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Home › Articles › Issues for Mom › Breastfeeding in Bed

Breastfeeding in Bed

What You Need to Know
About Co-sleeping

By Shel Franco

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The first two weeks of my first child's life I was not a mommy; I was a zombie. I can still remember how much I hated sunset how I would fill with dread when I knew that everyone but me was drifting listlessly off to sleep.

My oldest son, Angelo, had mastered breastfeeding with the very first latch. From there on out, he wanted nothing more than to be with me attached to me. At 22 years old, I was barely unattached from my own parents. So I waged a daily battle against the bottle-feeding, give-me-space mentality that my generation seemed so eager to embrace and the soul-deep desire to bond with my son on a unique, intimate level. Nowhere was that more evident than nighttime.

Angelo fell asleep at the breast almost as easily as he breathed. It was pure bliss for him and me. But when the time came to place him gently in his crib, bliss was the furthest thing from our minds. He would scream the minute his body hit the mattress. My husband and I tried everything we read and even more that we heard about to coax him into his crib. His longest stretch was 15 minutes.

Toward the end of week two, the idea of falling asleep in the rocker with my newborn precariously perched in my lap and my husband curled up on the floor at my feet was starting to wear thin. When Angelo woke for the third time at midnight, I asked my husband to "just bring him to me." The next thing I remember was sunlight pouring through the windows and the warmth of my son tucked in the crook of my arm. We had slept straight through until 7:30 a.m.

Angelo never used his crib again.

The Confusion
Three years after I brought my first son into my bed, Ann Brown, the commissioner of consumer product safety, advised parents not to sleep with their babies. She followed up by reminding parents that "the only safe place for babies is a crib that meets current safety standards and has a firm, tight-fitting mattress."

By the time her words went public, 3-year-old Angelo was sleeping in his "big boy bed" and 3-month-old Lucas had taken over the warm spot in the crook of my arm. Did her words make me doubt my actions? Not really.

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