What Co-Sleeping as a Family Actually Looks Like

When lifesytle content creator Hunter Premo first posted a video of the massive bed in which she sleeps with her husband, 2-year-old, and 5-year-old every night, she didn't expect it to get thousands of comments of other parents weighing in on co-sleeping. From messages of encouragement to comments like "I'm so glad I never did this," it was clear people had thoughts.

The family's bedtime routine looks like this: they'll read books together, then put their five-month-old down in her crib, which is right next to the bed. Then, they'll all drift off to sleep around 8 o'clock. And Premo is adamant that it's the right choice for her family.

"To me, I look at it as more time together when they're little and one day they won't want to sleep with us, so we're just soaking up those moments while we can," she tells Popsugar.

Sharing an extra-large bed with her kids wasn't necessarily what Premo had on her parenting bingo card, but when her oldest was about 14 months, he got sick on a vacation. Premo and her husband let him sleep in their bed the whole trip, and "everyone just slept so much better," she says - so the habit stuck. When her middle son turned 2, he wanted to sleep with them, too, so "we were four deep in a king bed." Premo assumes that when her youngest grows into a toddler, she'll want to join in as well. "What is often viewed as a 'last resort' has ended up being one of my favorite parts of motherhood," she says.

Social media is filled with the myriad of ways parents try to tackle bedtime, whether that's diligently sticking to sleep-training techniques like the Ferber Method or practicing attachment-style sleeping. For many millennials who grew up with parents who had an "off limits" mindset about kids sleeping in their bed, co-sleeping can feel particularly "out there" - prompting questions about the actual mechanics of all sleeping in bed together, how couples find time for intimacy, and whether it's good for kids' development.

Co-sleeping technically refers to any situation in which families sleep in the same room, while bed-sharing involves parents sleeping in the same bed as their kids. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises against bed-sharing until a child is 1 or older. It also reports that approximately 3,500 infants die of sleep-related causes, including sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), every year. As for a safe sleeping environment for infants, the AAP recommends: "supine positioning; use of a firm, noninclined sleep surface; room sharing without bed sharing; and avoidance of soft bedding and overheating."

Experts Featured in This Article

Craig Canapari, MD, is director of the Yale Pediatric Sleep Center. He's the author of "It's Never Too Late to Sleep Train" and co-host of the podcast "The Sleep Edit."

Director of Yale Pediatric Sleep Center Craig Canapari, MD, always advises families to follow the AAP's guidelines when it comes to safe sleeping. The research is mixed on bed-sharing after infancy, he says - there's not a lot of data on whether co-sleeping is a hindrance in terms of development, nor whether it has specific benefits, either.

"This is an issue of: different families make different choices," Dr. Canapari says. But there are some questions parents can ask if they're considering co-sleeping. "Everyone in the household deserves to sleep well. So if there's a child in the parent's bed, is the child sleeping well? Are both parents sleeping well? Is there enough space for everyone to feel comfortable? And is the child able to successfully separate without tears or anxiety?"

For families we spoke to who have opted to bed-share and co-sleep, the answer is yes. Nathalia Castellon, an actress who also runs her own boutique digital marketing agency, says that when she was pregnant with her now-4-year-old son, she did "tons of research" about the best way to get him to sleep, and everything she saw was about sleep training. She tried the Ferber Method - which encourages children to learn to self-soothe through brief, timed check-ins - but remembers there being a lot of "anxious energy" around bedtime. When her son was about 9 months, he grew out of his crib, and Castellon and her fiancé bought a Montessori floor bed - which was big enough for her to lie down on, too, and she would stay there until her son fell asleep.

"And with that, everything that I had worked so hard for to sleep train went out the window," she says. "It wasn't that I thought co-sleeping was good or bad, it was just kind of my journey."

These days, Castellon doesn't sleep with her son all night, but they'll read a bedtime story, talk about his day, and play music until he falls asleep. "Sometimes I fall asleep and I stay there and then I wake up at 1 a.m. and get out," she says. "Or he falls asleep and I get out and he stays by himself."

For Castellon, this routine has reduced her own anxiety around putting her son to bed. And as for how it's affected her relationship with her fiancé? "Actually, dad's very happy," she laughs. "It doesn't take much time out of my night. It promotes my relaxation after he passes out - whether I'm watching shows with my fiancé or just winding down. I don't lose time. If anything, it improves my time, because I know he's well-rested."

Rachael Shepard-Ohta, co-host of the "You're So Right" podcast, had a similar experience. She tried sleep training her now-8-year-old son, but after a "traumatic" 11 months, she didn't want to do the same with her second child. She started looking into co-sleeping, and eventually enrolled in a sleep-consulting certification program. When she had her two younger daughters, she started bed-sharing soon after giving birth. "I would bring them to bed, I would nurse them to sleep in bed, they would fall asleep beside me, and I would scroll on my phone, watch a show, and then go to sleep too," she says. Shepard-Ohta and her husband's three kids started sleeping in their own rooms at various ages quite easily, she says. Her youngest is 3, and she'll still come into their bed in the early morning hours.

"It was just life-changing," Shepard-Ohta says of her family's experience bed-sharing. "I felt so much less anxious, I felt so much better rested, they were doing well, my husband was really supportive of it."

Again, Dr. Canapari warns against any bed-sharing until children are older than 1. "The challenge here is, especially in infancy, that the risk of suffocation or SIDS is very real," he says. "And it's such a horrible outcome, it's really hard to recommend - even if there may be things that reduce the risk."

As a parenting influencer who shares about sleeping methods online, Shepard-Ohta is aware of the criticism around co-sleeping, but she believes the Baby-Led Sleep and Holistic Sleep sleep-certification programs she did and books she's read (including "How Babies Sleep" by Helen Ball and "Safe Infant Sleep" by James McKenna) ensured a safe sleeping environment for her kids. Her followers are also generally curious about the other potential drawbacks of bed-sharing - Shepard-Ohta gets a lot of questions about time for intimacy, for example.

"For me personally, postpartum was not when I was most interested in intimacy anyway, so it was kind of fine with me," she says. "My husband was not threatened by our baby. He saw this as a very short season where our relationship might come second and the baby's needs might come first, and my sleep might come first. I think he knew that my sleep - and therefore my mental health - was crucial to the whole family's well-being, so he was kind of willing to do whatever it took for that to be the priority for that short time. And I think you also learn to be a little more creative. It doesn't always have to happen in your bed at night."

In the end, these parents have found the time with their kids - falling asleep hearing about their days, waking up to snuggles - outweighs the potential drawbacks. "We're never going to be able to get these moments back," Castellon says. "So whatever consequences might come with it, I'm prepared for it because it's so worth it now, not just for me but for him, too. And yes, there's occasional bruising - sometimes you'll get kicked in the ribcage. But I just think it's worth it."