Battle of the bed

One of the less agreeable facts about the modern-day breastfed baby is that, given the chance, it will replace its father in the parental bed. I'm not blaming the baby for this: there's a simple economic principle at work. Breastfed babies need a regular, easily accessible milk supply. And just as ruthless multinational corporations do, they will strive to eliminate all barriers, artificial and otherwise, between them and the supplier: cot bars, fathers, anything at all.

Getting into the bed is the first trick. Once established there, however, a baby quickly works out that one of its parents is not strictly necessary in this area of the house.

Again this is nothing personal. But freemarket logic dictates that the unproductive parent unit should, if possible, be squeezed out. Of course, at an instinctive level, the baby understands that the more time it spends in bed with its mother, the less chance there is of - ahem - future competition arising in the milk supply area. I'll come back to the maleparent-replacement problem in a moment. But the general point is that babies have a habit of worming their way into their parents' bed and, once there, can be harder to shift than collar dirt.

That's assuming you want to shift them, of course: some people are ideologically committed to rearing babies in the bed. Many parenting experts actually recommend it (in books which actual parents have no time to read); and it's required by law in some of the Scandinavian countries.*

But most people simply slide into the habit, at least for short periods, because it seems like the only way to get a night's sleep.

It's a natural reaction after the first few weeks of having a new-born baby in the house, when parents get an insight into why sleep deprivation is such a useful weapon to repressive police forces worldwide. (I know I was ready to confess to the Shergar kidnapping just so they'd put me in a quiet cell for the night.)

You might not get perfect sleep when the baby is in bed, but it still seems better than being woken up completely at 3 or 4 a.m. when the nightly "Free the Cradle One" campaign gets under way.

Nevertheless there is a kind of stigma attached to the practice, and many people will admit to it in the same apologetic tone they'd use to discuss having an ant problem.

For one thing, you can't even mention the idea to people over a certain age. Tell your parents you're letting the baby sleep in the bed and they'll look at you as if what you'd actually said was: "We're bringing the child up as a Protestant". (No offence to my Protestant readers - we'll probably be looking for a place in one of your schools next.)

And there are plenty of contemporary parents who don't understand the baby-in-thebed thing at all, either.

There's a certain type of parent who believes in having the infant in the cot from day one, putting it in a separate room from about three weeks, and after that gradually encouraging it to leave home.

But insofar as the experts recommend rearing the baby (or even babies) in the family bed, the basic ethos seems to be that this is good for everyone involved, because they all get more uninterrupted sleep. And this is where I'm not so sure I agree.

The mother certainly gets more uninterrupted sleep. But for the non-breastfeeding parent it's not quite such a good deal.

For example, whenever our baby is invited in from the cot, before she gets around to doing any sleeping, she first has to perform an extensive series of warm-up exercises on the head of the bed: Squats, thrusts, basic climbing, and that sort of thing. The baby doesn't even know why she's doing the exercises, but this is nature's way of ensuring she doesn't pull a muscle while kicking her father during the night.

Sometimes, after say an hour of this (I'm talking about the warm-ups only, not the kicking) you'd be inclined to put her back in the cot and take your chances. Assuming you had the energy to get up, that is; which, of course, you don't because you haven't had a decent night's sleep under the current Government.

Moreover, when your baby does eventually settle down, you can't rely on it to behave like an adult (although it's incredible how much room a small baby takes up in the bed). For reasons I haven't worked out yet, our daughter needs to align herself with the magnetic poles during the night, which involves sleeping crossways at the foot of the pillow, with her head pointed north and her feet pointed towards, or sometimes resting on, the male parent's neck.

And this sort of thing does wear you out. It's not quite like those first weeks of parenting, but it's still bad enough that you should avoid working with machinery during the day (which is why I haven't mowed the lawn for months).

Sorry if I sound a bit grumpy - I think I was pushed out the wrong side of the bed this morning. But I'm definitely getting back into it tonight. Because the cot is just too cramped.

I don't know this, I'm just guessing.