Co sleeping parents- do you have the same bedtime as your DC?

[RoseGoldEagle]

My DD is nearly 1, I never planned on co-sleeping, but it was the only way we could all get a reasonable amount of sleep in the early months. I kept thinking- 'I should probably stop doing this and transition her to her own cot'', but then night time would come, and co sleeping was always the much easier option, it's incredibly rare for her even to cry at night because she can basically wake, latch on and feed briefly, and fall asleep within minutes, and I barely wake up and go back to sleep easily too.

The main issue I have with it though is the time we go to bed- as I have to go to bed at the same time as her (as I feed her to sleep in our bed- she would then stay asleep for a few hours even if I wasn't there I think, but obviously I can't leave her as she'd fall out of bed.).

If she stays up with us until we go to bed, I feel bad that her bedtime is later than it should be, and of course we don't really get an evening that way anyway, or not one to ourselves. But if go to bed with her at 8ish, I don't get an evening at all!

Just wondering what other co-sleeping parents do- do you put them in a cot for the first bit?( have tried this but she wakes up after 10-15 mins- I'm worried she's been spoilt by our ridiculously comfortable mattress and doesn't like the cot one!!) or I thought about bars for the bed, but read that they weren't safe. I even researched giant cots at one point that we could both sleep in and I could climb out of and leave her safely, suffice to say they do not make these!!! 😂 I feel sad to have to stop co-sleeping for this reason, but maybe it's something I need to think about. Any advice/experiences very welcome, thank you.

I used a cot pushed up to the side of our bed with one side removed. Obviously making sure they're is no 'gap' for them to get lost in!! This meant that I could leave them and then go to bed at my regular time.

Hi op, I have co-slept with both of mine. With dd we put our mattress on the floor with blankets around it so I could leave her in the evening. Now I have 8 month old ds and no room to store a bed frame in our new house so we have the bed in the corner and put ds in the corner by the wall and build a wall of pillows and duvet around him. My bedroom is opposite my living room though so with the door open I can see him.

You could put those toddler bed guards around the mattress or maybe a video monitor?

Foam wedge bed barrier things under the sheets & teach baby how to climb off the bed feet first. Monitor by you so you hear the first squeak.

I have one who wouldnt transfer from me at all so she slept on my knee until i took her to bed (quite happy to stay asleep while carried to the toilet but not when put into a bed or left in a bed )
One transfered fine but fed frequently so i put him on a quilt beside me until i took him up to bed.
One was ok in bed (but running up every hour put me off it for the others )

I second all the barrier suggestions but also get a video monitor and just have it in front of you in the evenings so you can spot wake up and intercept quickly! I'm only 6 months in so don't need to worry about the crawling off the bed yet but I think about it a lot. Of what's to come

Currently still bedsharing with almost 14m ds. He goes up to bed and bf to sleep, usually asleep by 730. Monitor as close to him as possible so I hear him at first rumble. We have a cot against the bed, with the bar up so it acts as a bedguard and pillows around him. Now that he can crawl though I have to make sure and get up there quick, but he hasn't fallen off yet.

Mine do go to bed at a similar time as me, maybe an hour earlier. I tell them stories and cuddle them to sleep then go downstairs. They don't need as much sleep as we are told in the country. In Europe it's different, none of this 12+ hours sleep ritual. My husband usually goes to bed at the same time as the baby so is there if they wake up. I have a cot at the same level/attached to the bed.

With my first I put a queen mattress on the floor in his room. Then I could feed to sleep and then roll away and have my evening. I could also then choose to sleep in my own bed with DP but if when DC woke up I could feed him and fall back to sleep in his room (I wanted to minimise getting up and down).

The other option is a bedguard, Argos do them and they fold down so when you come to bed you just swing it down. When I was pregnant I put the mattress in DC's room onto a bedframe as getting up and down on the floor was hard, so then I put a bedguard on the side.

Hi, I'm just wondering how happy you are about co-sleeping? It reads as if you've sort of fallen into the habit, as opposed to choosing it.

If you could wave a magic wand and have your child sleep in a cot, would you?

If yes, then maybe now might be a good time to try out some strategies to break the pattern?

If not, then sure some of the pps will help.

Please note, I'm not being critical of co-sleeping, I've done it myself at points.

Good luck

I became an accidental co-sleeper with my son (who's just over twelve months old), mainly because he'd wail like a banshee the second he touched his cot mattress. I started to get a bit down, as I'd go up before 7pm, and then that was it.

However, I kept on trying to get him in his cot when he was asleep, and he started sleeping through the traumatic experience. As soon as he woke up, I'd go through and bring him into bed with me. I started getting a couple of hours in the evening, which stretched until the point where he nearly sleeps through (occasionally makes it until 7am, more often he wakes some point between 6am/7am).

Sometimes I don't know what to do with my newfound free time!

We use bedguards. At 1 year my attitude is that the risk is minimal. Though we do have a video monitor so always aware of movements / wake ups anyway.

Tbh when left alone in our bed the kids - any of them - ALWAYS roll into MY SPACE and happily stay there. When I come to bed I either try and squeeze next to them and then they try and climb into me leaving nearly the whole of MY SPACE clear, or I move them, get into my space with my pillows and then they just climb on my head.

Kids are dicks.

We start out putting her in her cot then bring her in with us at first waking - which is usually somewhere around 1-2. My logic is that when (if?!) she magically starts sleeping through we'll already have the fall-asleep-in-the-cot battle sorted (it takes a week while to settle her, but not awful) and we'll be golden. I also get a few hours without having to bend myself round her as she likes to sleep at a 90 degree angle to us!

*wee while - it takes a wee while. 20-30 minutes. Not a week.

Thanks for all the great replies! Why on earth I didn't think of a monitor I don't know, as we have one, bought before she was born and never used (since she's never apart from us to need monitoring ☹️). Good idea about putting bed my mattress on floor by her cot too, if my husband and I agree to keep doing this, I think we will do that.

Really good question LastMango . I never even considered co-sleeping before she was born, no one I know did it (or said they did), the health visitor had told me it wasn't safe (which I now know is rubbish, provided it's done properly). I had a Moses basket ready to go (which has had all of about 10 minutes use!). I felt SO guilty about it to start with because I thought I was doing something awful! Actually I do quite enjoy it now and I think there's no way I would have kept breastfeeding to this point if I'd had to get up, properly wake up, take her out of a cot, nurse her, and put her back down (kudos to people that manage that!). Don't get me wrong, I'd love a night sleeping in my own bed alone (DH included tbh!), but if the alternative if a cry it out method I'm not sure I could do it (I'm really not trying to be judgemental there- it just isn't for us).

I think if I could manage to get my evenings back (at least sometimes), I might be quite keen to continue with it. I still have a niggling feeling that I'm just 'putting off the pain'- that at some point I'll have to wean her out of our bed and it will be harder the longer I leave it, and that does worry me. I also find it embarrassing at other people's houses (my family live a fair distance away, and we stay at friends reasonably often), because where they are putting any little ones down and ready to start their evening, we still have DD downstairs until we go to bed which must be really annoying for them (and I'd LOVE to be able to put DD to bed and have an evening properly with them too). Not that what happens when we stay away every few months should shape something so important I guess.

Batteries your post made me laugh- how can a one year old manage to take up all the room in a king sized bed- but they do!!

Researching bed guards now... thanks for all the advice.

Benson do you mind if I ask how old your DD is? If ours would go 8ish til 1ish in her cot and could then come into bed with us I would be delighted by that! And do you put her in her cot awake, or wait til she's asleep? I think because when I've tried it I've put her in asleep, so it doesn't really work, but I've also tried putting her in awake but sleepy at nap times, (well, I tried that once when I was following an on-line sleep plan, and was trying to teach her to 'self-soothe') and she got so hysterical that I had to stop (this was after leaving her for 5 minutes).

She's 11 months. The putting her in her cot part....I'd say 3 nights out of 4, she goes in drowsy but awake (and then goes straight to non-drowsy and pissed off!) and then one of us sits with her, maybe hand in cot, patting etc. It takes between 15 and 45 minutes, but usually between 20 and 30 for her to drop off. It's something we're working on. About 1 night in 4 she stays cross and it escalates to proper screaming and I give in and feed her to sleep. I don't always manage to transfer her without her waking which is why we're persisting with the in-cot settling. We don't have it figured out by any means! But we do at least get an evening together, and a few hours in bed on our own (nudge, wink) before she ends up joining us.

Also, that's how it works at night when she's very tired. I've never managed to get her to nap in her cot! It's all still a work in progress....

OP your comment about the giant cot made me smile - I've fantasised about just such a contraption

We have exactly the same issue as you. Just now he's in a cot pushed next to our bed with one side taken off - his mattress is about a foot lower than ours, which is fine for now but soon he'll learn to climb out. He has a somewhat kamikaze attitude to the sides of the bed so I worry a lot about him falling and hurting himself.

I'm seriously considering getting rid of the bed frame and just baby proofing the bedroom. Our bed is really noisy anyway so I'd be glad to be rid of it tbh. He won't settle in his cot at bedtime anyway and has to be moved once he's asleep so it would solve that problem too.

I love cosleeping!

Baby monitor next to baby, and sprint upstairs when they wake! He usually just sits up and cries (9months old). However he's got quicker so I put his cot mattress on the floor at the end of my bed and try and pop him down on that. TBH of our bed is quite low so even if he did fall off onto the cot mattress or cushions he's only falling 25cm and onto something soft and while I'd prefer him not to, he's done worse when awake!
Personally I like co-sleeping bestwhen they start the night off in their own space/cot/bed then come in with me at the first wake up. It's nice to get a little sleep without a baby around and maybe to read in bed for a bit. Doesn't tend to reliably happen with mine till 18montha old though.

My experience is very similar to MetalMidget. I remember at the point when my DD was about six months and no longer spending the evening with us being really worried about how get an evening back if I couldn't leave her to sleep in our bed alone. I started putting her in her cot once she was already asleep.

To start with it was horrendous, and she would wake up immediately and be furious and I would spend the whole evening soothing her back to sleep. Eventually the amount of time before she woke up stretched out, and now she's 14 months and more or less sleeps through most nights.

I've a one year old and a video monitor and a bed guard on my side. She knows how to get out of the bed safely. However I won't leave her in bed - when she wakes she immediately starts crawling before she's properly awake and the room is dark so she's likely to fall off the open side. Even if I see her on the monitor I couldn't get there fast enough to stop this happening. The solution for me is that I feed her to sleep (sitting up) and then put her in the travel cot until I go to bed. However I would never have got away with this with my eldest. So for her I fed her to sleep on a single mattress on the floor in her (childproofed) bedroom

In terms of teaching them to get down - both of mine have been able to do this pretty consistently from crawling age. We say "turn turn turn" and initially show them how to turn, then progress to just saying it while they do it themselves. Every time they go near the edge we repeat turn turn turn until they've grasped it

I surround my one yr old with pillows and watch like a hawk on the baby monitor!
I'm planning on a floor mattress soon though so I can sneak away and it won't be too bad if DD falls off.

@YouAndMeAreGoingToFallOut hi! 👋🏻 I've just written a post (called no Cry Sleep Solution) - I'm basically having the same problem you mention above, my 6 month old cant sleep downstairs anymore but when I feed her to sleep upstairs I feel I am up and down the stairs almost every half an hour!! For you when did you little on start stretching out sleep? Thanks in advance x

Sorry OP to hijack post!

My DD starts off in her cot and then comes in with us on first waking which is anything from 9pm to midnight. If it's before I'd go to bed, I just go to bed with her when she wakes.
I also have an extra long and high bed guard as we've got a really big bed. I really like bed sharing but know it's not for everyone. She is nearly 2 and only recently night weaned. I still breastfeed her to sleep.

Crazycatlady you'd think I'd be able to remember this given it was comparatively recently but I'm not really sure! It took a pretty long time though for her to sleep reliably in the evenings: maybe it was at about 8-9 months?