Ok I have to say that I never, ever bring this subject up on mainstream forums normally, so I am not sure what possessed me to do so here. I don't even recall doing so, but someone noticed
Anyway, let's get on with it. Before my daughter was born, I was COMPLETELY against co-sleeping. I thought it important to have the child near in the early months, in a bassinet at the side of my bed. But when she was born things changed.
For the first four months of her life she suffered badly from a severe moro reflex. It was so bad that within two or three minutes of falling asleep she would startle, and the reflex was so strong that it shook her awake. She'd been screaming and crying, and unable to get back to sleep.
So I learned very fast that snuggled was the only way she would stay asleep. This helped in other ways too. She was an exclusively breastfed infant, and would nurse hourly, night or day. For those of you who say you are against co-sleeping, I challenge any one of you to get up every hour through the night, spend 15 minutes out of that hour nursing a child, another ten putting them to sleep in their crib in another room, and then another twenty getting back to sleep yourself. I would get, if lucky, 15-20 minutes sleep before she woke again.
Now I am sure someone will pipe in here that I should have let her cry it out. I believe that practise to be absolutely barbaric-and studies in Australia have shown that it has a detrimental effect on infants who are put through it. It is not 'teaching children to fall asleep alone'. It is teaching them that from 7pm to 7am they are suddenly no longer worth your attention and they cannot depend on you for that 12 hours-they are on their own.
Thinking about how the child would feel when put through this was enough to make me know it wasn't for me.
So the co-sleeping came by accident, but made things so much better for my daughter and I. This way we are far better rested, and she knows she can depend on me.
Let me add that my husband and I slept in separate beds from when I was 6 months pregnant-it had nothing to do with co-sleeping. He is a VERY large man, and had sleep apnea. The snoring was of a volume, that even sleeping in another room, with earplugs in, I struggled to sleep through.
Eventually we got him a machine that stopped the snoring, and we tried to come back to the same bed. But the machine blew air up his nose and out his mouth and I got blasted in the face all night with foul breath whilst he bubbled at the mouth. And frequently the mask would fall off, and he'd be back to snoring again.
I left him because his violence escalated when dd was 6 months old. Co-sleeping at that point took on a new importance. For a start it meant that the limited room in my mother in law's house would be enough for us, as we needed only one bed. But the big thing was that she became terribly insecure when her father was suddenly not in her life-he never once has come to visit her and she's now 2 years old.
Co-sleeping gave her the security she needed because although dad had disappeared, mum was always there. For a long time she would scream if I was ever out of sight-my leaving her too, seemed to terrify her.
Yes there were times when I got kicked at night or she rolled over on me, but DH was WAY worse at it and at 330lb, he did way more damage-black eye even at one point because he rolled over and threw his arm over his head and punched me in the eye in doing so.
My daughter is extremely attached to me, but also to her nan, and her aunt. I think that co-sleeping helped her in developing those attachments because she is used to a close relationship.
I couldn't cope without it, simple as that. I would have gone crazy because of her poor sleep in the early months, as I have heard from many other co-sleeping mothers. If I ever have another child, I will co-sleep then too, and hence let the child know that they are important to me always, not just when is convenient to me.
She does not make the rules, nor the decisions. I decide what is for dinner and when, and I decide whether we are going out, staying in, whether we are visiting people, whatever. We are an attachment family, but not child centered.