Re Kathleen Auerbach's comments on this subject. When our first son was born we tried to follow the baby book advice and get him to sleep in his own bed. This clearly was not even possible to contemplate, though, till he was no longer regularly breastfeeding at night. Then there came a period when he often still woke at night and eventually my wife gave up on trying to cart him back to his own bed. She usually fell asleep while breastfeeding him anyway. Then when he was about 9 months old we made a huge effort and after what felt like the application of "cruel and unusual punishment" got him used to falling asleep on his own. Then we entered a period of moving several times and all newly formed habits were called off. Sleeping in bed with us became a new habit of its own. Then we saw the book The Family Bed and decided to give up worrying about it. When number 2 came after a 3.5 year birth space, we pushed two mattresses together on the floor and got used to being four in a continuous bed space. I was more bothered by our boys' kicking in their sleep than Stina (their heels seemed to have built-in homing systems targetted to that spot between one's legs), so my only request was that she lay between me and them, but that only worked sometimes. This kept on and was actually conventient, as in those days we could not afford more than the two room apartment we had. When they were 10 and 7 years old we began to sleep in a separate mattress in the living room. But we kept taking turns laying down beside them as they went to sleep. For the next couple years they still never had to fall asleep on their own, but gradually they got used to it and now only the 12 year old on rare occasions likes to have company at least for awhile before falling to sleep. As neither boy ever sucked his thumb (or anything else besides a breast for that matter) or was interested in teddy bears or such, I was interested to note in "Object attachment, thumbsucking, and the passage to sleep" by AW Wolf and B Lozoff (J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 1989; 28:287-292) that it is falling to sleep with someone (closely correlated to having body contact at this time) rather than breastfeeding per se that is most associated with lack of need for an "attachment object." Knowing what eis wondering about, I can say that a physician colleague at work loudly claimed a few years after the birth of his youngest that this thing of prolonged breastfeeding that I advocated (ours were breast fed for 3.5 years each) had no future, as it interf1 Uppsala University 751 85 Uppsala Sweden phone +46 - 18 515198 fax +46 - 18 515380 home phone +46 - 8 191397 (can be used as fax also)