I’m a 27 year old single mother and I have a 12 year old son. Recently he’s been knocking on my door in the middle of the night because he can’t sleep and he asks to sleep with me. I’ve been letting him since neither of us really have a problem with it and it’s kind of nice not having to sleep alone every night. However, I’ve heard and seen some things online that seem controversial about co-sleeping with a child past a certain age. I definitely don’t want to negatively affect his development, so I guess what are your thoughts?
This. You’re not causing permanent damage to a child by letting them sleep in your bed. You don’t need an academic answer on what research says about this.
I don’t like it because my kids kick and move around, so I don’t want them to sleep in my bed.
The main advice for parenting should always be “you do you”.
Sorry, but that’s simply not good advice. Nobody is born with perfect parenting skills and is granted all the answers. In fact, many parents are not fit to raise kids at all, others are simply overwhelmed and need help.
It’s very easy to have a kid, not particularly easy to raise one. The idea that all your decisions are magically correct and sound just because it’s your own kid and that every parent knows best is simply wrong. It’s healthy to doubt yourself and to ask for advice.
Also, parenting science is not quackery. This is an actively researched area and there are real scientific efforts to better understand child development with respect to biology, psychology and neuroscience. These efforts do lead to a better understanding of how kids can be raised and how certain parental decisions might affect a child.
Personally, I’m happy each time parents try to inform themselves and seek the advice of others. That doesn’t necessarily mean relying on the answers a bunch of strangers give on social media, but I hope the Fediverse as a whole can do better.
Right now, I can’t make the claims you did in your post initially.
I wouldn’t know that. Intuitively, I do believe that co-sleeping would have a lot of benefits up to a certain age, after the infant stage and dangers of SIDS have passed. However, I could easily imagine that there might be adverse effects after a certain age. Would it be likely to occur after a handful of times? Probably not. Are there any indications on the threshold maybe? Anything to look out for, given the kid might have anything else going on? Maybe. All information I would have on that subject would indeed be anecdotal though, and so in turn pretty useless. Why the dismissal of an honest attempt at getting educated?
I would indeed argue for getting an overview of what science has to say on the matter and then making an individual, informedndecision based on all the additional context I’d have as a parent that I could never cram into a couple of posts on the internet.
Having access to scientific publications, I’ll see if I can provide some material later.
People tend to forget that in the past the parents rarely were the ones who raised the kids. It was the grandparents.
Parents have kids, the grandparents raise them, the parents learn how to raise so they then can raise them when they are the grandparents.
Raising a family was generational and cooperative. It’s more modern that family units are so small