Sharing a bed or a room with a child

Where the safety rules stop applying

The risk of sudden infant death falls steeply after six months and is very low after the first year. By then a child can roll, lift and turn their head, push bedding away and move themselves out of a bad position, which is precisely what a newborn cannot do and why the infant rules exist at all.

Two things still matter after that, and they are about ordinary accidents rather than cot death: a small child can still fall out of a bed, and can still become wedged in a gap between a mattress and a wall or in a slatted headboard. A guard rail, a bed pushed properly against the wall with no gap, or a mattress on the floor all deal with it.

The one rule that does not relax

A baby and a toddler should not share a bed. A toddler moves in their sleep, does not understand the consequences, and can roll onto or against an infant, or push bedding over them.

Older advice sometimes suggests this is manageable if the two are kept apart in the bed and the toddler is told the rules. It is not. A toddler cannot be made responsible for a baby's safety, asleep or awake, and arrangements that depend on their compliance are not arrangements. Where an older child wants to be close by, the answer is a separate mattress or bed in the same room, not the same bed.

The arrangements families actually use

Few households match the textbook picture of every person in their own room from the start. The common patterns:

• Occasional sharing. Everyone has their own bed and the children come in after a bad dream, during an illness, or early in the morning. This is by some distance the commonest arrangement in Britain and is rarely described as co-sleeping by the people doing it.
• A family bed. Children sleep in the parents' bed as a matter of routine, often with the adults relocating in the evening and coming in later.
• Room sharing with separate beds. The child has their own bed, futon or mattress in the parents' room. This keeps most of the closeness and removes the practical problems of a shared mattress.
• A sibling bed or a shared room. Children sleep together rather than with a parent. For a younger child moving out of the parents' bed, an older sibling in the room is often the step that makes it possible.
• No fixed arrangement. Beds are not assigned and who sleeps where depends on the night. It sounds chaotic and works for some families.

Housing is a large part of this and goes largely unmentioned in parenting advice. A great many families share rooms because the house has fewer bedrooms than people, not because of a philosophy, and advice written as though the arrangement were always a free choice is of limited use to them. The practical sections below apply either way.

What the evidence does and does not show

Claims that sharing a bed produces more confident, higher-achieving or more contented adults appear regularly and are not established. The studies are mostly observational, the families who choose to share differ from those who do not in many other ways, and the practice is near-universal in some cultures and unusual in others, which makes comparison very difficult.

The honest summary is that beyond infancy there is no good evidence of harm and no good evidence of lasting benefit. The claim sometimes made in the other direction — that a child who shares a bed will struggle to become independent — is equally unsupported.

That leaves it as a decision about the household rather than a decision about the child's development, and the things that properly bear on it are whether everybody is sleeping, whether the adults have any time or privacy, and whether the arrangement is one somebody is enduring rather than choosing.

The adults' side of it

This is the part most often skipped. A shared bed can cost adults a great deal of sleep, and it removes the one room in the house that was private. Where one partner is content with the arrangement and the other is quietly not, that matters more than any research finding, and it is worth saying out loud rather than discovering after a year.

The usual workable compromises are the ones that separate closeness from the mattress: the child's own bed in the parents' room, or the child starting the night in their own room with the door open and coming in later if needed. Both keep the reassurance and return the bed.

Siblings sharing a room

This brings its own problems, and most of them have practical answers.

• One child waking the other. Usually less of a problem than parents expect — children habituate to a sibling's noise surprisingly fast, often within a fortnight — but a period of broken nights at the start is normal and not a sign the arrangement has failed.
• Different bedtimes. Staggering them is easier than synchronising them. The younger child goes down first in the shared room; the older one has their wind-down elsewhere and comes in quietly later. Reversing it rarely works.
• Different sleep needs. A child who needs ten hours and one who needs twelve will not be served by a single bedtime, and the compromise usually costs the younger child sleep.
• Each child needing their own cue to fall asleep. Where one needs a light and the other needs dark, a small clip light or a book torch for the one who reads is a better solution than a lamp.
• Early waking. One early riser in a shared room wakes everybody. Something quiet to do in the room, laid out the night before, buys more time than any instruction does.

As children approach puberty, privacy starts to matter in a way it did not before — changing, keeping things private, and simply being alone. Where separate rooms are not possible, a curtain, a screen, a high bunk or an agreed half-hour of the room to oneself does a reasonable amount of the work. It is worth taking seriously rather than treating as fussiness.

Moving a child out

Whether the move is out of a cot into a bed, out of the parents' room, or out of the parents' bed, the same things help.

Timing. Not in the same fortnight as a new sibling, a house move, starting nursery or school, or an illness. A child who associates the new bed with the arrival of a baby will resist the bed.

Make the new place desirable before it is required. Naps in it, stories in it, the child choosing the bedding, the comfort object living in it during the day. A bed that has been a nice place to be for a few weeks is an easier sell than one that appears on the night it must be used.

Go gradually and do not go back a step. The gradual retreat method — a parent present at bedtime and moving a little further away every fourth night until they are out of the room — is what health visitors and children's sleep services use, and it is set out in full under bedtime and night fears in children. It works for moving out of a parent's bed as much as for settling in one's own.

Expect returns. A child who has moved out will come back during illness, after a nightmare, and during any upheaval. Letting that happen does not undo the move, as long as it is clearly the exception rather than a new arrangement.

Decide in advance what the rule is, and say the same thing every night. A child who gets a different answer depending on how tired the adult is will keep testing which night it is, which is reasonable of them.

What not to worry about

Opinions on this subject arrive uninvited and are often delivered with great confidence by people who are not responsible for the household's sleep. Beyond the infant safety rules and the baby-and-toddler rule above, there is no arrangement here that a family needs to defend.