Study looks at bed-sharing and effect on child behavior

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDJul 19 2011

According to a new study parents who let their toddlers sleep in the same bed as them are not slowing their learning and behavior development.

The study that was published Monday in the journal Pediatrics analyzed the families' socioeconomic status, mothers' education levels and mothers' parenting skills as well before coming to this conclusion. Among children who slept in the same bed as their parents and then had slower cognitive and behavior development, researchers found that socioeconomic status, education and parenting skills were likely responsible rather than the bed-sharing.

The authors wrote, “The findings from this study suggest that there is no association between the ages of one and three years and cognitive and behavioral outcomes at five years of age. The negative association between bed-sharing and letter-word identification [the test used to determine cognitive development] was attributable to the socioeconomic characteristics, maternal education, and mothering practices of those who bed-shared, rather than bed-sharing itself.”

The team looked at information collected from 944 interviews done for an Early Head Start program evaluation. The interviews were done at one, two and three-year home visits, with cognition and behavior evaluated at the five-year home visit.

The research confirms what previous studies found, which is that black and Hispanic parents were more likely than non-Hispanic whites to bed-share. Of the 944 interviewed, 31 per cent were black, 25 per cent Hispanic, 38 per cent white non-Hispanic, and four per cent identified as other. About 82 per cent of the mothers were U.S.-born; 73 per cent lived below the poverty line and 41 per cent didn't graduate from high school. Nearly half the families in the study said in at least one interview that they shared their bed.

Lauren Hale of Stony Brook University School of Medicine in New York, who led the study said, “Parents can do what works best for their family and not feel guilty if they choose to bed-share, because there probably aren't lasting impacts.”

Experts say bed-sharing is not very common in the U.S., and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends against it until babies are at least one year old. The main worry with small babies is sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, which killed nearly 2,300 children in 2008, according Dr. Fern Hauck of the AAP.

Dr. Nina Sand-Loud, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School and a developmental-behavioral pediatrician with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, agreed. “I think each family has to work out what's best for them, in terms of what works best for their child and their child's sleep on a day-to-day basis,” she said.

Also commenting on the study, Michelle M. Garrison, a research scientist with the Seattle Children's Research Institute, focused on the notion that what matters “is not so much bed-sharing itself, but rather how exactly parents go about it.” Garrison explained that “some children fall asleep in their parents' bed on their own, and then their parents get into bed later. Others fall asleep with their parents in bed at the time. And that makes a difference. Toddlers who fall asleep on their own tend to sleep more restively. And good quality sleep really does have an impact on behavioral and cognitive issues down the line,” she noted. “So bed-sharing is not necessarily something to be advised against,” Garrison said. “It can actually be a positive thing. But it's just a matter of figuring out how you are going to go about it.”