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Observer
22-07-2025
- Health
- Observer
Sharing a bed with Your Kid? It's normal in Asia
SINGAPORE — In the United States and some other Western countries, many parents wince at the idea of sharing a bed with their young child regularly. But in other places, long-term bed sharing through infancy, toddlerhood, and beyond is seen as totally normal. For many families in Asia, in particular, the question is not whether to do it, but when to stop. How and where young children sleep is a big deal for the whole family. It can have implications for an infant's safety and a child's development. It can also affect parental sleep, intimacy, and mental health, and can influence how families configure their homes. In South Korea, many parents bed share because they want to savor a close relationship with young children 'who one day won't need them anymore,' said Inae Kim, an office manager in Seoul. She sleeps in two adjacent king-size beds with her husband and their two girls, ages 5 and 7. 'They want to enjoy the moment,' Kim, 40, said over an iced latte in her high-rise apartment complex. Though her girls slept in cribs until they were 6 months old, they've grown up bed sharing with their parents. In the West, and especially in the United States, bed sharing tends to be unpopular and contentious. That is partly because the American Academy of Pediatrics and other experts warn that it can be unsafe for infants 6 months of age or younger. Many Western parents put infants to sleep in cribs or beds in a separate room — often using a practice known as 'sleep training,' in which infants are taught to sleep independently. Modern ideas about separating mothers and babies at night have their roots in campaigns by 'Victorian-era influencers' in Britain and the United States, according to 'How Babies Sleep,' a book published this year by anthropologist Helen Ball. Even though there isn't much scientific literature on bed sharing, studies generally show that the practice is far more common in Asia than in the West. (Other regions where bed sharing is popular, including Latin America, aren't as well studied, experts say.) One multicountry survey of parents of infants and toddlers from 2010 found that bed-sharing rates were more than 60% in China, Japan and South Korea, and more than 70% in India and parts of Southeast Asia. The rates in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States ranged from 5% to 15%. Country-level studies since then have broadly reinforced some of those findings, although a 2015 survey in the United States found that 37% of mothers 'rarely or sometimes' bed shared and 24% of them 'often or always' did. Bed-sharing rates in the West may be higher than such figures suggest because stigma around the practice linked to safety concerns in infancy leads some parents to underreport it, said Ball, the director of an infancy and sleep center at Durham University in Britain. 'I think bed sharing is a much more normal strategy than Westerners recognize,' she said. In parts of Asia, motivations for bed sharing vary by place and by family. Some are extremely practical. Some parents in Seoul, a city where many families live in high-rises, share beds with infants because they worry that putting them would lead to crying and wake the neighbors, Kim said. In Hong Kong, where apartments are notoriously small, many families don't have extra rooms to put their children in, said Vicky Tsang, who runs breastfeeding support groups in the Chinese territory. She said it is common for bed sharing to last through primary school. 'The space problem is a big factor,' she said. But practical considerations don't always fully explain why bed sharing is popular. In some Asian societies, many couples prioritize the mother-child bond over their own sleep health and marital relationships, said Heejung Park, a professor of psychology at Scripps College in California who has studied bed sharing in the region. In other cases, parents who grew up in bed-sharing households can't imagine a different sleeping arrangement. 'It's so common that no one thinks, 'Is it uncommon?' ' said Erin Lim, 39, an entrepreneur in Seoul who grew up in a household where three generations slept in the same room. Lim said that she stopped sharing a bed with her older son when he was 4, and with her younger son when he was 2. Now the boys are 9 and 5, and they have their room. But she still keeps a small bed in her bedroom for if — and when — they wander back in. In India, the cultural attachment to bed sharing is so deep that it tends to persist even among urban elites who are exposed to 'Western sleep training culture,' said Himani Dalmia, a sleep specialist in New Delhi who runs a support group for parents and shares a bed with her children, 7 and 9. She said she sometimes gets calls from Indian parents abroad who can't find the sleep advice they're looking for. 'Look,' they tell her. 'We want to bed share, and we can't talk to anyone here about that.' One apparent exception in the region is Singapore, a wealthy city-state where reported bed-sharing rates are lower than in other East and Southeast Asian countries. Sleep training seems to be increasingly popular there, and some Singaporean parents are reluctant to admit to bed sharing, said Elaine Chow, the president of a local breastfeeding support group. 'Sometimes, if they do mention it, they will mention it kind of guiltily,' she said. Ho Kin Ing, who shares a bed in Singapore with her three girls — 2, 3, and 6 — said that she and her husband once felt significant social pressure to sleep train as they browsed online parenting forums. 'I had a lot of influence and information, and not a lot of intuition,' Ho, 33, said during an interview in her high-rise apartment. 'But I guess that, over the years, that intuition part started to strengthen a little bit.' Her husband, Tan Peng Yong, 37, said they didn't regret choosing to bed share. 'To be woken up by your kids is one of the best feelings ever,' he said, sitting next to a toy bus and a Mrs. Potato Head doll. 'Even when they hit you in the face.' Social pressure around sleeping arrangements can cut the other way, too. In some East Asian societies, choosing not to bed share can be seen as 'harsh parenting,' Park said. In her study on sleeping habits in Japan, some mothers said they felt compelled to do it to conform to social norms around maternal responsibility. Kim knows the feeling. She sleeps better without her kids in the bed, she said. But her husband insists on family bed sharing because he sees it as essential for a close relationship with his daughters. Some of Kim's friends have children who stayed in the family bed until age 12, even at the expense of their parents' sleep quality and sex lives. That would be too much for her, she said. So she and her husband have decided that their girls will move into what is now their playroom in about two years. Whether that will happen on schedule is an open question. The plan is to install bunk beds, Kim said with a laugh, but neither girl wants to sleep on top. 'It's kind of scary to think about falling off,' she said. This article originally appeared in
The Guardian
13-04-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Put your baby down to nap near a washing machine, expert says
Babies should not be put in a dark, quiet room for a nap but in a light room with background noise like a washing machine, an expert has said. Prof Helen Ball, a scientific adviser for the charity The Lullaby Trust who has carried out sleep research with more than 5,000 parents and babies at Durham University, said long daytime naps are like 'mini night times' that can disrupt babies' sleep when they properly go to bed. She believes parents should let babies and toddlers snooze naturally in a light room, with background noise so they wake up themselves if they have had enough sleep. Ball, an anthropologist who won a Queen's Anniversary prize for her research on parent and infant sleep in 2018, said: 'The pressure to control babies and give them scheduled sleeps, so they fit in with our clock-driven routines, is getting worse now we have so many baby sleep coaches, baby sleep monitors and apps about 'wake windows' which claim to calculate exactly when a baby needs to nap. 'Babies, like us, biologically need to build up sleep pressure – tiredness from energy expended in the brain through the day – to fall asleep. So they naturally nap at different times on different days, depending on whether, for example, they have been for a walk with lots of tiring sensory stimulation, or have been inside. 'Putting them down to sleep in a silent dark room at a set time for a prolonged period during the day is great for parents who want some down-time or to get some housework done. But it doesn't make sense at all for babies who, when they have these mini night-times during the day, are more likely to then be awake during the night.' NHS advice states: 'It's a good idea to teach your baby that night time is different from daytime from the start. During the day, open curtains, play games and do not worry too much about everyday noises when they sleep ... Your baby will have their own pattern of waking and sleeping, and it's unlikely to be the same as other babies you know.' Babies can wake up at night because they are hungry, teething, processing a new skill they have learned, or struggling with separation anxiety and wanting comfort. Sleep training, which means parents allowing babies to cry when they wake at night without going to them, to encourage them to self-soothe, is advised against by Ball, whose book How Babies Sleep will be published next month. She said: 'This stems from previous generations' advice that parents had to show babies they were in charge and get them into a routine of sleeping.' She suggests parents catch up on sleep by going to bed earlier, because babies stay asleep for the longest period at the start of the night, allowing parents to get some deep sleep before their child wakes. Older babies' bedtimes could also be shifted later, so it is later in the night when they first wake crying, she said. The popular advice when it comes to nap times is to watch babies for signs of tiredness, like rubbing their eyes, tugging their ears or yawning. But Ball said: 'These apparent tiredness cues can just be a sign of boredom, and the need for a change in activity. Even if they are tired, the baby is not necessarily ready for a nap, so a parent could be trying to rock them to sleep for a long time with no luck and for no reason. 'If people wait for babies to fall asleep naturally, rather than imposing naps on them, it could save a lot of frustration and time which could be spent doing better things.' Scheduled naps are often encouraged by baby sleep 'consultants', a growing industry, and social media influencers. Andrea Grace, a sleep consultant who advocates scheduled naps, said: 'Wake windows can be useful for parents to feel more confident on when their babies need to sleep. A schedule based on these can prevent infants becoming overtired, which then makes it harder for them to sleep.' Prof Paul Gringras, clinical lead for children's sleep medicine at King's College London, and president of the International Paediatric Sleep Association, said: 'Psychology and medical sleep professionals tend to appreciate that it's not always 'one size fits all' and that different families might need different approaches. 'But in the first three months, I don't think any would support extremely rigid schedules for baby sleep, as they do not align with natural sleep-wake cycles and can interfere with feeding. 'All families are different, and where parents' mental health and wellbeing is really suffering, they might try to get babies to nap at around the same time, because that rhythm in the day is useful.' He added: 'Some studies suggest that controlled crying – when babies are left to self-soothe at night – causes them stress, shown by higher levels of cortisol. However, other studies looking at children after a variety of bedtime routine strategies showed no difference in cortisol levels, so there is still some debate around this.' He advised families to check the qualifications of baby sleep consultants, as the profession is unregulated.
