Baby sleeps better alone

Infants over six months lose 40 minutes’ sleep a night if they share parents’ room

SHARING a bedroom with their baby is a guarantee that parents will lose sleep.

Now a study has shown the child can miss out too.

Infants put to bed in their parents’ room after the age of six months lose 40 minutes of sleep a night, a study has shown.

They appear to lose their ability to soothe themselves and are at risk of tantrums and child obesity due to lost sleep, researchers said. Their study found the average nine-month-old sleeping independently gets almost ten and a half hours’ sleep a night. But one sharing a room with a parent gets only nine hours and 47 minutes.

That is because they are four times more likely to be taken into their parents’ bed at night. They’re also twice as likely to be ‘fed back to sleep’, which can get young children into the habit of needing attention, a bottle or breastfeeding to fall asleep again.

The study cites evidence that children under six months should sleep with their parents to prevent sudden infant death syndrome. But lead author Dr Ian Paul, from Penn State College of Medicine, says of older infants: ‘Babies have brief waking episodes overnight, and I suspect parents in the same room are more likely to respond to those awakenings rather than let the baby go back to sleep on their own.

‘This starts a vicious cycle where a baby becomes accustomed to a parent responding to them. Instead of self-soothing, they need a more complex and prolonged interaction such as being rocked or fed to sleep.’

The US researchers found that room-sharing babies had lower odds of going to sleep by 8pm. Those aged nine months had less night-time sleep, shorter sleep stretches and more unsafe sleep practices. On the average 40 min- utes of lost sleep for babies sleeping with their parents, Professor Paul said: ‘For children who were still room-sharing at nine months old, the effects persisted when they were two and a half, when they still slept an average of 45

‘It’s linked to childhood obesity

minutes less a night. We know that a loss of sleep is linked to emotional and behavioural problems, as well as child obesity.’

He said parents should first consider giving a baby their own room from the age of six months.