Every parent is different in the way they chose to parent their child – and there is no right or wrong way in doing so. Many mums and dads will have their own opinions when it comes to co-sleeping with their children.
Whether you’re for or against the arrangement, it seems that sharing a bed with your toddler can have a seriously positive impact on their health later in life.
There’s no better feeling than cuddling up to your little on for a snooze, and a resent study by a group of college psychology students revealed that adults who co-slept with their parents “had higher self-esteem and less guilt and anxiety.”
One person said: “It always gave me a feeling of security to know that if I had a bad dream, I could crawl into bed with my mom and dad.”
The report went on to say that: ”Females with a history of sleeping with their parents during childhood reported increased comfort with physical contact and affection”.
James McKenna, Ph.D., director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame, said co-sleeping might contribute to a child being more independent, confident and competent in a social respect.
He said: “A study of English children found that children who never slept in their parents’ beds were more likely to be harder to control, less happy and to exhibit greater tantrums than children who were allowed into the parental bed.
“They were also more fearful and more dependant on their parents than children who always slept in their parents’ beds.”
The study was looking at kids above a year old, with The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) warning against co-sleeping with babies under six months old.
Dr. McKenna has studied the effects of parents co-sleeping for a long time, and in 1997 he added that: “babies, who routinely share a bed with their mothers, breastfeed more frequently and for longer periods during the night than babies who do not routinely share a bed with their mothers.”
He said that this could have a “significant positive impact on an infant’s well-being as there is ‘near universal agreement that increased breastfeeding reduces infant morbidity and mortality worldwide.”
What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments!
This content was originally published here.
