How it changed my Perception of Co-Sleeping (Three in a Bed: The Benefits of Sleeping with Your Baby - Deborah Jackson)

Member Name: BaggiesHouse

Product:	Three in a Bed: The Benefits of Sleeping with Your Baby - Deborah Jackson
Date:	26/11/02 (357 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Well researched material, offers practical info., Is a persnal experience of the author

Disadvantages: bias towards breastfeeding, Can be very heavy going

Book Review of Three in A Bed by Deborah Jackson
ISBN: 0 ? 7475 ? 4295 ? 3

How it changed my Perception of Co-Sleeping

I chose to read this particular book after meeting Deborah Jackson at the 2002 Practical Parenting Baby Show at Olympia. It was a topic I felt I needed to find out more about for my Post Natal course, as it was an option that whilst I was pregnant and even after having my baby I would not consider. I want to be able to be objective on this topic.

I am one of those people that hates to share my personal space, and so felt that co-sleeping would never work for me. It took me many months to get used to sharing my bed with one other person and even now, much as I love my partner, I can never spend my time sleeping cuddled up! For starters I get too hot, feel claustrophobic, hate having restricted movement and hear every noise ? breathing, snuffling and movement. So for me 3 of us in the bed would seem like torture. However, when our daughter was born she did spend 8 weeks in her crib beside my bed ? I got very little sleep. Now she is two and a half and very accustomed to sleeping in her own bed in her own room.

One of the first pieces of text that really struck me was ?Catherine , a French friend, said her four-year-old daughter had asked ?Mummy, why do I have to sleep on my own when you sleep with Daddy??? I know how much I hate to sleep without my partner there and I also know how much he hates sleeping alone too. Yet as Deborah presents to us in the book it appears to be something that society forces onto its young children. I was also struck that it is not only women who like the idea of co-sleeping Deborah quotes Richard E Grant as saying ?I wake up with two women by my side: my wife on one and my daughter on the other.? It certainly sounds to me as though he is happy with the arrangement.

The book goes on to look at poorer countries and less industrialised communities where co-sleeping
occurs as a matter of course, and babies are carried around constantly. In our modern developed society it has become the norm to put our babies in cots and to separate them from us. It appears that this has happened due to commercial pressures ? such as the desire to have a beautiful nursery and also pressure form health professionals.

Deborah looks at studies that show that there are many benefits to the childs health from co-sleeping, such as the reduced risk of cot death, the baby?s warmth is better controlled by the mothers body temperature, the baby is soothed by the familiar sounds of the mothers heartbeat , and feeding is much less of a disturbance. The best example of this in the book is the following passage:

Born 12 weeks prematurely on Oct 17 , 1995, Brielle was put on a respirator while Kyrie was able to breathe on her own.
?My husband and I came in to see the girls,? recalls mother Heidi, ?and Brielle was having a really tough day, her oxygen levels had been turned way up and she was having erratic heartbeats.? As Brielle?s condition deteriorated, nurses at Massachusetts Memorial suggested the Jacksons hold their sick daughter, telling Heidi that ?perhaps a little bit of love? would help. But she recalls, ?If anything she was getting too stressed. I told [nurse] Gayle Kasparian that I was going to put her back in the incubator?.and she said, ?Let ne see if putting her in with her sister would help.??
Kyrie was gaining weight and getting close to going home. ?We moved Kyrie way over to the other side [of her crib] and put Brielle next to her. It was really quite amazing?.Brielle just snuggled right up against her and fell asleep.?
Almost immediately, Brielle?s heart rate and breathing improved. ?My husband and I looked at each other and at Gayle and she said ?I can?t believe it!?. We stared at her for 10 minutes to see if she was going to stay like that or whether it was just a fluke. She stayed like that. They
were identical twins and they shared the same placenta and I think that was what she was used to. Brielle was used to hearing Kyrie?s heart, she was used to the way she felt and smelled.?
?It was kind of a miracle?, says Susan Fitzback, nurse manager at the hospital. ?But it worked and we?ve been doing it ever since.?

(?Double Exposure?, WHO, 17 June 1996)

It is thought by many people that by co-sleeping you are denying the child its chance to become independent. The babies in many of the tribes that co-slept still grow up to be independent ? maybe more so that those that sleep alone as they feel more secure from all the close contact in the early days. Also it would appear that children who have been exposed to this level of intimacy and who have known intimacy between the parents are less likely to have sexual ?hang-ups? or to suffer abuse. Also as time goes on the child is generally not that difficult to wean out of the bed but merely tends to make the transition to their own space, bed, room when they are ready.

More quotes that I like from this book are:

Fathers will be able to bond with their babies as nature had intended them to ? as they sleep. Even if dad is away all day, he need not become a distant figure, appearing only at bath times and weekends.

Don?t sleep with your baby if you don?t want to.


My conclusion
I have to admit that after reading this book I actually love even more the times when my little girl climbs into bed with me early in the morning. We now have afternoon sleeps in my bed together cuddled up. It actually feels like our special time.

The book is well researched and Deborah has looked at the arguments from both sides even though she is openly using the book as a medium to express her own feelings and reasoning for co-sleeping. The research also covered a lot of very interesting topics.

I enjoyed reading the book immensely as a Postnatal Discu
ssion Group Leader Trainee, however, I do feel that the content at times was rather heavy going for a new or potential parent. In fact, I was so interested in this aspect that I did a search for reviews on the internet and found only 2, both by mothers who actually found the book very useful. I think it can be very difficult to read a book for one reason and also look at its usefulness to others,

My only negativity is that I felt the book was very much geared towards the benefits to a breastfeeding mother and could potentially make a bottle feeding parent feel somewhat excluded. However, I think it is a difficult balance to get 100% correct as with most readers of this type of book the stereotype of a breast feeding mother would probably be applied
.
Were I to have another child after reading this book I think I would give co=sleeping a try. It now almost seems cruel to me to separate mother and child after birth, after such intimacy and closeness that the mothers womb offered. How frightening life must be for a newborn baby, it seems almost inhumane to remove that tiny being from all the security it has ever known at such a vulnerable time.

Summary: