Sleeping with Our Toddler
We are a two-mom middle-class family with a two-year-old son. I am a “stay-at-home” mom, and my wife is a graduate student. We are lucky to have a flexible schedule.
The three of us have co-slept since our son was born, and it has worked well—of course with challenges along the way.
We have reconfigured our bedroom multiple times to adapt to everyone’s needs and to make co-sleeping safe for an infant. Currently we have a king-sized bed with a three-sided crib attached to one side, making for one continuous sleep surface.
As our son gets bigger, he is more mobile and has more preferences about where he sleeps and sleeping next to whom. About fifty percent of the time, I sleep in the guest room and my partner sleeps in the big bed with him.
He has needed big sessions on sleep since he was an infant. I have discharged as much as I can to give him good attention for these crying sessions. I have also always discharged before making any decisions about our sleep routine. I discharge about what’s not working, what I want for myself, what our son needs, my worries, and of course all my early distress related to sleep and my early life in general.
Luckily, our son usually sleeps through the night. I believe the many sessions we’ve given him on sleeping have helped. Our biggest struggle is how long it takes him to get to sleep. Often it’s sixty to ninety minutes from brushing teeth and reading books to when we are our able to sneak out of the room when he’s in a deep sleep. We both wish bedtime took less time.
My wife and I currently alternate who stays with him for bedtime. I am now doing it three nights in a row, because my wife has classes that meet at night.
Co-sleeping also means that she and I get less closeness and snuggle time as a couple, which is hard. My having less time and attention for her feels like a huge loss. We are both in RC and understand the value of closeness. We talk a lot about when we might train our son to fall asleep independently. And we need to discharge on whether it’s a realistic goal, or if it can’t happen in the foreseeable future.
I feel like I still need to discharge for at least a hundred hours on my early hurts from being abandoned at night as a toddler. I have discharged many hours on it already, but I need to do more before I can confidently transition our son to his own room. I want to be as confident as possible, so that I can lead him and our family without reservation (in other words “stay thinking” during the process).
Here are some other things I’ve discharged (and will discharge more) on: (1) terror about not getting enough sleep, (2) feelings about how long it takes to put our son to bed and how it makes me feel trapped, and (3) how hard parenting is during a pandemic with so little resource and so few contradictions to distress.
[See related article on the following page.]
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of parents
(Present Time 207, April 2022)