Co-Sleeping With a Toddler: I Was Against It. We're Still Doing It Two Years Later.

Before Ian, I did have an opinion on co-sleeping, I just hadn't given much thought to where it came from. If you'd asked me in my twenties, I would have told you, quite confidently, that I didn't think it was good for a child. I said it the way you say things you've absorbed rather than chosen, with total certainty and zero homework behind it.

I never once sat with that opinion and asked myself where it actually came from. Was it based on anything real? Something about safety, something I'd read? Or was it just an idea that arrived with life, the way certain opinions do, uninvited, unexamined, fully formed. If I'm honest, it wasn't the child's physical safety that worried me back then. That thought never crossed my mind at all. What worried me was something far more specific, and slightly ridiculous in hindsight: the idea of a child waking up in the middle of the night and catching their parents in an intimate moment. That was the whole engine behind my old opinion. Not concern for a baby. Just an inherited discomfort I'd never questioned, dressed up as a principle.

I saw that old fear surface in myself directly once, not through a story, but through someone close to me who was co-sleeping with their own child, almost five at the time. I remember telling them, with total confidence, that I didn't think it was a good idea, that it felt like it was taking away their privacy, putting their child through something they shouldn't have to be part of. I believed every word of it. I also hadn't read a single thing on the subject. Motherhood has a very specific way of humbling you about opinions like that.

Then I got pregnant, and my very confident plan, the one I was sure would hold, was what I now call the cozy crib approach. Baby's room right next to ours. A proper crib, soft and cozy. A camera. If he cried, I'd go to him, feed him, put him back, return to my own bed, lights off, peaceful, done. Simple. Reasonable. Very organized, which is, if you know me at all, extremely on brand. I built that plan the way every first-time mother builds her plans, up in cloud nine, months before anyone tiny actually arrives to laugh at it. I had shopping lists. I had a color scheme. I genuinely believed a newborn would respect a schedule I hadn't even tested yet.

The cozy crib plan was, in hindsight, less a parenting strategy and more a beautifully organized failure waiting to happen, because that's the great joke nobody tells you before you have a baby, you can buy every single item on the registry, read every book, plan every detail down to the thread count, and one seven-pound tyrant with zero interest in your spreadsheet will still take over your entire bed, your sleep, and your sense of control, and somehow you'll spend the next year running around like a headless chicken, exhausted, outmaneuvered, and completely, hopelessly in love with the tiny dictator responsible for all of it.

What I did not know yet was that cozy and safe are not the same thing, and I was choosing cozy because I was still thinking like someone furnishing a nursery, not like someone about to become a mother. No one warns you, before your first baby, that half the plans you make in pregnancy are made by a person who will no longer exist the moment that little human actually arrives. She gets replaced almost instantly, and completely without your permission, by someone who has just met the most demanding, most adored boss of her life, and who apparently reports to a face that small and that unfair. You just have to gracefully accept it, usually somewhere around week two, usually while crying about something unrelated to crying.

Everything changed once I actually started researching sleep safety while pregnant. I learned about SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome, that quiet, terrifying possibility every new mother eventually has to face head on instead of just fearing from a distance. I learned about the risks of an unsupervised newborn, and the plan shifted gently, before Ian even arrived. His crib stayed in our room, attached to the bed on my side, and for his first four months, that's genuinely where he slept, on his own, all night, every night. He'd finish feeding, I'd put him back in, and he'd settle, no drama, like a very small, very content little roommate who paid no rent and complained about nothing except being hungry.

There were a handful of nights in that same stretch when he slept in a small, soft nest instead, tucked right on the bed between Ivan and me. Vaccine days were often one of those nights, when he just needed to be held through the fussiness. So was the week we all caught COVID early on, mild on him, thankfully, considerably less mild on me, and having him within arm's reach made those particular nights easier to survive. But that was the exception, a few scattered nights, not the pattern. The crib beside the bed was the real routine for those first four months, and honestly, I was a little smug about how well it was going.

Then we went to Brazil for what turned into about six weeks. Because the trip was meant to be short, we hadn't really thought through sleep arrangements in advance. A friend offered to lend us a crib a couple of weeks before we left, and we thought, great, problem solved. It was not solved. What showed up was one of those little foldable play cribs, built for a lazy Sunday nap on a rug, not for surviving a full night with an actual baby in it. And Ian was not a small baby by then, all rolls and elbows and opinions. That poor crib looked like it was bracing for impact the moment we lowered him into it. He lasted about four minutes before making his feelings extremely clear.

Where we were staying, there happened to be more than one bed available, so for that stretch it was just Ian and me sharing one, Ivan comfortably in another. No crowding, nothing to think through logistically, it was simple. On top of the crib chaos, arriving in Brazil always comes with an adjustment period for us, it's not that anything is wrong with the place, my dear Ituiutaba included, it's just that our bodies need a beat to catch up to a new environment. Within the first day or two, we were both under the weather, and Ian was clearly picking up on the general unraveling of everyone around him.

But it felt right almost immediately, in a way I wasn't expecting. The more I read about it once we were actually living it, the more it made sense, and the more convinced I became that this wasn't a compromise, it was simply working.

When we came home to Ireland, I did try putting him back in his crib, genuinely, just to see whether the old setup would still hold. It didn't. He'd lost all interest in it, the way toddlers lose interest in a toy they were obsessed with exactly one week ago. He wanted me. Warmth, contact, the whole of me, right there. And I noticed something in myself too, something I genuinely wasn't expecting: I didn't want the old setup back either. Somewhere in the middle of all this, without ever deciding to, I'd stopped missing my own space.

I won't pretend nighttime itself became some soft-focus, candlelit bonding scene, because it didn't. Nights were still nights, tiring, unglamorous, running purely on autopilot and whatever love reserves hadn't been used up yet that day. But mornings were a different story entirely. I'd open my eyes, and his would already be open, looking straight for mine, and that's when the smile would land, his first, then mine, completely involuntary. That, not the night itself, was the actual reward hiding inside all of it. Very few things in life beat that.

We shared that same bed, the three of us, for about two or three weeks after we got back, mostly because we needed the time to actually adjust our routine to this new reality we'd fallen into. He'd left for Brazil sleeping in his own crib and come home wanting absolutely nothing to do with it. So we adjusted properly instead of forcing it. One of the guys from our crew built him a proper floor bed, low, wide, with rails, closer to a Montessori setup than a crib. Ian and I moved into that room together. Ivan stayed exactly where he'd always been, in the bed we used to share as a couple. That's genuinely how it settled, and it's stayed that way since. I need to be honest here, this was never only about what was good for Ian. It gives me something too, still does. There's a fullness that comes from having him right there, tucked against me, knowing he's safe under my wing, protected, and that in that moment I am, quite literally, his entire world, and he is mine. I used to think I was doing this purely for him. I've since realized I was doing it for both of us, and it took me embarrassingly long to actually admit that out loud, even to myself.

Once we knew we were staying in it, the focus shifted to doing it properly, safely, deliberately. Ivan is naturally a light sleeper, the kind who wakes up if a floorboard so much as thinks about creaking, but through that first exhausted year of Ian's life, even he turned into someone who could sleepwalk through a small earthquake. So the real question stopped being "should we do this" and became "how do we make absolutely sure nobody gets hurt while doing it." Not anxiety, exactly, more a low, constant hum in the back of my mind. Will this actually work. Is this safe. Am I doing this right.

Nobody warns you either, about the specific brand of chaos that is the newborn phase. That first year does things to a woman that no amount of preparation braces you for. There were nights I genuinely could not tell whether I was dreaming or simply moving through the dark half asleep, on autopilot, running purely on love and caffeine residue. If you're in that blur right now, reading this at 3am with one eye open, you are not the only mother who has felt slightly unhinged at that hour. Every honest mother I know has her own version of that story tucked away somewhere.

So I did what I always do when I don't have the answer to something. I searched. I read. I looked for people who'd studied this properly, books, articles, real research, anything that would make the fog in my head clear a little. Not because I was scared. Just because that's how I've always handled not knowing something, I go find out.

Somewhere in all that reading, I came across the idea that we are mammals, and every mammal keeps its newborn close, for warmth, for scent, for the shared rhythm of breathing and heartbeat. It's not only about feeding. It's about a small creature who has just left the only environment it's ever known and still needs to feel that environment nearby. Reading it, something in me settled, quietly, like a piece I'd been missing without knowing it was missing. And I still feel it now, not as a fact I memorized, but as something I notice in real time. When Ian isn't well, a cold, a rough night, a cough that won't let him settle, having him close still does something for both of us. My eyes are on him without my even trying. His breathing steadies against mine. He feels comforted, he feels protected, and I get to be exactly what I want to be for him in that moment, his safe harbor. That's not theory anymore. That's just Tuesday nights in our house.

What started as an unplanned, half-feverish decision in Brazil quickly became something steadier, and steadier eventually became simply how we live.

I read the downsides too, carefully, not selectively. This is one of the things I'd tell any first-time mother weighing the benefits of co-sleeping against the very real risks, read both sides properly, not just the side that agrees with what you already want to do. For our family, weighed against each other, the benefits won. That's not a universal verdict, it's not the truth for everyone. It's simply the conclusion we reached, as a couple, for us, with our specific circumstances. It doesn't mean the negatives aren't real. It just means that for us, the positives outweighed them.

Luckily, we have a construction company, so instead of hunting online for something that might fit, we built it ourselves, a proper co-sleeping bed, double bed sized, high rails, nothing loose in it, nothing soft or decorative, just a real co-sleeping mattress chosen for breathability and safety. Half the fun of that project was Ivan drawing plans on the back of an invoice while I stood there saying "higher rails, higher rails" like a woman possessed.

From there, a rhythm formed on its own. I'd sleep in my own bed until around one in the morning, when Ian woke to feed, and then I'd move over to be with him for the rest of the night. Side lying breastfeeding, barely any disruption to my own sleep. He stopped needing to be burped somewhere around one to three months old, so there wasn't even that extra interruption.

That's the part people always want to ask about, so I'll say it plainly. No, we do not measure our marriage by whether we share a bed. It was never something either of us needed to prove. And to be completely clear, because I know exactly where some minds go with this, there is no version of our life where anything intimate happens anywhere near our son. That's simply not who we are as parents, and thankfully Ivan feels exactly the same. He was, at first, unsure about co-sleeping itself, the same way I once was, not against it, just not yet convinced. But once he did his own reading, he landed in the same place I had. He said something once that I still think about, that he's happy for Ian to have me for as long as Ian needs me.

This is what co-sleeping with a toddler has actually looked like for us, not the theory, the real, slightly chaotic, deeply loved version. Right now Ian is two years and nine months old. I put him to bed, he falls asleep on his own at his normal time, and I go carry on with my evening, whatever that looks like that night, until I'm ready for bed myself. By the time I come in, he's already sleeping, still smelling faintly of bathtime and warm milk and that particular smell that belongs only to him, one I could probably pick out of a room full of other children with my eyes closed. He doesn't wake up, but he notices I've arrived, and he settles right back in until morning. Twelve hours, most nights, which honestly still shocks me some mornings. I know the day is coming, not too far off, to gently start introducing his own bed. I don't have a clean answer for when to stop co-sleeping. I don't think anyone actually does. I think he'll walk toward that independence on his own timeline, and I think arriving there on his own terms, rather than being pushed, will make him more confident for it.

I regret the years I spent quietly judging something I hadn't actually looked into. That one's on me, not on the people who chose it long before I understood why.

But if I'm honest, none of this was ever really about co-sleeping as some rule to follow. It's one part of a much bigger belief Ivan and I share, that closeness, safety, and connection right now genuinely shape who Ian becomes later. We believe it's contributing to a kid who'll grow into someone confident, independent, and emotionally intelligent, as a toddler, a child, a teenager, eventually an adult. That's our belief, not a verdict on anyone doing things differently. We're not writing this to convince you, or to judge anyone reading this who disagrees. This isn't a manual. It's just our story, the exhaustion and the small victories and the mistakes and the little hand finding mine in the dark, all of it, together. We're not here to judge. We're here to share.