Bedsharing doesn't cause excessive night waking

Bedsharing is not a cause of excessive night waking. If your baby is waking excessively at nights, her disrupted sleep pattern is usually due to the settings on her body clock, which are out of sync with yours, and with day and night.

You can find out about

• Causes of excessive night waking here.

• If you fall into the category of families who have particular vulnerabilities which mean that sharing the bed with your baby is too risky here

• How to share your bed with your breastfeeding baby as safely as possible here

• How to share your bed with your formula feeding baby as safely as possible here.

Why do parents bedshare?

Up to 75% of parents share their bed with their baby at least some of the time.

Over many years in the clinic, women who share their bed with their baby repeatedly tell me they bring their baby into bed because they sleep better. (I also shared the bed with my own babies, all those years ago, because I slept better.) The research confirms this, that parents sleep better when baby comes into their bed. The nights are easier.

From an evolutionary perspective, humans have always slept with their baby close to their bodies, often but not always the breastfeeding mother's body, because this best protects the baby's

• Breastfeeding

• Physiological stability (body temperature, heart rate)

• Emotional well-being (by keeping the dial on the baby's sympathetic nervous system turned down)

and also protects the mother's

• Breast milk production

• Sleep

• Emotional well-being.

Do babies who bedshare wake more often?

Women who are breastfeeding have at least as much, and often more sleep, than parents who are needing to use the bottle.

Some researchers have concluded that bedsharing breastfeeding mothers may wake more frequently to feed, relative to formula feeding parents, but that these mothers are awake for shorter periods and fall back to sleep more rapidly when they have the baby in their bed, sleeping more overall than non-bedsharing mothers. You can find out about breastfeeding and sleep durations here.

However, a groundbreaking study has shown that regardless of baby's feeding method or place of sleep between four and 16 weeks of age, the number of times babies wake when measured by movement sensors is the same. These researchers found that parents whose babies were formula fed accidentally overestimated the amount of sleep their baby was having compared to objective measurement. This study has meant that previous research which included parent-reported sleep estimates to compare bedsharing with not bedsharing needs to be viewed as unreliable.

If you are ready to transition your baby out of your bed

In the clinic, some women who report that they now feel they are being disturbed by a very active older baby or toddler in the night and are ready to move that little one out of the bed. You can find out what you might do to make this transition here.

Selected references

Blair PS, Ball HL, McKenna JJ, Feldman-Winter L, Marinelli KA, Bartick MC. Bedsharing and breastfeeding: The Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine Protocol #6, Revision 2019. Breastfeeding Medicine. 2020;15(1):5-16.

Rudzik AEF, Ball HL. Biologically normal sleep in the mother-infant dyad. American Journal of Human Biology. 2021;33(5):e23589.

Rudzik AEF, Robinson-Smith L, Ball HL. Discrepancies in maternal reports of infant sleep vs actigraphy by mode of feeding. Sleep Medicine. 2018:doi:10.1016/j.sleep.2018.1006.1010.

Salm Ward TC. Reasons for mother-infant bed-sharing: a systematic narrative synthesis of the literature and implications for future research. Maternal and Child Health. 2015;19:675-690.

Tikotzky L, Sadeh A, Volkovich E, Manber R, Meiri G, Shahar G. VII. Infant sleep development from 3 to 6 months postpartum: links with maternal sleep and paternal involvement. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. 2015;80(1):107-124.

Zimmerman D, Bartick M, Feldman-Winter L, Ball HL. Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine Clinical Protocol #37: Physiological infant care - managing nighttime breastfeeding in young infants. Breastfeeding Medicine. 2023;18(3):164-167.