Today I want to talk about something that I call, “Part-time co-sleeping,” and let me explain what I mean by that.

I get a lot of emails from people saying, “You know, I really enjoyed having some cuddles in the early morning hours with my child and I miss that now that I’ve started the program. Is there any way that I could bring baby into bed with me halfway through the night, or maybe around four o’clock in the morning?”

And these are the questions that I get asked, and first of all, I totally get it. I mean, I never slept with my own children, but I can imagine that it was quite lovely in lots of ways, so it makes sense to me that you would miss it, but the truth is, all of us, we’re very habitual about our nighttime environments.

We don’t like a lot of change or surprise, so in the same way it really wouldn’t work for you, you know, if you were really used to sleeping with your partner, for example, then halfway through the night, you didn’t sleep with your partner, that would really fragment your nighttime sleep and you really wouldn’t be that comfortable with the whole situation.So there really is no way to part-time co-sleep.

Here’s another problem with it; you know what you’re doing, but your child doesn’t. Right? So if you’ve decided in your mind, “Okay, after 4:00 A.M. I’ll let her come to bed with me and we’ll nurse and cuddle and sleep.”

If she really likes that, which I’m guessing she does, she will continue to wake almost hourly, wondering if it’s that magical time where, “I get to go into Mommy’s bed with her.”

So you’ll have a midnight, a one, a two, a four, and then finally, yay! For some magical reason, she gets to come to bed with you. You can see how that would be really, really confusing to your child.

So I’m sorry to be the bearer of this little piece of bad news, but you cannot part-time co-sleep. You cannot. That will mean even when you travel. Do not part-time co-sleep when you travel either. A couple of nights in bed with you and you could be right back to square one, and have to start the whole program over again. And no one likes to do this in the first place, so why set yourself up so that you have to do it again and again?

But here’s a little bit of a silver lining. You can have morning cuddle time. All three of my kids, when they were little, they woke up at 7:00 A.M. like clockwork and we would all pile into our bed and have a little morning cuddle. You know, ten or fifteen minutes of just all being in the same bed and having a bit of time together in the morning was really enjoyable for all of us, and my daughter, who’s nine, still comes in for a morning cuddle.

So that is perfectly fine and you’ll have to just make peace with that. That is about as good as it’s going to get. Just so that you don’t send a confusing message and you don’t end up undoing all of the wonderful work that you’ve done thus far. All right?

Thanks so much for watching. Sleep well!