Where should my baby sleep?

6-12 months
The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends that it is safe to keep your baby in the same room with you when he or she is sleeping until the age of six months. This is true at night and during the day. For these tiny babies, it is vital that they can hear our noises even when they are asleep. Without this, they can’t even signal their needs as if we were there, let alone respond to their signals! And if they do not, or we do not respond to their cues, the baby’s growth and even life may be at risk. The American Association of Pediatricians (AAP) professional recommendation for the same is 1 year of age.

If you’re always in the same room, you can react easily and quickly – even in your sleep! – to every little sign your baby gives you. You need this at least in the first year of life.

Together or apart?
Either way after the age of six months. The important thing is to sleep in the way that works best for you. There are thousands of ways to sleep together and separately. Don’t be categorical about whether you sleep together or separately! Our advice is to just decide how you sleep tonight, now! And be open enough to the fact that if the situation changes – because with a baby, with a toddler, the situation changes all the time! Whether it’s the specific sleeping arrangements or whether you sleep together or apart. The more flexible and dynamic your thinking is, the easier your everyday life is likely to be.

There are not really two categories (together/separately), but rather three.

You sleep within arm’s reach.
The child sleeps further away, but in the same airspace as you.
The child sleeps in a different room from you, separated by a wall.
The first two can be called co-sleeping. The more accurate English terms are bedsharing (mirror translation: bed-sharing – the situation corresponding to our point 1) and co-sleeping (mirror translation: co-sleeping – the situation corresponding to our point 2), but it is not the name that matters.

If you sleep within arm’s length of each other,
you’re affecting the baby and you’re mutually aware of each other. This has many very beneficial effects. The physical benefits for the baby are that his breathing rhythm and heart rate will be steady, his blood oxygen levels and blood sugar will be stable. The chances of prolonged respiratory failure will be minimised, but the chances of successful breastfeeding will be increased.

A positive psychological effect for your baby is that by being so close you are giving her the best possible support for falling asleep and staying asleep at night, and the best possible basis for her to thrive in her social relationships later on. Last but not least, it is to your advantage that in this proximity, amazing synchronisation mechanisms ensure that you, the parents, can sleep effectively, even more effectively, than if you were sleeping further away from the child.

It’s all about proximity. It doesn’t matter how many parts make up the sleeping surface, or whether there’s a grid between you. Closeness gives your baby a great sense of security, both physically and mentally, and helps you to understand your baby, to care for him and to rest.

If you sleep in the same room, but the cot is further away from you,
then the baby can hear you and you can hear him. You are already losing many of the regulatory mechanisms of the body proximity detailed above: your baby’s bodily functions and your rest will not be as finely regulated. But because you can hear each other, the baby will signal his needs and you can respond. This set-up is still safe enough to be recommended for babies under six months.

The disadvantage of this set-up is that you have to get out of bed when the baby needs you. This is an order of magnitude more tiring than just waking up and not getting up to care for him. You wake up differently in the two cases: one is a small wake-up, the other is a big one. A small wake-up is not or hardly tiring, and it is much easier to fall back asleep afterwards.

The advantage of this set-up may be the distance it gives you, if any. This is a common occurrence in our culture, but we are always talking about specific things. Distance does not have an advantage for everyone.

If the baby sleeps in the other room than you,
you’re not only far apart, you can’t hear each other’s little noises. With distance you lose the fine control of bodily functions. And the big silence can put your baby into a long, deep sleep that he wouldn’t get into under ideal circumstances. It’s a kind of escape, a way of conserving energy. It is a survival strategy to hold out until the mother and the possibility of sucking emerges. So sleeping in the other room can make suckling less frequent, which puts milk production at risk. It thins out requests to eat, which puts gaining weight at risk.

It is tempting to co-sleep, but …
Co-sleeping is fairly unknown in our culture. So you may have many questions and fears when you think about it. In another article, we’ve collected the most common ones and written about them in more detail to help you decide what’s best for you.

I really can’t get a break from it!

There is such a thing. If you’re really not good at co-sleeping – it’s not just the sleeping arrangement that’s not quite right – then sleep separately. Only you know what works for you.

We had very different care growing up and one of the results of that may be that we don’t sleep well with the baby. We can’t close our eyes when he’s there. We are full of fears that he is not safe with us. We’re afraid we’ll never be able to get him out of our arms. We worry that our partner won’t approve. We think it’s not good for the baby. And we could go on and on.

If this is the case, sleep separately. What should we do to maximise safety? We can set the baby monitor to transmit sounds from us to the baby, not just to signal the baby to us. If the father is not disturbed by the baby, he can sleep in the nursery and transfer the baby to the mother if he wants. You can also move the cot further away from ours, so that we still have an air space if we have enough room.

These are just examples. Experiment to see which solution works for you all.