Frequently Asked Questions About Sleeping With Your Kids.

1) Doesn't weird Oedipal stuff happen? I certainly don't recommend that mothers follow in the footsteps of Elvis Presley's mother and sleep with a child until he's 14. But if you're talking about kids 2 or 3 years old--well, the very fact that people ask this question is a sign of how bizarrely obsessed our culture has become with childhood sexual abuse. The fact is that sexual abuse between children and their biological parents (as opposed to stepparents) is exceedingly rare. And when it does happen, it's often because the biological parent was absent during the child's early years, so that the normal instinctive prohibitions against incestuous sexual attraction weren't triggered. (That was the case in the recently published autopathography The Kiss, about father-daughter incest.)

2) What about sex between parents? Assuming you don't live in a studio apartment, having sex beyond earshot of your sleeping child is logistically possible. (Here's your chance to re-enact the kitchen scene in Fatal Attraction.) Obviously, complete spontaneity becomes problematic. But if you want to preserve complete spontaneity, you shouldn't have kids in the first place.

3) Isn't it harder to get your children to fall asleep if you don't Ferberize them? Yes. It obviously takes more time for the mother to nurse the child to sleep than it does to set the child down in a crib and walk away. On the other hand, many mothers treasure this nightly ritual--not surprising, given the bonding hormones that nursing releases. In principle, I suppose it would be possible to Ferberize your child into falling asleep unassisted in your bed and still nurse the child on demand during the night. But most parents seem to stay at one end of the spectrum or the other.

4) Don't parents roll over on infants and accidentally smother them? This is just the kind of thing you'd expect natural selection to have guarded against in designing our brains. And, indeed, parents seem to be acutely attuned to this danger even as they sleep. On the other hand, natural selection didn't count on parents being, say, full of tranquilizers or booze. So if you go to sleep full of either, caution may be in order. (But if you're a nursing mother, of course, you shouldn't be full of such things.) There is reason to believe, by the way, that sleeping with an infant reduces the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Apparently, frequent bodily contact with the parents stimulates regular breathing in the child.