Why do we make children sleep in their own room when it’s clear they don’t want to?

[merrynelly]

Many people I know have struggled with or are struggling with getting their children to sleep in their own room and to stay there for the whole night. Often the child comes to the parents room in the middle of the night and if permitted will sleep in their parents bed for the remainder of the night. I would think that many children seem to feel safer and more secure sleeping in the same room as their parents if not the same bed. So why do we force them to go against what seems to be so natural for them?

[quote JohnsRaincoatLost]**@merrynelly* back in March you said your child was not quite 12 months old and you were "permanently exhausted, lacking sleep and therefore feel I am not doing my best with him"*

So maybe some of us are coming at this years down the line from where you are. You are planning to return to work full time as you said in your other thread, so maybe a year from now when you have still not had a full nights sleep and you are ridiculously exhausted you would think maybe they need to sleep in their own room in their own bed.

My sons are now 18 and 15 so we are very far down the line from you. My children have slept in their own rooms from under 1. If they needed me in the night and they were in their cot of course Dh or I would get up and be with them.

If when older they needed to be next to a parent to sleep that night Dh and I let them into our superking bed and Dh would often leave our bed to sleep in the now empty one. Firstly because he was working full time and I am a long term SAHM and secondly because my sons just wanted me. However having a starfish child (DS1) or a limpet child (Ds2) attached to you whilst they slept at 7 or 8 was not great for my sleep. My bed is technically 2 single beds. You would think that would mean I actually got sleep. Nope.

Disturbed sleep over a long period of time is soul destroying.[/quote]
Good spot on the OP!

The children that struggle with it are parents who dont set firm boundries and let it drag on and on for months.

I don't agree that attention seeking issues stem from a child sleeping in their own bed.

It's a good thing I said it doesn't mean all the time or that it's the only reason for such issues. So we agree. I just also know that it does happen a lot.

It's all a load of bollocks. Children instinctively sleep in with parents until they want to be alone. The key thing is to let them know they have their own space ready, if they want it.
Parents need private time too, so another bed is handy.

Also one size doesn't fit all. Children have different personalities, some reach independence more quickly than others for example, some are naturally more anxious or need reassurance at night, some don't.

It's a good thing I also said this. So we agree.

@Hankunamatata

The children that struggle with it are parents who dont set firm boundries and let it drag on and on for months.

Or the ones who get a bit scared being alone. No amount of boundaries can fix that one.

Only ever had this with my eldest. Our middle child wouldn't get in our bed for any reason and youngest hasn't expressed any interest (yet)
I don't like co sleeping because I'm scared of rolling on them so barely slept when our eldest came in bed.
Also we like watching a film in bed and obviously can't do that with a child in bed.
I was relieved when we were able to move our son in to his own room. He was in the Moses basket in our room and we distributed each other all the time.

My eldest happily slept in his own room from a year old, still does now at 4.5.

Youngest big Nono he wants company all night long at 2.5 but I really do try and get him
Into his own room and bed as I’ve suffered with insomnia for years and sharing a bed with a wriggly toddler doesn’t work for me

@eatsleepread

Someone on this thread co-slept until her children were 9 & 10 years old. I'd be curious to know about the children's resilience levels, and also the state of her marriage! I can just about understand co-sleeping with a toddler, but the above is a bit odd in my opinion.

I co-slept with my dd until she was around 8 or 9 - can't remember exactly when she moved into her own room, it was a gradual drift, led by her at every step of the way.

At almost 16, she is one of the most confident and resilient kids I know. Very mature and independent. Excellent mental health. And we have a much closer relationship than almost any of her friends have with their parents. I'm not saying that this because of the co-sleeping, but it clearly didn't do her any harm.

As for my marriage, that's fine too, thank you. We have been together for over 25 years, and our relationship is based on much stronger stuff than who sleeps where.

Judge others all you like, but just because you find it odd when others do things differently, that doesn't make them wrong. There is more than one way to parent, and looking at the way my teenage dd has turned out, I have no regrets at all about how I approached it.

People who think children typically remain in their parents' bed forever if they sleep in the same room/bed show they have very limited, if not zero, experience and knowledge about it or the actual development stage of a human being without forced/manipulative intervention through tradition.

To be clear, I'm not condemning children sleeping in their own room because there are many cases where this is needed. Even for "selfish" reason, it's understandable but just accept it's for those reasons.

I'm just talking about the culture of doing so without giving it a thought and looking at actual needs/wants; or objectively trying it out as a lifestyle, not as a 1 or 2 week test while impatiently waiting for a magical result

Each to their own really but this is a cultural issue, and not anything to do with children's actual development, as a group. Individual cases may differ.

If I didn’t then I would have 4 children in my room so 5 of us in one room. 😂 wouldn’t fit would it!

For me it is because children need to go to sleep earlier. My children are in bed for 7pm,

Does co-sleeping mean going to bed at 7pm?

There are a lot of things that children don't want to do. Where do you draw the line?

Someone on this thread co-slept until her children were 9 & 10 years old
I'd be curious to know about the children's resilience levels, and also the state of her marriage!
can just about understand co-sleeping with a toddler, but the above is a bit odd in my opinion.

My youngest co slept until puberty and I don't share a bedroom with my husband and surprisingly marriage and kid are fine.

Shocker not every does things the same as you. I mean what kind of strong marriage does a person have where bedsharing is essential? It's a bit needy really imo.

For me, it starts with identifying needs/ wants. Needs have to be done.

Wants can be compromised.

That was for Tambora's post.

The issue is that many people often conflate the two and set arbitrary rules.

I have 3 dc unless they have been unwell they don't get to sleep in our thats our space to be together as a couple

I co-slept with mine when they wanted to (they both stopped at around age 8) and they’re two extremely independent men now, and have been throughout their development.

My kids have never minded sleeping in their own rooms. They sleep really well by themselves and never ask to sleep with us.

My DS is only 14 months. We have a single door between us so i hope him being able to see us through there will help in the long run.

@ItsAlwaysAFriendNeverMe

For me, it starts with identifying needs/ wants. Needs have to be done.

Wants can be compromised.

It's not quite that cut and dry though. Kids might want to bedshare because they need to feel safe at night. There's more than one way to meet the need but it does need meeting. Lots of people think if it's not about food, water or warmth that it can be ignored. Needs can be emotional too.

I struggle to understand what we don't just do what children want. It was a more a case of I felt like we were going against nature and that's why many struggle with this.

My DS currently thinks it’s great and natural to wee in his potty but wants to shit in his pants... suppose I should leave him to it then and not try to encourage him otherwise. He would also like to eat chocolate as a main meal and watch 300 episodes of Duggee back to back. Here’s me going against his natural instincts - I’ve been getting this parenting thing all wrong.

The whole 'going against nature' thing seems to be a core argument in favour of attachment parenting methods. See eg. people like Sarah Ockwell-Smith saying that we shouldn't sleep train and should be baby-led as far as possible when it comes to sleep because babies haven't changed since the stone age and don't know about the modern world. But the point is, we do live in the modern world. Like it or not, most families do need two incomes to survive and most of us are far from 'having a village.' So we do things that are 'against nature', like put children in their own rooms to improve parental sleep, because it's what works best for the family unit, bearing in mind that babies also need their parents to be functional in the daytime, earn money etc. If extended co-sleeping is working for your family then great, but I think this idea that we should do what nature dictates for babies, regardless of the costs, is all tied up with the expectation that mothers in particular should martyr themselves to parenthood. Which, as I have said on a previous thread regarding pressure to breastfeed, is very problematic from a feminist perspective

My DS currently thinks it’s great and natural to wee in his potty but wants to shit in his pants... suppose I should leave him to it then and not try to encourage him otherwise. He would also like to eat chocolate as a main meal and watch 300 episodes of Duggee back to back. Here’s me going against his natural instincts - I’ve been getting this parenting thing all wrong

Well, nappies aren't exactly natural in and of themselves, are they? Training him to soil himself in the first place was where you deviated from the biological norm. Nappies are a social norm, and I put my DC in them too because they're much easier than practicing elimination communication from birth, but they're not the natural status quo.