I wouldn't worry about cosleeping affecting their development.
The only things you have to worry about is you both getting enough sleep, and any shame or embarrassment they have about cosleeping.
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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I mean, I'm assuming your kid knows he's going to be a teenager soon and what that means. You can just talk to him about it like a person.
They're too old for that.
Find a way for them to sleep on their own, you'll need to say no and mean it. No matter the waterworks that may follow.
Why do you think he is asking to sleep with you? I know you said it's because he "can't sleep", but you can also just not be able to sleep in your own bed.
When I was a child (and even sometimes as an adult), I would get scared at night. Yeah every 2 year old gets scared at night, but I'm not talking about age 2. I did it my entire childhood...even when I got to be a much older child. I'm talking as old your son and then even older. When I would get scared at night, I would go into my sibling's room at night and sleep on the floor. It happened frequently. I did eventually "grow out of it" as another user stated and did it less frequently as I got older.
It might be embarrassing for him to talk about and he might not want to admit it, but do you think it could be something like this?
I'm 30 now and thankfully don't have those problems much anymore (and I live alone so there is no one to sleep with lol).
He tells me he gets scared at night as well. He also has diagnosed hyperactive ADHD which might make him restless at night.
I have experience with this. There is nothing damaging about co-sleeping occasionally. The risk is either of you becoming dependent.
A 27 year old single mother, if I had to guess, doesn't plan on staying single forever. At some point a significant other, once properly introduced, will be staying the night and your son should not be a part of that.
The other issue I see here is "it's kind of nice not having to sleep alone every night." This does not strike me as healthy, especially when he stops co-sleeping.
Ultimately, you are the adult, and you are the caretaker. I would highly recommend getting your son a regular therapist to guide you through this.
I did this when I was around the same age as your son. I remember knocking very often for a certain period of time, then at one point I just grew out of it. I would not worry too much about it, if there is no other serious topic that could be a reason for the behavior.
If you're afraid it might cause a problem, maybe you could try to say no one time (ideally at some time when you sense it's not that important for your son, like not during a storm or after nightmares), just to see if that's ok for him, or if that raises problems.
I feel like you might be over-thinking this. If it's a recent thing then it's most likely just a phase and he'll grow out of it when puberty kicks in. One my best friends has an 11 yo and a 4 yo and they both end up in their parent's bed pretty much every night. There is nothing weird or unusual about a child sleeping in the same bed as their parent/s, no matter what internet hacks try to tell you.
This. You're not causing permanent damage to a child by letting them sleep in your bed. You don't need an academic answer on what research says about this.
I don't like it because my kids kick and move around, so I don't want them to sleep in my bed.
The main advice for parenting should always be "you do you".
Sorry, but that's simply not good advice. Nobody is born with perfect parenting skills and is granted all the answers. In fact, many parents are not fit to raise kids at all, others are simply overwhelmed and need help.
It's very easy to have a kid, not particularly easy to raise one. The idea that all your decisions are magically correct and sound just because it's your own kid and that every parent knows best is simply wrong. It's healthy to doubt yourself and to ask for advice.
Also, parenting science is not quackery. This is an actively researched area and there are real scientific efforts to better understand child development with respect to biology, psychology and neuroscience. These efforts do lead to a better understanding of how kids can be raised and how certain parental decisions might affect a child.
Personally, I'm happy each time parents try to inform themselves and seek the advice of others. That doesn't necessarily mean relying on the answers a bunch of strangers give on social media, but I hope the Fediverse as a whole can do better.
Right now, I can't make the claims you did in your post initially.
You're not causing permanent damage to a child by letting them sleep in your bed.
I wouldn't know that. Intuitively, I do believe that co-sleeping would have a lot of benefits up to a certain age, after the infant stage and dangers of SIDS have passed. However, I could easily imagine that there might be adverse effects after a certain age. Would it be likely to occur after a handful of times? Probably not. Are there any indications on the threshold maybe? Anything to look out for, given the kid might have anything else going on? Maybe. All information I would have on that subject would indeed be anecdotal though, and so in turn pretty useless. Why the dismissal of an honest attempt at getting educated?
I would indeed argue for getting an overview of what science has to say on the matter and then making an individual, informedndecision based on all the additional context I'd have as a parent that I could never cram into a couple of posts on the internet.
Having access to scientific publications, I'll see if I can provide some material later.
I don't think it'll affect him negatively. It will be good to know why he wants to sleep in your room, so you can know if it's something you need to fix. If it starts to get uncomfortable you could let him sleep then take him to his room once his asleep (provided he's not too heavy).
If it's just a few nights, I wouldn't worry about it.
It's up to you how you raise your kid. Does he have any special needs or other extenuating circumstances? If not, personally I would try not to make it a habit for him. Bring him back to his bed when this happens and stay up with him until he falls asleep again so he can be more comfortable in his own bed. That can be exhausting but I think it would be good for both of you if your son had some good independence skills.
He does have diagnosed ADHD, but thanks for the advice, will definitely try this.
I can sympathize, I was a nightmare for my parents growing up not being able to sleep. Though I usually was caught reading or playing video games instead. ADHD can be very hard to deal with and I wish you the best of luck
I was sleeping in my parents room, on the floor, till I was embarassingly old.
Turns out I had/have Tinnitus and found the background noise of whatever show they were falling asleep to made it infinite easier to sleep.
Holy shit I feel like I had a similar kind of issue and I've never heard anyone talk about it before. Childhood tinnitus and sleeping issues. Literally never had anyone else write anything remotely similar to my experience.
I slept on the floor of my sibling's room instead of my parents. I have always suspected that I had a form of tinnitus even as a young child. I would get paranoid that the sounds of the tinnitus were some other entity in the room and get scared. You know how like you can sometimes "hear" when someone behind you even though they don't make a sort of obvious sound? That's how mine has always been for me. For me, it wasn't that I needed noise to drown it out. It was that having someone else in the room made me feel safe enough to sleep.
My tinnitus if that's what it really is has always constantly and incessantly warbled in intensity and directionality, which propogates the feeling of something suddenly being there. It's not the classical "eee" noise that people think of when they think tinnitus.
I remember as a child thinking when people would talk about the "sounds of silence" that they just meant this noise lol.