SLEEPING WITH KIDS !

Co-sleeping: Will sharing a bed with your children kill your marriage?

To some parents it's the most natural thing in the world, to others it's a horrible prospect. It's a debate that divides parents: should you allow your young children to share your bed? Some say it makes a family closer, others that it kills a couple's intimacy. Here, two women who have tried it give their very different opinions.

No - says Victoria Lambert

Writer Victoria Lambert, 43, who lives in South London with her husband Nick and three-year-old daughter Rowena...

Sweet dreams: Victoria Lambert and three-year-old daughter Rowena. Victoria is happy to 'co-sleep' with her toddler until she is ready for her own space

The early nights get to you. Not to mention being left with a foot-wide stretch of bed to sleep in.

Equally frustrating is the temperature: three humans in a bed radiate enough heat to rival a furnace.

Despite all this, I wouldn't give up co-sleeping with my husband and daughter Rowena, not for all the long nights of uninterrupted solo sleep you could offer me.

Sharing your bed with your children is one of the most natural and healthy practices, and no childcare guru or super-nanny could convince me otherwise.

Choosing to co-sleep - not just letting junior climb into bed halfway through the night - is as old as time.

Yet during the Victorian era, with its obsession over modesty and insistence that children should be kept at arm's length to encourage independence, combined with the emergence of a middle class who could afford homes with more than one bedroom, British children stopped sleeping with their parents.

Yes - says Emma Cunningham

Emma Cunningham, 28, lives with her husband, James, 30, a salesman, in Peterborough. They have three children, aged four, two and one...

One night this week, I'd barely been in bed for ten minutes when I heard the familiar patter of two-year-old Keira's tiny feet across the landing.

Sure enough, she slipped into bed beside me and snuggled back to sleep against my body.

Sounds blissful, doesn't it? But the reality is that every time this happens, my heart sinks.

I know I'll have another night of disturbed sleep followed by a blazing row with my husband the next morning.

As selfish as it sounds, I rue the day I let my children into our bed.

The arrival of Keira will quickly be followed by the appearance of my other two children, who fidget and kick James and me to the edge of the mattress.

Far from improving family life and bringing us closer, co-sleeping has caused ructions within our marriage and has left us, literally, divided by our children.

We never imagined co-sleeping would ruin our lives like this.

In fact, after the birth of our eldest son, James and I were enthusiastic supporters of sharing our bed with our children.

We felt it was natural, healthy and would make them secure, protected and loved. How wrong we were.

Despite the warnings of well-meaning family and friends, we thought we knew better.

As we marvelled at this tiny, perfect, fragile creature we had created, we agreed neither of us could bear being apart from him for a minute longer than we had to.