Me and my boyfriend have been co-sleeping with our children since they were born. Some of my friends think we are nuts and people overall tend to have very strong opinions about it. Read more about it here. Sleep-sharing has of course its downsides, but for us the positive aspects have been dominating.


1. First of all

I know from myself that I have always been feeling better when I have shared a bed with someone I like, rather than when I have slept alone. I have felt it would be cruel to isolate my social little babies in own beds. And now when I am used to sharing a bed with my children, I enjoy it as much as they do. I find it very comforting to hear them breathing at night and I love when they are cuddling with me in the sleep.

2. Does this affect my sleeping?

Yes, sometimes it does. But the upside of sleep-sharing is greater because of all the time that I don’t have to go out of bed to put my children back to sleep, I will just put a hand on them or give them my breast (the one that’s still breastfed that is), often while I go on sleeping.

3. Science shows

that there is a link between Sudden infant death syndrome (which we go into more detail about over here) and co-sleeping so that has been a great fear of mine for the first six months of both my children live. I have tried to take all the extra precautions there is to compensate for the co-sleeping.

4. If you want to know more about it

this link will give som good tips on safe co-sleeping. For us it worked well to have a baby nest in the bed, it was a bit like the baby had its own bed inside our bigger bed. We didn’t use it all the time, but a lot.

5. So finally the thing that everybody wonders

when it comes to family beds, but no one dares to ask about, is how the sex life is influenced by it. Well, I think our sex life would be better without sleep-sharing, but only insignificantly. When you have two small kids it’s kind of impossible to have sex when they are awake anyway but when they are asleep we can have sex just like everybody else, maybe not as comfortable in our own bed as other people, but this is easy to solve with couches and extra beds.

The only way sleep sharing influences our sex life is that we don’t have as many of these moments when we are comfortably laying next to each other in bed and one thing leads to another. We will have to make a bit more effort to get started.

Well, this is how and why my family co-sleeps. If you want to read about the reality behind some myths of co-sleeping, check this out!

And if you have something to add, may it be thoughts or experiences, just put em in the comments below.