I Never Intended to be a Co-sleeper: How my daughter has taken up residence in my bed

My daughter and I are going through a phase right now. At least, I hope it’s a phase. For the last month she has refused to sleep in her own bed. Sometimes I win, and she starts out in her own room--usually on the floor--but she almost always ends up in my bed in the middle of the night. And because I need my sleep too much to fight with her, she almost always stays there until morning. 

She has cried every night for the last month in the hopes that exhausted, I’ll give in and allow her to sleep in my bed. Some nights I have caved, and then sat bitterly in the living room, exiled from my bedroom. Other nights I let her cry, bringing her back to her bedroom over and over again until she finally passes out at 10:30 or 11pm. When I asked her why she doesn’t want to sleep in her bed anymore, she said that there are monsters under her bed. I did a thorough examination, getting down on my knees and peering under the bed in an effort to prove to her that there were no monsters whatsoever. Sadly, it did not work, and a month into this she is still holding firm.

It is at this point that my attachment-parenting readers might wonder why I don’t just allow my young daughter to sleep in my bed until she is ready to return to her own. My answer is two-fold. First, I live in a small, urban apartment, and as such my desk is in my bedroom. If my daughter goes to sleep in my bedroom, I cannot work in there. And while I do have a laptop, I am most comfortable and most productive when working at my desk. Second, I am not the type of person who is cut out to be a co-sleeper. I’m a highly sensitive sleeper, in that I need conditions to be just right for me to fall asleep and stay asleep. And because life is funny that way, my daughter is an extremely restless sleeper, and tosses and turns throughout the night. The truth is that in general, I sleep better alone, and because I know this about myself, I never planned to co-sleep with my daughter.

Up until recently, it had never been an issue. When my daughter was an infant, she slept in the room with my ex-husband and me, in a little bassinet at the foot of my bed. There were a few times when I fell asleep nursing her in my bed in the middle of the night, but other than that she slept in her bassinet. When she was about four months, we moved her into a crib in her own room, and when she was seven months, we did a modified version of sleep training (I let her cry, but I went into her room to comfort her), and in two days she was sleeping through the night. Over the last couple years she has slept in my bed a handful of times--usually when she was sick. Overall, she has been a dream when it comes to her sleeping habits, and I have always been extremely grateful for that.

Then last month we both came down with bad colds which turned into sinus infections, and she came down with an ear infection to boot. She ended up sleeping in my bed for the week or so that it took for her to start feeling like herself again, but I didn’t worry too much, assuming that she would return to her bed and sleep soundly like she always had. But by then my daughter had experienced a taste of la dolce vita, and was not about to sleep all alone again in the toddler bed in her room. 

Since then we have been battling, and bedtime is now frequently a two-hour ordeal. In an attempt to put some structure around my bribery, I recently purchased a Melissa & Doug responsibilities chart, which I am using to reward positive behavior, including sleeping in her own room. (Stay tuned for a post about how I am using it to implement a new reward system!) So far I have had mixed results in terms of it motivating her to stay in her bed all night, but I have decided to reward her as long as she falls asleep in her own room, so even if she later migrates to my bed, she still gets a sticker on the chart. And I have started to notice an improvement, in that she cries and whines for a shorter amount of time before she lays down and goes to sleep.

Slowly slowly we are working our way back to her sleeping independently in her room. It’s a gradual process. As the parent, I take responsibility for having allowed her to sleep in my bed for several nights in a row in the first place, and for having not been consistent since then. She is two, and of course she wants to sleep in bed with her mommy. And as she put it, “Mommy’s bed is nice.” But I also know that co-sleeping is not a good long-term option for us. 

And so I persevere, laying her down over and over in the evening, and making room for her and her stuffed-animal entourage at night. I know we’ll get there eventually. Teenagers love their bedrooms, right?