A new survey launched this week by two long-time advocates of co-sleeping lets co-sleeping families, so often marginalized or misrepresented as radical, irresponsible, or just plain odd, the ability to stand up and be counted.
The Fennells have been involved in promoting safe co-sleeping for many years. As parents of six and inventors of the Humanity Family Sleeper, they know first hand how misleading media coverage of co-sleeping can discourage families from using this important bonding and nurturing tool. Now they have launched “The Great Co-Sleeping Survey” to help raise awareness about co-sleeping, and how to do it safely. Please participate in their survey!
Here are several fine resources for parents hoping to safely share sleep with their children:
- The Eight Principles of Attachment Parenting – Engage in Nighttime Parenting
- Dr. James McKenna’s Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory’s Safe co-sleeping resources
and check back next month for information about API’s Safe Sleep Campaign. - Dr. Sarah J Buckley’s Ten tips for safe sleeping
- Ask Dr. Sears article: Co-Sleeping: Yes, No, Sometimes?
As a family who co-slept with both children when they were infants and who welcomes both children (now aged almost 4 and 2) into our bed (the little one more often than not!), I look forward to seeing if the Fennells will meet their goal of getting 50,000 co-sleeping families to complete the survey before the end of the year. Normalizing what has until the last 50 years or so been the human beings’ normal sleep arrangement, while at the same time educating families who want to co-sleep on how to do it safely, seems like a win-win for everyone involved.
Educating people on the safety issues is so important! Unfortunately, unless there are dire warning plastered all over a product, it is just assumed that parents will be irresponsible if left to their own instincts. Co-sleeping isn’t regulated by any agencies, so therefore it is suspect. This leaves a lot of very responsible parents in a position of defending their well-thought out parenting practices (like co-sleeping and extended breastfeeding for instance) as if they have committed a crime.
I have posted the link to the survey on http://www.JulianArts.com as well to help spread the word and get the facts about sleep-sharing out there in the world!
API–Thank you so much for sharing information on this important and timely issue!
I was happy to participate. 🙂
I was delighted to participate too and found the results very interesting 🙂 It would be wonderful to see co-sleeping being judged more positively.
For my family, it has been lovely. I had never planned on co-sleeping but because my children were all breastfed as babies it just happened that way. As they got older they were put in their own beds but all made their way into ours each night. In the end we had to buy a bigger bed!
I’m sure my children will have many happy memories of the times they shared our bed when they are grown up and I hope they’ll co-sleep (and breastfeed!) with their own children too.