This is how we’re sleeping tonight.. or most nights.

[Sulking]

key code:
green - husband
white - DD (5yo)
yellow - DS (3yo)
purple - me.

2am, can’t sleep, being kicked in the ass and stomach.

I could go sleep in their room but I will be even more sore in the morning as I suffer from chronic back pain after my c sections that I have to have particular mattresses/toppers to be comfortable.

AIBU to want to DIY a double-king size bed across the entire back wall of our bedroom just so I can sleep at night?!🤣

How has this got anything to do with co sleeping? You can still set boundaries for your child and let them into your bed when they are sad/ scared/ feel alone at night. It doesn't mean you never say no to them about anything else.

I was raised in the 80s/90s and we always ended up in our parents beds. It's not a hugely new thing for woke millennial parents.

why are your kids sleeping in your bed.

you need to go to their room with them if they are scared. They'll soon stop when they realise that they won't be sleeping with you. Letting them in with you is a disaster.

good grief.

Invest in good double beds for every room, if you can't get them out.

I can understand how you've ended up like that. My kids always come into us through the night. After the second one comes in, one of us goes to sleep in the vacated single bed. I've always been too tired and/or lazy to try to settle them back into their own bed. The only obvious solutions are that you get a bigger bed, one of you moves to a vacated child's bed or you give them a reward for each night spent in their own room.

I bet the kids sleep just fine, it’s the parents that don’t !! Speaking from experience here, we have a 2.5 year old and a 1.5 year old in our bed 😆

I would absolutely hate this. I can't stand all the touching and not being able to move around in the bed. And like a pp mentioned back pain is nothing to mess with, especially as you age (i know from experience). I would either buy a double for them to sleep in or put a mattress on the floor for them.

So someone is experiencing very poor, disruptive sleep, plus physical pain from the poor sleep which exacerbates previous injuries, and you’re advice it to ‘enjoy it’.

Weird.

Or actually quite toxic.

Well, there are psychological studies that support the current style of parenting and most experts don’t consider responding to your child’s emotional needs as mollycoddling.

We can use past parenting as an example of what NOT to do.

Ah yes... studies, research, experts.
But sadly no common sense.
What today's parents don't get [and as I said upthread, don't want to get because they are absolutely convinced they are The Best Generation Of Parents Ever) is that best practise, research, experts change over time.
And the arrogance of your last statement ...
As I say, crack on. You are sure you are right but you won't know for years, by which point research will have changed and the current baby and child-led philosophy will have disappeared years ago.

We don’t know that we are right, we are humans so we evolve and learn - as we should.

What the research shows us now, is that attentive parenting is good for children. Research aside, most of us can tell from our own generational trauma that something needed changing - and I applaud all parents willing to address this.

Actually, we DO know we're right. Because it's the way other similar animals do it and the majority of human kind have done it for almost all of time.

Sticking children in separate rooms alone is a western thing that's only been around for a very short time. That was the experiment and it hasn't worked. It hasn't created more cohesive families and resilient humans.

Not everyone follows this weird little universe where people don't have to get up mega early for work and don't need to go to bed early and get more than 1 day off work a week yanno..or have tvs in the bedroom.

Seperate bedrooms here and no divorce on the cards. There are plenty other ways to keep a bond.

Late night personal chats and lie ins indeed.

OP get another bed to make more room or get the mattress toppers for the kids beds. This doesn't last forever.

Can't? Don't you mean won't? At this age (and supposedly size) they can be made to leave. That is until OP gives herself such bad back ache that she can't move of course.

Well it might. My friends dh was still on the floor in the kids bedroom at 13. 13 long sleepless years is a prison sentence or worse.

So you have separate bedrooms, no time together and no personal chats. Okay. Well that’s your relationship, not mine, but that doesn’t even sound like a marriage to me..

OP I just want to say that I really appreciate the effort you have put in to creating a whole diagram for mumsnet to show us your sleeping positions 🤣🤣 I think either get the kids back in their own beds or buy a mahoosive bed as you have suggested, whatever works! I like someone’s suggestion about putting double beds in the kids rooms too so they can maybe crawl in with each other rather than the adults for comfort if needed. But the current arrangement is madness 🤣

Children started being put into their own beds in the late 19th century, i.e. post 1850. What's really interesting is that it was quickly followed by "cry it out" parenting books in the late 19th century, because as it became popular parents wanted to know what to do, they hadn't been used to children crying a lot at night. Commonly of course with bigger families, children slept with other siblings rather than parents. Then by 1950 attachment theory came out looking at how to resolve issues caused. The time- span is really incredibly short.

Exactly this. I’m willing to bet that the co-sleeping thing is never driven by a man 😄