Feminism doesn't come up in this article, presumably because it is romanticizing the "other" and questioning the "West." Are we not supposed to notice that Inae Kim is unhappy with the burden and disorder of bed sharing and the loss of sleep and sexual connection to her husband, who insists that closeness to the daughters must predominate?
July 22, 2025
"In South Korea, many parents bed share because they want to savor a close relationship with young children 'who one day won’t need them anymore'..."
"... said Inae Kim, an office manager in Seoul. She sleeps in two adjacent king-size beds with her husband and their two girls, ages 5 and 7.... In some East Asian societies, choosing not to bed share can be seen as 'harsh parenting'.... Ms. Kim... sleeps better without her kids in the bed, she said. But her husband insists on family bed sharing because he sees it as essential for a close relationship with his daughters. Some of Ms. Kim’s friends have children who stayed in the family bed until age 12, even at the expense of their parents’ sleep quality and sex lives. That would be too much for her, she said. So she and her husband have decided that their girls will move into what is now their playroom in about two years. Whether that will happen on schedule is an open question. The plan is to install bunk beds, Ms. Kim said with a laugh, but neither girl wants to sleep on top...."
Meanwhile: "Many Western parents put infants to sleep in cribs or beds in a separate room — often using a practice known as 'sleep training,' in which infants are taught to sleep independently. Modern ideas about separating mothers and babies at night have their roots in campaigns by 'Victorian-era influencers' in Britain and the United States...."
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48 comments:
At least they aren’t including a dog in their sleeping arrangement. I would think a dog would spend many nights with one eye open
As far as I know, I slept in a room by myself until I shared a room with oldest sister starting at age 3 until we moved into a new home when I was 8, after which time I slept alone the rest of my childhood. If I had ever been a parent, I would have trained them the same way I was trained.
However, I think people sleeping the same room/bed with their young children is far less strange than people sleeping in the same bed with their dogs and cats.
In Chen Kaige's first film, "Yellow Earth" (黃土地) there's a funny little scene where a man and his wife are conjugating in the middle of the night in the one room they share with their 6 children. The older kids sleep soundly, but their young daughter asks her father in the morning why he "was hurting mommy". He says that he wasn't hurting mommy and that she was hurting him, to which the mother replies, "serves him right for 'paying extra for the special dumplings'."
It involves a traditional play on words + the innuendo of a 'reward'...quite masterful writing on Chen's part.
Outside of upper classes, I think most pre-modern people got their information about sex by literally watching family members, other members of their community et al. Now most people get information about sex via pornography. I wonder which historical distance will suggest is better overall.
it is romanticizing the "other" and questioning the "West."
Well put. This is the foundation for nearly all progressive thought.
Doesn't sound very Tiger Mother-ish. Maybe the Tiger Mom stuff is specifically Asian-American, like chop suey?
Ref sex in communal spaces: Wytold Rybzynski's "Home" covers the evolution of privacy and housing and how they influenced each other.
RR
JSM
I miss sleeping with our dackel, gone three weeks now. The short legs make all the difference.
I have a vague memory of my parents telling me I was no longer going to sleep in their room on a rollaway bed, but in the “boys’ room” with my two older brothers.
I only shared the “boys’ room” with my older brother, as the oldest one left home at the same time. So, I had to have been about 3 to 4 years old.
Shoulds and Ottas ,,living Your Life in accordance with Someone Else's ideas and suffering from it? Yeaaaahhh, NO..
The most notable thing in this article is the existence of South Korean children. If there are two in this house then the neighbors have none.
We bed share. We have a king and a queen pushed up against each other. To be fair, the only one who STARTS in bed with us is the baby (almost 1yo). But by 2 am, there's and extra 3 bodies in there with us. Oldest is 11. I HATED sleeping alone as a kid, and I HATED it. I was also an only child, so no siblings to even share a room with. So I leave our bed open for any child who wants some extra snuggles.
I'll report back in 20 years if they're all still there.
This is nuts.
One bed for the parents. No pets or kids allowed!!!
Like natatomic, I had my own bedroom from a very early age, and hated it. I would get up in the middle of the night, creep down the long, cold tiled hallway, up the long staircase, down another long wood-floored hallway, and knock on my parents door. "Daddy, I'm scared!". He would take me back downstairs, and sit on my bed until I went to sleep. It never occurred to anyone to move me upstairs. At some point I got used to it, but it took years.
Our kids slept in their own beds, in our bedroom. They had their own bedrooms, but didn't start sleeping in them until their early teens. When the bird is ready, he flies.
Of course, for most of human history, separate bedrooms for children were a luxury few could afford. Hell, bedrooms were a luxury few could afford.
I would bet that the young of all primate species are afraid of the dark.
2 adjacent king size beds isn't so much bed sharing as sleeping in the same room.
And a big room at that
What did more, Victorian influencers or an expansion of the middle class who were able to afford enough space for everyone to have their own bedroom?
I suspect it is much more common in then West than people let on. There is a shame in admitting as parents that this is the norm. Our two now-adult, well-adjusted children spent many nights for many years in our bed.
"Hell, bedrooms were a luxury few could afford."
"Back in my day the best you could find at times was a manger, and you'd count yourself lucky to have it!" - Jerome of Nazareth
Victorian-era influencers? Setting aside how grating the term "influencers" is in this context, many people lacked the literal room to separate infants and children from their parents, or even owned enough bedding to do so. There were movements by midwives, doctors, and social reformers to move newborns from the parents' bed as soon as reasonable, but, sadly for New York Times reporters, no Tic-Toks of such advice are extant.
I am sorry about your dear pup, Narr.
Parent of four here. 1. Sleep 2. Sexual intimacy 3. Downtime. Snuggles are for mornings, weekends and the occasional child’s nightmare.
I was wondering whether anyone would tie bed sharing to South Korea’s absurdly low birth rate. Maybe we can deport our illegal immigrants to South Korea — otherwise who will make the Kias and Hyundais for us?
Biden practiced this....wait, that was a shower.
China too. Know woman who shared bed in China with grandma until 13. But poverty and overcrowding a factor
The best we could manage was a cardboard box, in the middle of the road.
Who is NYT trying to convince?
"Daddy, I'm scared!"
In our fret house the nursery was next to the master bedroom. When he was around two our firstborn son would wake us up insisting there was a monster in his closet. I bought him a cap pistol and told him if the monster ever bothers him again to take the gun and blow its God-damned head off. About 12:30 or 1:00 in the morning we heard the cap pistol go off three times, and the “monster” never woke him up again.
When the second son was about two and sleeping in the nursery he kept waking up insisting there was a monster in his closet. Okay, I got this. I loaded up the cap pistol and told him that if the monster ever showed up again he was to blow its God-damned head off.
“Daddy, this is a cap pistol!
Second son went on to earn a Ph.D. in math from a prestigious university.
Before my teens, I had bed wetting issues. So imagine that worked out in the same bed with my little brother in the DR.
I’ve never considered it this way before, it’s possible my parents emigrated so they could afford to buy my little brother his own bed at long last
"And he said to them, 'Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, "Friend, lend me three loaves, for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him"; and he will answer from within, "Do not bother me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything"? I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence he will rise and give him whatever he needs.'"
-- Luke 11:5-8
Bedsharing has a long history.
I hear a public service commercial on the radio every day telling people not to sleep with their baby because of danger of suffocation.
My earliest clear memory is watching, from my own small bedroom, how the traffic light a few hundred yards away across the park would change again and again and finally sleep would come. I had my own small bedroom, and don't recall any terrors outside the normal--the thing in the closet or under the bed, which forbade dangling any limbs over the side . . .
My older brother had his room, and my little brother slept in our parents room, I think, until we moved a little up and east the day when I finished first grade.
I recall hearing or reading something about infants sleeping in the same bed with their parents being less prone to SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). Is that true or just some more contradictory medical advice you hear about eggs being bad for you one year and good the next?
The new house still had only three bedrooms but it was a two-holer with separate dining room and den. My older brother got the middle bedroom, and me and the next one got the other one. The newest brother slept in our parents bedroom.
None of us had any night fears that outweighed fear of our father's old school Germanic style of parenting, especially after cancer started eating his insides.
Very small sample number, but every case of bed sharing I have known about involved a narcissistic, controlling mother, and the outcome has been infantlized, overdependent "adult children." I don't care what serfs had to do in the Middle Ages.
That’s an adjustment my wife and I dread, Narr: not having our normally sweet dispositioned little Cairn Terrier sleep on our bed with her growling every time she has to move after leg bumps from us. She’s lost nearly all hearing and gone blind in her left eye, but she’s a happy dog.
We never bed-shared, but we got a sleeping bag and let our son sleep on our floor when he wanted.
In general, though, I put up with a lot of crap from the kids in order to spend time with them, mindful that the clock is ticking.
A reminder that The Brady Bunch was the first TV show to portray a husband and wife sharing the same bed. In US historical past, married couples didn't even share beds.
Each of our three kids slept in a crib with one rail taken off, butted up against our bed, until they were old enough to wake me on the chance that I would "overlie" them, as used to be the fear with drunken moms and wet nurses (I was a little paranoid, not drunk). That way if they woke hungry in the night, I could roll over and present a boob, barely waking up myself.
When they got a little older but were still breastfeeding, they could move to the king bed itself, where one earned the nickname "The Starfish" and another "The Barnacle" (the oldest was unpredictable.
All three shared a bed with Grammy from time to time.while we were traveling together, because my husband is, as I have mentioned here more than once, very frugal.
I was a terrible sleeper as a child - used to wander the house, scared of things and unable to settle. I would regularly awaken my mom by crouching over her with my ear a couple of inches from her nose, making sure she was breathing. In college I might've hit four hours of solid sleep a night, with or without a couple of hours of restless dozing. As a young mother, not a lot better. None of our kids slept through the night until they were at least a year old despite our using "attachment parenting" methods, but I figured it was genetic since I was exactly the same and underwent "sleep training." (My husband was a sleepwalker and -talker until his mid-20s, when suddenly he became a deep sleeper.)
Ulterior motive? Liberals sold the transgender spectrum with a behavioral anomaly in a lower order. The wicked solution through a religious progression of human life.
In my village in Thailand, the norm is children sleep with parents. When I described the Western tradition of putting them in a separate room and letting them cry themselves Ed to sleep it sounded cruel. Either the parents or the kids can be top priority, not both.
"co-sleeping" used to be a killer of babies in the hood. Haven't heard of that for a while.
Adults used to share beds, too. Remember the kerfluffle about young Abe Lincoln sleeping with other guys as a circuit-riding lawyer? Rooms and beds were expensive for most of history.
My own anecdote: at winter Ranger School, the RI's put us in a mandatory 2-hr admin sleep break, when we'd been so screwed up doing the mission there was no time left to get any sleep in tactical shifts. Immediately, four of us spooned together and put our four poncho liners on top, just to have some warmth. No discussion, hesitation, or even jokes. Just survival.
RR
JSM
"co-sleeping" used to be a killer of babies in the hood.
Substance abuse. I once was sharing a bed with someone who turned out to be an alcoholic (who did the steps and has been sober for years now, I'm happy to say for his sake and the sake of anyone else he might have hurt); at one point in the middle of the night, he rolled over, snoring sonorously, half onto me, and I had to struggle pretty hard to get un-pinned. He never woke up the whole time.
My favorite historical sleep factoid is that there used to be inns where, in the shared travelers' room where the flush could but a spot in a shared bed, you could pay the lowest amount to spend the night standing, draping your arms over a suspended rope for support.
And my favorite sleep theory: I read a few years ago that some anthropologist hypothesized that the reason people's sleep patterns change throughout their life is to ensure that someone is always more or less awake and alert to threats. Adolescents stay up late and sleep late; adults in non-clock societies often have two sleep phases interrupted by a period of wakefulness; elders tend to go to bed early and wake up early. Always someone to sound the alarm.
Each of our five slept with us until they were about 2, then they moved to a bed with a sibling. After that they would often end up next to our bed in sleeping bags. We all got more restful sleep being together. Yes, we had to be creative in managing sex.
No regrets - all five are now successful productive adults and parents.
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