My Baby, Co-sleeping and The Patriarchy

When I had my first baby in 2007, I stumbled upon co-sleeping as many parents do… after trying everything else. I had a co-sleeper (a little side car) next to my bed that my baby would sleep in during the night. He grunted ALL NIGHT LONG and I was awakened by every little sound he made. It was as if we both just wanted to know where the other was. He felt too far away even though I could reach out and touch him. My anxiety was really bad and I tried putting him in the crib in the other room. This made it even worse, as every time he woke up to feed, I would walk down the hallway, pick him up, nurse him in the glider and then settle him back down into the crib and then bleary eyed walk down the hall to my room and try and go to sleep again. I would still obsessively wake to check the monitor. It’s like my body was just on fire needing to know where my baby was, even while I was sleeping. I cried every morning with how exhausted I was.

One night I fell asleep feeding him in the rocking chair and almost dropped him. My husband at the time said, “Honey it’s just not safe, just bring him to bed with you”. So I did. I was so worried I was doing something wrong. But that night, he stopped grunting and just lay in the crook of my arm and snuggled with me all night. We both slept really well. I remember just how refreshed and alive I felt the next day. I also had this contented feeling like everything was right in the world. Even after this, I still worried it wasn’t safe to sleep with my baby in my bed and continued to try and use the co-sleeper. We even bought an expensive baby hammock that was supposed to move with his movements and lull him back to sleep. He still grunted. Nothing worked.

I joined a new mom’s group and all of them were using the cry-it-out method. One night I got desperate and tried it. I lasted 5 minutes. As my son made what sounded like angry desperate cries for me, my body tensed and I felt sick. I started to cry and shake. I just couldn’t stand the intense need to go comfort him and pick him up. At that point I started to research co-sleeping. I needed to know that what I felt inside when I slept with my son was backed by science. I found conflicting studies about co-sleeping and bedsharing that made me wonder if anyone was really looking at the big picture. Had anyone felt what I had by following my parenting instincts? Was it really that wrong to sleep with my baby?

Then I discovered Dr. James McKenna, PhD, who was an anthropologist studying mother-infant co-sleeping pairs at the time. There was a magazine article written about his research and his sleep lab at the University Of Notre Dame, but he had just published his first book in 2007, “Sleeping With Your Baby”. In the book, he writes about how his wife in 1978 discovered co-sleeping after being exhausted with their first child and saying "I don’t care what the books say, I’m just gonna sleep with my baby”. She felt the same way I had after just one night of co-sleeping. Being an anthropologist, Dr. McKenna was intrigued by what he witnessed and the conflict of the popular advice given at the time.

“We learned that there was not only nothing in the childcare books that reflected anything about what we had learned about our primate heritage and sleeping arrangements, but nothing was reflected about what current neurobiological and psychological research was uncovering about human infant biology and the role of maternal touch in promoting human infant growth and well being. Further we learned that infant care recommendations were not based on empirical laboratory or field studies of human infants at all, nor on cross cultural insights into how human babies actually lived. Rather they were based on 70 or 80 year old cultural ideas, unique to Western culture and historically novel, mostly reflecting the social values of male physicians who not only had never changed a diaper — but never in any substantial way — associated with, or taken care of, their own infants. These were essentially middle aged men, who preferred to define babies, in terms of who they wanted infants to become, rather than in terms of who they actually were — little creatures who are very much dependent physiologically, socially, and psychologically on the presence of a caregiver to an unprecedented degree for an unprecedented length of time compared to other mammals. The more we delved into these areas, the more we discovered, that the prevailing wisdom had no basis in science whatsoever. This discover changed my career.” — Dr. James McKenna, PhD, “Sleeping With Your Baby”, Pg18-20 2007, Platapus Media.

I found myself feeling angry about how the Patriarchy played a huge role in defining our cultural practices around infant care. These doctors had never taken care of a baby, and just surmised what they thought would be good parenting practices based on the societal and cultural values of the time. Just like many things in our society, we don’t see it if its woven in. Unfortunately, the ripple effects of this 100 year old advice on the way Americans care for their infants is still being felt. Beliefs that you can teach a baby to “self-soothe” and that helping a baby to be self-sufficent earlier will foster more independence is still being taught to parents even though more recent science finds the opposite is true.

I was surprised to learn that co-sleeping was near universal in most parts of the world and that “attachment parenting” is just called “parenting” in non-western cultures. Keeping your babies and toddlers close isn’t novel. It’s the way things have been done for a millennia.

When my baby was 18 months old, I became pregnant again. I knew I would do things differently this time. This time I planned to co-sleep with my 2nd baby and had a floor bed for my toddler in the other room so he could get those first precious few hours of sleep before midnight by himself and then could come and get into bed with us for the more wakeful hours of the morning. I played musical beds with my baby and toddler having the baby always on the opposite side of me than my toddler, nursing when I needed to. I got WAY more sleep and finally enjoyed co-sleeping rather than feeling anxious about it. The family dog approved of this situation, as pack animals do, and slept at the foot of the bed with us. I felt like the full expression of my mammal self, soaked in oxytocin, breastmilk at the ready, between my two warm children.

It was bliss.