Yes, My Toddler Still Sleeps In Our Room. No, We Haven't Stopped Having Sex.

My 3-year-old still sleeps in bed with my husband and me. I like cuddling him all night, and I’ve come to accept that it’s just the kind of mom I am: the clingy co-sleeping type. When he was littler, we took safe-sleep precautions with a bassinet and all that jazz, but these days, he sleeps right up next to me. Most non-co-sleeping families cringe at this. And then they immediately want to know: So how do you get intimate with your partner?

To which I say: We manage just fine, thanks. But lately, I’ve been wondering about the elephant in the room. Or, should I say, the toddler.

My husband and I NEVER have sex in the bed with our toddler. But we do sneak into the bathroom. Or sometimes, once he’s deeply asleep, we pull out a cot on the other side of the room and get it on in the dark. I’m embarrassed even admitting that.

I also don’t believe we’re the only parents who have ever found themselves in this predicament.

Here’s the thing... our house isn’t huge. And between the 3-year-old sleeping soundly in our blacked-out bedroom and one of our much more aware older kids wandering out of their rooms, we’ve chosen the former.

Which brings me to something else we really need to address. What about the “olden days”? Ma and Pa from Little House on the Prairie managed to have four babies while living in one-room log cabins and shanties. I guarantee they weren’t heading out to the barn or the outhouse every time they wanted to have sex, especially when bears and wolves were roaming around, and temperatures dipped below zero.

Besides, many modern families around the world still live and sleep in shared spaces.

Lately I’ve wondered if being horrified by the idea of parents having sex in the same room as a sleeping child is a cultural thing. Is it so awful if they’re still very little? At what point does “they have no idea what’s happening” turn into “Mom and Dad need to find somewhere else to do this”?

We reached out to experts to answer all the questions you’ve probably been dying to know but have been way too embarrassed to ask.

Is it weird to have sex with a baby in the room? Asking for a friend.

Here’s the short answer: Parents don’t need to feel guilty about having sex in the same room as a newborn or young infant. An infant doesn’t have the “cognitive capacity to understand what sex is,” and they won’t remember or understand what’s going on, says Kimberly Resnick Anderson, LCSW, an AASECT-certified sex therapist.

Anderson does add one caveat, though. Having a baby nearby is likely to make parents more reserved and overall less expressive during sex. Over time, she says, that could potentially lead to a “more permanent shift” in how they express themselves sexually.

When does she recommend finding some privacy? Around age 1.

Once a child develops language and becomes mobile, she says, it becomes harder to get it on, knowing the child could wake up in the middle of it.

But Samantha Ridout, M.Phil., BCBA, a child development and behavioral expert, cautions against treating any birthday as a universal cutoff. No two children develop at exactly the same rate, she says, so there isn’t a magical age when a child suddenly becomes aware of what’s happening around them. Instead, parents should watch for their child’s growing alertness and awareness and set appropriate boundaries.

I’ve found this to be true in my own family. We moved our older two kids out of our room quicker because they were definitely more aware than our last, who just feels more “babyish.”

But both experts made one thing very clear: During sex, infants need to be in a separate, safe sleep space.

Is our horror over having a kid in the room a cultural or modern perspective?

Let’s go back to my Ma and Pa observation for a minute, shall we?

The idea of children and adults having separate bedrooms is a relatively new phenomenon, says Macall Gordon, a researcher and sleep coach with an undergraduate degree in anthropology who studies children’s sleep through a sociohistorical lens. She says before the lightbulb was invented, family life revolved around sunrise and sunset, with families often sleeping in shared spaces.

But with electricity, adults could suddenly stay up after children went to bed, she adds. Now, children needed a “separate space to sleep” while adults stayed up. So the nursery and the crib came along. Then, she says, the layout of homes started to change, too, to include hallways connecting separate rooms. Before that, rooms were all connected to each other, so you had to go through one to get to another.

To this day, however, a separate bedroom is still something of a privilege. Many families simply don’t have “extra, separate rooms,” Gordon points out, especially in big cities, where studios and lofts are common, or in cultures where extended family members may occupy additional bedrooms. “While we think of a separate room for children as the norm, it really wasn’t for most of our history,” Gordon shares.

Tiffany Belanger, cosleeping expert and founder of Cosleepy, says the topic tends to divide her followers into two camps: those who will have sex in the room with a kid and those who won’t. When I described my scenario to her, she responded that floor sex while young kids are still sleeping in their parents’ bed is actually pretty common among the co-sleeping families she hears from.

At least I’m not alone.

OK, but what if your toddler wakes up?

You want to know if mine has woken up before.

Yes.

But rarely. He’s a really deep sleeper, and it’s only happened a few times. It’s dark, and when he did wake up, he immediately called out for me in that disoriented, half-asleep way toddlers do. We stopped immediately. The cot is also on the far side of the bed, outside his line of sight. As far as I know, he never saw or heard anything.

Will we emotionally damage our kid if he were to catch us in the act? Unlikely, Ridout says, if parents stay calm, stop immediately, tell the child they are safe, and answer their questions in a simple, non-panicky way.

But all of this still leaves me with the extremely practical question that got us into this mess in the first place.

So how the hell are co-sleeping parents supposed to have sex?

Parents have to get creative, flexible, and spontaneous, says Anderson. That might mean asking family or friends to babysit when you can, doing it in other rooms, or using whatever short pockets of privacy you can find.

And while Belanger reassures me that my floor-sex solution isn't unheard of among co-sleeping parents, the other experts think it’s not a great option when kids become mobile and verbal. So, I suppose it might be time to retire the cot. Where to next?

If only we had a barn…