The ‘sleeping in separate rooms’ can be extremely useful. My wife and I have very different circadian rhythms, so we find it really helpful to sleep in different bedrooms (in the context of an otherwise happy, loving, and delightful marriage.) We put our baby’s basinet in a separate walk-in closet near one of our bedrooms, which can be made nice, dark, and cozy for daytime naps and nighttime sleep even when it’s not yet dark outside. So, baby being awake for short periods in the night doesn’t need to disrupt our adult sleep, and baby can get scheduled breastfeeding a couple of times a night.
By contrast, many parents of babies try to co-sleep all together in the same bedroom and even in the same bed—I did this with my first baby long ago, and it was extremely disruptive to sleep.
I understand the evolutionary background that co-sleeping with babies was pretty typical for hunter-gatherers, and might be more ‘natural’ in some ways, but I think this might be one of those cases where the original reasons for co-sleeping—protection from predators and parasites and infanticide, keeping baby warm enough during cold nights, etc—might not be as relevant in modern life.
Jeff—I strongly endorse these suggestions.
The ‘sleeping in separate rooms’ can be extremely useful. My wife and I have very different circadian rhythms, so we find it really helpful to sleep in different bedrooms (in the context of an otherwise happy, loving, and delightful marriage.) We put our baby’s basinet in a separate walk-in closet near one of our bedrooms, which can be made nice, dark, and cozy for daytime naps and nighttime sleep even when it’s not yet dark outside. So, baby being awake for short periods in the night doesn’t need to disrupt our adult sleep, and baby can get scheduled breastfeeding a couple of times a night.
By contrast, many parents of babies try to co-sleep all together in the same bedroom and even in the same bed—I did this with my first baby long ago, and it was extremely disruptive to sleep.
I understand the evolutionary background that co-sleeping with babies was pretty typical for hunter-gatherers, and might be more ‘natural’ in some ways, but I think this might be one of those cases where the original reasons for co-sleeping—protection from predators and parasites and infanticide, keeping baby warm enough during cold nights, etc—might not be as relevant in modern life.