Sleeping alone ‘is good for babies’

BRINGING a crying baby into the marital bed in the hope of getting a good night’s sleep is a strategy for failure, said experts yesterday.

They found that the longer an 18-monthold had bed-shared with its parents, the more likely it would be to suffer troubled and shortened sleep.

Researchers said around 56,000 reports by mothers of child sleep were used in the study, taking data from the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study.

Dr Mari Hysing, a psychologist at the University of Bergen, said: ‘Bed-sharing was an independent and graded predictor of nocturnal awakenings and of short, sleep duration.

‘The longer the child shared a bed with their parents, the greater the chance was of short sleep duration and of frequent awakenings at 18 months of age.’

Many health professionals warn parents against bringing babies into their beds, following tragic cases of suffocation.

The study was published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.