Strollerderby : family bed

Miley Cyrus Does It, But Would You Let Your Teen Sleep in Your Bed?

JeanneSager — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:32:00 GMT

Think you've got it bad trying to kick your cosleeping toddler out of your bed? Actress and singer Miley Cyrus recently told Glamour she still likes to crawl into bed with mom and dad on occasion, and she's sixteen.

Cyrus told Glamour she sometimes feel immature for her age, and she related that to a desire to sleep with mom and dad, specifically cuddling with her mom, after a long day.

I truly can't imagine having crawled into bed with my parents at sixteen. Perhaps it speaks to how much tighter-knit the Cyrus family is; I was your typical teenage girl at odds with her mother and then some. But it sounds like they might be a little too tight-knit.

Not in a sexual way. At least, I'm not concerned that there's anything inappropriate between child and parents. I do wonder, how do mom and dad resume a normal sex life after their kids have gotten out of the infant or even early toddler stage if they don't know if their kid might wander into their room in the middle of the night? When does the family bed return to the marital bed?

My daughter is three and a half, and she usually crawls into our bed first thing in the morning - she usually wakes up before we do. But where she sits at the end of the bed with a coloring book or her stuffed Piglet for a few minutes to at most maybe half an hour each morning, she rarely sleeps with us.

That's usually reserved for nights when she's sick, when my husband or I initiate her coming into our bed. It's for comfort, mostly, ours as much as hers - I would be jumping up to check on her in the next room anyway. Even then, it's hardly pleasant. She kicks. She windmills her body, turning so she's spread horizontally across the bed, and my husband and I are driven to our two very separate sides of the bed. I don't enjoy sleeping with my daughter in the bed, and the sleep is hardly restorative.

After a certain age, kids just get to be too big physically to share a bed with two adults. They also prevent parents from having ANY time alone together, as two people who love each other for the sake of each other - not just because they share a connection to one not-so little body.

I haven't figured out what the age is - my daughter is still three and still needs me - sometimes - even though she's been out of our room since she was old enough to sleep through the night.

Where and when do you think parents should close the door on their kids?

Image: Wikipedia

Keep Kids From Messing Up Your Sex Life

Kelly Mills — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:01:00 GMT

By way of the Huffington Post, we now have some tips for ensuring your kids don't ruin your sex life. I'm a little underwhelmed. Guess what is number one? Take out your knives co-sleepers, because the top tip is: Separate beds. Now, I'm not even a family bed kinda gal, but I do know you can have sex in more places than just a bed at nighttime. But maybe group slumber does inhibit the nasty--you can let me know.

Other tips mostly center around making sure everyone gets enough sleep; setting aside couple time in the form of the adult-only vacation and regular date nights; and keeping arguments over discipline and such out of the bedroom (unless you are talking about the other kind of discipline and that happens to be your thing.) Nothing too revolutionary here, though the date night thing always irks me. I know we enjoy date night so much we decided to make it an annual event. I mean, does anyone actually manage to do this with real regularity? The cost of babysitting and a movie or a meal alone necessitates we dip into the kid's college fund. But hey, maybe you regularly do a night out with your sweetie, or even your spouse, so I'll suspend my total disbelief in case scientists discover the rare couple who does this all the time.

5 Ideals of Attachment Parenting Applied to Marriage

Rachael Brownell (Redsy) — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 15:20:00 GMT

Attachment parents (APs), those lovely kind souls mean well. They do. But sometimes following the tenets of perfect childrearing can cause irreparable harm to the marriage upon which the children ultimately depend. Marriages struggle after kids, there's no doubt about it. And I think the higher your childrearing standards are, the more pressure is placed on the marriage after kids.

Here are 5 attachment parenting practices and some suggested applications to marriage or partnerships:

1. Respond with Sensitivity. APs are encouraged to respond to the nonverbal cues of infants and young children and to respond with love and gentleness. In marriage, partners worn out from caring for children often forget to follow the same tenets in caring for the marriage.

2. Nurturing Touch. The concept of loving your child with loving touch is an obviously good parenting practice and can mean hugs, kisses, but also handholding and shoulder rubs. The same approach can strengthen the marriage. Friendly touch (the kind that doesn't ask for anything in return) can build a bridge between even the most harried of harried souls. Hand-holding, kissing, and shoulder rubs can work miracles on a stressed out couple.

3. Nighttime Parenting. While I definitely agree that it is important to be responsible to kids (especially infants) and their needs at night, I also think it's crucial to remember that sleep deprivation can cause illness, such as depression, anxiety, and high blood pressure. If you and your spouse never get any sleep, how in the hell can you expect your marriage to flourish?

4. Strive for Balance. Ahhh balance. The catch word and the mythology of it all. I think having children is more about growing accustomed to being unbalanced, than to striving to eat enough carrots and go to yoga. When the parents are in charge, at least the chaos is somewhat ameliorated by some authority. I'm not talking handing out 'whoopins', but surely you've witnessed some of the "discussion" with small children that fail to alter bad behavior? A marriage needs balance, particularly balance between the needs of the children and the needs of adults. While children's needs often come first, Mommy and Daddy need date nights and weekends away to remind themselves why they're doing all of this anyway.

5. Family Bed. In many cases, the family bed causes marriage problems. Once there is more than one kid in the picture, and unless you have a California King, how is one supposed to get rest, or get some? Parents need boudoirs, dammit, or at least an adult space that isn't littered with cheerios and peanut butter smudge and questions about Jesus first thing in the morning. Cuddling time is crucial. But when the kids are old enough to ask why you're "tickling each other" it's time to make other arrangements.

It's OUR Bed, Dammit: Co-Sleeping by Default

Rachael Brownell (Redsy) — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 16:18:00 GMT

When I was a child, we were only allowed to wake the parents in cases of extreme weather, suspected haunting by ghosts, or extreme physical distress. Otherwise, their bedroom was off limits. This rule was instituted following my discovery of the "massager" I'd found in my parent's nightstand. The lock on their door showed up the next day and foiled further attempts to find even greater discoveries.

The Family Bed is as old as oatmeal but has found greater traction among Gen X than the Boomers before them. And it makes me wonder: what the hell are we thinking? I truly understand giving kids comfort and love during the night as well as during the day. And when babies are small and new and hungry, nursing them in bed is convenient and promotes better sleep for mom and baby.

But at what point does it get out of hand?

Alisyn reached her limit when her daughter turned three. The New York Times reports that some parents end up sharing beds with their kids out of desperation and describes a new category of parent with whom I totally sympathize, the "reluctant co-sleeper."

There is apparently now an entire industry devoted to helping families sort through various sleep problems, many of which are outlined in the Times piece. How is it that top attorneys, gallery owners, and CEOs cannot manage the boundaries and structure necessary to get kids back in their own beds?

I think the problem is in the power. Parents who exercise power during the day are most likely so wiped out in the evening or on the weekends that they have insufficient energy to devote to whipping those ankle-biters into shape. And tired parents are understandably more interested in having their kids in bed than in disrupting sleep night after night in order to get the kid back into bed. I could also be that we've become a generation that has completely lost site of the difference between loving our children and LOVING our children. I predict divorce rates will soon be skyrocketing unless we figure out a way to get Billy back into his own goddamn bed!

Strollerderby : family bed

Miley Cyrus Does It, But Would You Let Your Teen Sleep in Your Bed?

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Keep Kids From Messing Up Your Sex Life

5 Ideals of Attachment Parenting Applied to Marriage

It's OUR Bed, Dammit: Co-Sleeping by Default