Is it bad to let a puppy sleep with our old dog?

[yodl]

Hi, I´m new to mumsnet and English isn´t my first language, so I apologize in advance if I make any mistakes : )
So, we got a puppy two weeks ago, he is 2 months 3 weeks old. Our older dog accepted him right away. They play together and sleep together during nights.
Today we started dog training classes with our pup and the trainer says that it´s a bad idea to let them sleep together as the puppy will get too attached to the old dog and we´ll face serious problems once the old dog passes away (she is 11 years old, but absolutely healthy).

I like our nights at the moment. Puppy ofcourse isn´t housetrained yet so he pees on his puppypads once during the night. I´m sure he´ll grow out of it once he´s able to control his bladder. I know many dogs who´ve been brought up this way as well and at one point they all stopped using the pads during the night so I don´t think it´s worth the effort to take him outside at night. We won´t let him pee inside during the day and praise him a lot if he does it outside.

Apart from that, they´re usually both sound asleep during the night. Should I really stop this practice, crate the puppy and separate him from the older dog as the trainer advised?

• for the first three NIGHTS, not weeks, sorry!

All anyone can do is make the best decision they can for their circumstances.

Battendog slept beside me and was taken out whenever he cried. We never made a big deal of it (he never got fuss or play) and went straight back in his crate once done.

He was clean through the night (10pm - 7am ish) within about 4 weeks. He also always was a lovely sleeper, easy to settle and never really tried to wake me up early. I put that down to using an alarm as a constant cue it was time to get up and never engaging in anything remotely interesting before it went off.

Daytime toilet training took longer (understandably).

No way could I have left him with the older dogs overnight - I could well see how that would cause problems settling and risk him annoying the older dogs.

During the early months I saw it as my role to stop battendog doing anything silly that damaged the chance of a future good relationship between all the dogs. Which basically meant keeping him out of their way unless we were all doing something together (such as a walk or snoozing on the sofa etc).

I've only had experience with one puppy but he slept in kitchen with puppy pads down for first week or so; we got up if we heard him moaning / barking but not otherwise. After first few days he slept approx midnight til 6 and no longer needed puppy pads.