Health

For almost five years, in rare snatched moments, I have dreamt of sleep. It has become an elusive, yet recurrent theme: I bulk buy bedlinen and pyjamas as a substitute for the unfulfilled longing of uninterrupted nights and langorous lie-ins.

Sleep deprivation is not good for you; there is no doubt about that. Multiple studies point to the deleterious effects on concentration and mood if there is no time for decent amounts of deep sleep. If babies came on prescription, there would be a warning label on the Babygro about the hazards of driving or using heavy machinery while you have one. Five years on, I have bags the size of suitcases under my eyes and two small children who like to call my bed their own.

Mothers should not really admit to being bed-sharers, for the science - at least the presentation of it - can be confusing. A parent who falls asleep on a sofa, infant in arms, or a baby who shares a bed with parents who smoke or have used alcohol both increase the risk of sudden infant death. (Although parents who would rather drink or smoke when they could be sleeping are a mystery to me.)

But there is a good research base that tells us it is easier to maintain milk supply on demand if the child is beside you. Bed sharing also promotes bonding, regulates sleep patterns and helps the mother learn "cues" that the baby wants feeding. And breast-feeding, as we are constantly being told, is the best nutrition available for a child - indeed, the only food a child needs for the first six months of life.

But the list of do's and don'ts for bed-sharing can be somewhat daunting. DO sleep on a flat firm mattress and maintain a room temperature of 16°C-18°C; DON'T share your bed if you are "unusually tired" (which raises the question as to when, exactly, maternal exhaustion can be regarded as unusual).

With kicking, writhing children, a good night's sleep is not assured. But the alternative is not eight hours of undisturbed rest - it is hours spent at the cotside, singing lullabies. I know which works best for me.

I did not start by inviting the children in and asking them to cosy under the communal duvet. I was just very, very tired. The two-metre walk to the cot after a nocturnal feed may as well have been a mile. It was easier to stay in bed and keep my babies beside me.

As the human cow, racked in a cycle of continuous breast feeds, nappy changes and intermittent weeping from tiredness, this was the better option. It was my way of getting through. And as I seem to know lots of parents who tell me their darlings "have slept through the night since six weeks old", I have tended to keep it quiet.

Sharing my bed with my children has been one of their lazy mummy's guilty secrets: like the gin in my "fizzy water" - not something you want your mother or health visitor to know about. But now it seems there may be other advantages to my seemingly lackadaisical approach.

Recent encouragement of the separation of infants and mothers at night - even more recent advice to keep children in a cot in the parental bedroom - is something that seems to be unique to the human species. Professor Jaak Panksepp, psychobiologist with the Falk Center for Molecular Therapeutics at Northwestern University and author of Affective Neuroscience (Oxford University Press) thinks the trend for parents and children to be separated at night may be a bad one.

"In our ancestral environment, children almost invariably slept with mothers, as do other primates in the wild, and we simply do not know the consequences of these two current types of parenting, although a study could be done." He feels the process of hands-on soothing of a child, which is known to reduce the stress hormone cortisol, can make a difference to children's early development.

"I think we can be confident the 'sustained-touch' type of approach, which is very hard to implement in many modern circumstances, is likely to lead to the healthiest and most secure, well-adjusted, and socially savvy kids."

It seems the process of touching and soothing a child results in an array of anti-stress hormones being released, including natural opioids and oxytoxin. And it appears that keeping your child close can be as good as an incubator.

A recent paper in the British Medical Journal described "kangaroo care", developed by Edgar Ray in 1978 in Colombia as a response to the shortage of incubators for low birthweight babies. Under this arrangement, the newborn is settled upright, wearing only a bonnet and nappy, on to the mother's or carer's chest, 24 hours a day, and the mother sleeps in a semi-sitting position. Not only does this work, it improves bonding and breastfeeding rates. The study concluded that it "delivers ideal conditions for low birthweight infants to thrive".

There is also evidence that kangaroo care is useful in normal weight babies born at term. The journal Pediatrics published research last year that showed newborns settled better when held in skin-to-skin contact. Professor of neonatal medicine Neil Marlow wrote in the British Medical Journal that the possibility of longer term outcomes such as better developmental and behavioural progress remained a tantalising possibility. In the meantime, he said: "We really do not need evidence from systematic reviews [a critical evaluation of the highest quality studies] to tell us that being kinder and gentler with babies and using a child's behavioural responses to adapt neonatal care practice is a better approach than a rigid systemic programme of care."

Of course, bringing your child into your bed only accrues beauty sleep for the mother if she can honestly claim to get more sleep with the child in the parental bed than when it remains in his or her own. Here, I must be honest. I have grown far too used to having my children beside me. There are rare occasions when they - one is rapidly approaching school age - do not pad their way into my bed by 1am. And then I sleep so badly that I have to go and fetch them.

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