Are you still cosleeping with your giant, gangly-limbed 10-year-old? Second-grader still claiming your pillow as her own? Got an eight-year-old who sleepwalks into your bed night after night? Does the sight of your child's unused bed fill you with a vague sense of failure? Well sit next to me, because you are not alone in the battle of get-outta-my-bed. There are many, many reasons why you may still be co-sleeping with your child, and they're all perfectly understandable. I feel you, truly I do. Here are just a few of those reasons.
1. Your bed is too comfortable. Your bed: 12,000 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets on a pillow-top mattress. Your kid's bed: Adventure Time sheets (which he asked for!!!) that feel like finely-woven burlap. No effing wonder.
2. Broken dreamcatcher. Who will catch your child's nightmares now, Mommy? Who? WHO?!?
3. Not enough light in their room. You just haven't found the right nightlight to scare off everything that wants to eat your child in the middle of the night.
4. Too much light in their room. You just haven't found the right nightlight that's dim enough to sleep with.
5. Your bed smells like you. The obvious solution is to sleep every night in your child's bed and then never wash the sheets, ever.
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6. OMG, life. It's hard on a kid out there. Bullies, spelling tests, asparagus, siblings. Sometimes a kid just needs a little extra comfort.
7. Weird sounds everywhere. Your house is settling. Or the heater makes a lot of racket. Or the oxygen molecules make a lot of noise swirling around your kid's room.
8. You're closer to the bathroom. And that means it's just faster to flop onto your mattress instead of her own when your daughter returns from that midnight pee pee break.
9. You're just too cuddly. Maybe if you'd try harder to be mean and prickly your kid wouldn't want to cozy up to you at night. Just saying.
10. You know it'll all end someday. Maybe you're a little slow to kick your kid out because you know someday they'll be big, independent teenagers and you'll miss hearing their sweet breathing all night long.
Does your "bid kid" still sleep with you sometimes… maybe more than sometimes?
Image via Hugh Whitaker/Corbis
