenient for me each “period.” Every night, he goes down in his own crib from 9pm until his first wake up (usually 11.30-midnight). Usually, I nurse him and put him back in his crib. If he wakes up again at 3am (teething does that) and I’ve been sleeping well, I’ll nurse him in the rocking chair and settle him back into the crib. If I’m exhausted, it’s both of us into the king bed–he can nurse while I sleep. But, he’ll sleep anywhere (and sometimes now, after nursing while I sleep, will actually whine at me UNTIL I take him back to his crib–his room is cooler than the master bedroom and I’ve noticed that when the master bedroom is particularly warm he doesn’t want to sleep there), and I think it’s partly our we-don’t-care attitude that has lead to it. I’m hoping that’ll lead to an easy “stay in your own bed” when it comes the time. Especially since we don’t have the sibs solution that my parents used. (My parents had two dedicated co-sleepers out of five kids; at one year their solution was to assign an older sib for the dedicated co-sleeper to sleep with. So, my just-younger sis slept with me for about a year, and the youngest sib slept with A for about two years. I think it’s less disruptive for a kid to be sharing a bed with another kid–I remember my sis sharing a bed with me, but recalled that we both enjoyed it. And when I got sick of it, it was less stressful for ME to kick her to her own bed because I was just the annoyed sister.)
We co-slept and let it go a really long time, and had a long transition time to boot. We also lie down with them in their beds for about 15-20 minutes each night until they’re asleep (or close to it) most nights, mainly because I miss the cuddle time. (kids are 7 and 8) That said, they are perfectly capable of going to sleep on their own, and it’s not a problem for us. When there are nights I’d really rather do something else, or have a lot of work to do, or am sick, then they don’t get the night time. Those people in the article? Crazy.
It’s all about hating the parents. now zuzu, child-hating is one thing, but Mommy drive-bys? if you had kids, you would understand. /sarcasm
11 years old — this is insane. When he starts asking mom to wear favorite nightgowns I think they may feel compelled to do something. Seriously sometimes you have to say no to kids. Mine went through a brief phase when he was maybe 20 months to two years old when he woke up at night. I comforted him when he cried, but left the room thereafter. At a certain point, we just let him cry. I think it took him less than two weeks to get over it. Now if I could just get the cat to stop whining at night. I don’t mind her in the bed, although the arm kneading I could live without.
I occasionally slept with my parents until my mom became pregnant with my little brother when I was about 5 years old, and then it was a pretty firm “sleep in your own bed” thing. Later on, things like storms, bad dreams, etc were valid reasons to sleep with my parents, but it had to be pretty extreme to be allowed in. By that time, I was so enamored of having my own room that I usually didn’t want to leave. And on the other side of the coin are my in-laws, who have a ten year old daughter who has co-slept with them her entire life. My MIL’s oldest 3 (28, 27, 25) are from her first marriage, and she had her tubes UNTIED for the daughter when she re-married. This girl has been essentially an only child her whole life, and while she seems pretty normal, she refuses to sleep with anyone but her mom– if there’s a slumber party, she’ll go, but call for a ride home when everyone starts to go to sleep. My step-FIL generally sleeps on the couch or in the daughter’s room while mom and daughter get the king bed in the master bedroom. There have been half-hearted attempts to get her to sleep in her own room (“big girls sleep by themselves”, etc), but as soon as she starts crying, it all goes out the window. As far as I know, none of the other kids from either parent’s previous marriages ever did the co-sleeping thing, so I don’t quite get how the little angel gets away with murder. The strange thing is, she’s generally pretty mature for her age when dealing with other adults, her peers, teachers, etc. Only when it comes to her parents does she become this bad. And then my MIL rides us about when we’ll have kids. If this is what I have to look forward to, never.
My parents had a cut off age: 9 After that you didn’t sleep in mommy and daddy’s bedroom unless, like zuzu pointed out, there was a severe thunder storm (being in tornado alley my mom wanted us close). And even then we slept on a pallet on the floor. I honestly think this is people with too much money and too much time on their hands.
We do cuddle time on the couch every night for about twenty minutes — or now that I think about it, used to. Ethan gets a choice now whether he wants to read in bed or cuddle with me, and it usually depends on whether or not he’s got a good book he’s reading at the time. (He’s seven and into chapter books.) After that, lights out. No negotiations.
My nephew, age 5, sleeps with his mother for one reason, and one reason only; they live with our mother in a 2 bedroom townhouse. As soon as my sister and I get a place together, 3 bedrooms minimum, my nephew gets his own bed and room. My cousin and her husband had the most difficult time getting their daughter to stop sleeping with them. They let her, even though she had a room of her own, until she was 8. They spent months fighting with an 8-year-old trying to get her to sleep by herself. It was insane. I think it’s not unreasonable up until the kid starts kindergarten. After that, parents are just asking for trouble.
I think there’s often other things at play. My little brother would insist on sleeping with our dad, because my dad used to travel for work for months at a time, and the little guy just didn’t see him enough. I also recall watching one of those nanny shows where the father had just left the military, and the kids would get hysterical whenever he left the room because they were convinced that he wasn’t coming back for over a year, if at all. In the end, my mom pushed my two little brothers’ twin beds together, to make one bed they could co-sleep in. They did it until the little one wanted his own bed, and then we moved into a bigger house so he got his own room, too. Interestingly, if one of us is really sick, my mother still tries to convince us to sleep with her sometimes. However, I totally could have used a sleep consultant as a child, because I had a ridiculous time falling asleep. It used to take me hours. Maybe I just needed someone to tell my parents that I didn’t need as much sleep as the other little kids.
If something truly extraordinary were going on — natural disasters, that kind of thing — my parents might offer to let my sister and me sleep in their bed, but otherwise it was understood that the options were a) sleep in your own bed or b) fine, don’t sleep, but do it in your own bed. I really dislike sleeping with my kids and that’s more or less the rule in our house. At least with the oldest one (just turned 5). The baby (not quite two) still gets to sleep with us on occaision, usually when he wakes up and the husband can’t just leave him alone. I tend to check on him and, if nothing is visibly wrong and he’s been changed, hug him and put him back to bed to let him cry it out. The husband usually brings him in with us, and then I don’t sleep after that because I can’t sleep with the kids in the bed. Hopefully once he moves in with his brother in a few months (his crib is in the very tiny guest room right now) he’ll sleep better and it won’t be an issue anymore.
The more I think about this, I wonder if sleeping in our mom’s room might have some relation to my sister still living at home with our mom at 28. Wouldn’t explain why I’m living 3,000 miles away, but maybe her being older made it weirder. I dunno.
I can’t remember ever sleeping with my parents. My sister and I shared a room until I was 10 and my sister was 14, so we had each other for company. Mom and Dad only had a full-sized bed. No room at the inn. If one of us was sick, Mom or Dad would come in and check on us. If we had a bad dream, Mom or Dad would come in and sit with us until we fell back asleep. By the time we were school age, their bedroom was their space, not our playroom or hangout. Dad would go in there to balance the checkbook and pay the bills, Mom would go in there to read. If the door was closed before bedtime, we were not even to knock unless it was an emergency involving death, fire or the need for an ambulance.
Ya know, as a parent with a kid who has serious sleep problems, I find the attitudes of many of the commenters here to be really annoying. “Cry it out” borders on abuse (IMNSHO). If this kid has such a problem that the parents are willing to spend money on a sleep consultant as to not traumatize the kid, well, more power to them. Take your sanctimonious “Grow a spine” and stuff it.
You know, cry-it-out may sound like abuse, but it beats heck out of tossing ’em out the window, which, believe me, was starting to look like the alternative. I think of it this way: Which is worse, a few nights’ trauma for the kid while learning to sleep on his own, or a lifetime of sleep-deprivation psychosis for me? That said, for some bizarre childmind reason or other our five-year-old spent about a week crawling into our bed in the wee hours of the morning. The first time it happened we were startled as all heck on account of him then sleeping until nine. We had not slept until nine for some time. It made the day very short.
I don’t let my kids cry it out either Luna, and I think 11 years old is ridiculous to be sleeping with your parents, sorry. Our almost three year old goes to sleep on her own, but if she wakes up one of goes and sits with her until she falls back asleep. This happens like once every few months. The 8 month old sleeps in his crib in our room, but we put him in bed with us if he wakes up in the middle of the night because it’s easier. He’s really hit and miss, sometimes he’ll sleep all night, sometimes he’s up at 4. My cut off for regular sleeping with us is probably 2, but no way in hell is my 11 year old sleeping with mw.
now zuzu, child-hating is one thing, but Mommy drive-bys? Don’t be silly. It’s always OK to hate on women as long as they’re mommies, because we all know that unless they’re poor and single, they’re morons. And yeah, I did read the article. There’s a big difference between suggesting parents not let their kids co-sleep if the parents don’t want to, and the inevitable “well MY mom did blah blah blah and we turned out all right, fucking spoiled brats today” blather inevitable in any discussion of actual parents. It’s like you just have to mention mothers and otherwise normal liberals turn into whiny eighty-year-olds with lawns.
I’m like Chicklet and I don’t recall ever co-sleeping with my parents, though my brother and I often shared a bed/room growing up and there was a time when my Uncle co-slept with us… but that was… uh.. to molest me… I can pretty much sleep anytime, anywhere with almost anyone. I guess I’ve had so many different sleeping arrangments in my life that I don’t really care who/what/when/where anymore or if I’m even really tired or not. (which can be a problem sometimes, especially in boring office meetings) My daughter slept by herself until about half a year ago (she’s 4) but now every night she wants to sleep in Mommy’s bed cause she’s “scared of my[her] room” I’m hoping it’s just a phase. I’ve tried to reach an agreement with her that she can sleep in my bed on Fridays and Saturdays. But every weekday she tries to re-negotiate “No, my bed is Friday!” LOL. Maybe I shouldn’t have repainted her room but she seemed fine with it months after I did it… Thought she does keep tearing down the border and she doesn’t seem to keen on the white ceiling vs purple walls. Sigh. I’ve tried rearranging her room several times, thinking maybe it wasn’t “fung-shei” or something, but to no avail. Even when I’m firm about her sleeping in her bed, she’ll wait until I’m REMing so that I don’t notice when she sneaks into my bed until I wake up in the morning. We were co-sleepers from when she was born (futon bed, nice flat and firm – plus I sleep like a rock, no rolling over) because for some reason I could never fathom, no matter what I tried (something with my scent on it, soothing music, sound of my voice, I even bought her a cute unicorn doll/pillow that imitated a heartbeat when you lay on it), she absolutely HATED her crib. Whereas when she slept with me she would sleep for HOURS, she only stay asleep in her crib (she’d have to be asleep before I put her in there first) for an hour, 2 hours max. Obviously, since parenting mags recommend taking naps the same time as your kid, co-sleeping was the best option for us. As she got older I tried more and more to get her to sleep in her crib/toddlerbed/twinbed. But it wasn’t until we bought/moved to the house and we both got seperate rooms (and I got a safety gate to put up on her room) that we actually started sleeping seperately. Which was only about 2 years ago. So she’s slept by herself for about… um…1 1/2 years before reverting back to the old ways. I don’t think I have a point here, I’m just rambling. Sorry.
Although… thinking about what Prairielily said about younger brother sleeping with dad as a way to spend more time with him. And then reading about some of the parents in the article… that may be all that’s behind this. More time with their parents. Hmmm.. maybe my daughter just needs more Mommy-time too.
I don’t remember ever sleeping with my parents as a matter of course. There were those occasions when I’d tuck in between my parents during thunderstorms or after particularly bad dreams, but they tried to keep that to a bare minimum, mostly because I kicked like a windmill up until I was twelve. I was quite keen on our bedtime rituals, though; we’d get together in my brother’s room for bedtime prayers, then Berenstein Bears for both of us (when we were younger) or chapter books separately (when we were older; I think that Anne of Green Gables was my first), and then bedtime in our own beds. It worked for us, I think, because it gave us quality time with our parents and also served as punctuation for the day – “After this, you go to bed, and tomorrow will start tomorrow.” I don’t know if there would have been that puncutation if I’d just been cuddling up in the parents’ bed afterwards. To this day, though, I have trouble sleeping with someone else in bed. Or, rather, I have trouble sleeping with someone else touching me; I can generally get to sleep if Other Person is over on his own pillow, but cuddling and/or spooning just leads to cranky mornings for me.
I can’t fathom why 11 year olds would want to sleep with their parents. Even before that age, I didn’t want to be near my parents, I wanted to be alone with my door shut. Aren’t 11 year olds strippers and harlots now a days anyways?
That’s so funny, Ashlee, because I just read through all of this thinking pretty much the same thing — my mother sometimes wanted me to sleep with her, but I was always of the mind “why would I?”
Hear! Hear! Mythago. You called it. And yeah, zuzu, I read it. And I don’t care. The point is that this sort of judgmental crap pisses me off. And no, some people can’t fathom why an 11 year old might want/need to sleep with his or her parents, but I imagine there’s a lot of things those people can’t fathom. Ever hear of *anxiety*?! There are these things called mental health issues that I’d think that you all ought to have a little more compassion for. Sheesh.
I think that what the kids are going through is simple anxiety that is not the same as having serious mental health issues. Simple anxiety is often overcome through simple desensitization. They’re pushing mom out of the bed to sleep in an entirely different room so they can sprawl out on mom’s bed–it’s not like waking up to seeing mom not there is causing them stress. While it’s probably a source of comfort for them to be in mom’s bed, I think that this is more just that the parents didn’t really set a boundary, because really, mom’s bed is their own bed. If they wanted to be with her, they would join her when she went to sleep in their room. If there had been a freaky meltdown associated with trying to put the foot down and telling the kids “no, you stay in your bed tonight” I might say “yeah, get a mental health professional involved.” But the article doesn’t discuss that, which makes me suspect the parents never even tried. I’m all for co-sleeping, but what’s described in the article isn’t healthy. Husband and wife have no marital bed, and on top of that the children’s presence in the bed is physically harming the adults: “[…] I will tell you that my daughter does kick and spin. My husband will swear she pulls the chest hairs out of his chest. But if I don’t make an issue out of this, I do — we do — get a decent amount of sleep, at least six hours.” I think there’s a huge difference physically, emotionally, and mentally between an infant and a six-year-old. I have to side with Zuzu on this one — obnoxious class wars aside, these people aren’t doing themselves or their kids any favors by letting them have rule of the bed like that.
And no, some people can’t fathom why an 11 year old might want/need to sleep with his or her parents, but I imagine there’s a lot of things those people can’t fathom. Ever hear of *anxiety*?! There are these things called mental health issues that I’d think that you all ought to have a little more compassion for. Luna, the kid sleeps in the parents’ bed every night. The parents don’t want the kid there, but don’t do anything about it. Plus, what Mighty Ponygirl said.