Advocates of co-sleeping speak fondly of feeling the warm bodies of their small children cuddled up next to them on cold winter nights. However, for other parents, the reality is often spending long hours clinging to the side of the bed as their child sleeps across the mattress sucking loudly on their thumb.
—Lynn Cochrane, "There Were Six In The Bed and the Father Said: I'm Out of Here," The Scotsman, November 12, 1998

For better or worse — no one knows which - children sleeping with parents isn't unusual in America.

The practice, cosleeping, has been documented by researchers from the Rainbow Babies and Children Hospital, Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Cleveland.

''Cosleeping was a routine and recent practice in 35 percent of white and 70 percent of black families,'' Dr. Betsy Lozoff and associates said in a report in Pediatrics, journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
—Patricia McCormack, "Children sleeping with parents not unusual," United Press International, August 24, 1984