Nearly half of American parents are still climbing into bed with a child who is well past the newborn stage. A national survey commissioned by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine found that 46% of parents say they sometimes, often, or always co-sleep with a child under the age of 18, a figure that has almost nothing to do with newborn room-sharing and everything to do with toddlers, school-age kids, and even teenagers ending up in a parent’s bed on a routine basis. Meanwhile, the CDC’s own Vital Signs data shows 61.4% of parents report bed-sharing with their infant at least occasionally, with nearly a quarter doing it “often or always.” Pediatric guidance has not budged an inch in the other direction. If anything, it’s gotten more explicit about how dangerous the practice can be.
What the Survey Data Actually Shows
The AASM survey, fielded by the independent research firm Atomik Research among just over 2,000 U.S. adults in May 2024, didn’t just ask whether bed-sharing happens. It found the practice spans the entire span of childhood, not a narrow newborn window most parents assume the conversation is about. That distinction matters because most of the public safe-sleep messaging Americans encounter is aimed squarely at infants under 12 months. There’s comparatively little formal guidance, and even less survey tracking, on why a 6-year-old or a 10-year-old keeps ending up in mom or dad’s bed, even though the AASM’s own commentary suggests it’s common enough to be a routine sleep-hygiene concern rather than a rare exception.
Why Pediatricians Won’t Soften the Warning
For infants specifically, the numbers behind the AAP’s position are stark. According to the Academy’s own patient-facing guidance on HealthyChildren.org, the risk of sleep-related infant death is up to 67 times higher when a baby sleeps with someone on a couch, armchair, or cushion, and more than 10 times higher when the adult sharing the bed is fatigued or has used alcohol, medication, or other substances that make it harder to wake up. Babies under 4 months face 5 to 10 times higher risk from bed-sharing alone, and preterm or low-birth-weight infants face 2 to 5 times higher risk. The Academy’s core recommendation remains that infants sleep on their backs, alone, on a firm surface, in the same room as a caregiver but not the same bed, for at least the first six months. None of that guidance softens or expires once a child ages out of infancy; it simply stops being the subject most public health messaging addresses.
The Gap Shows Up Differently Across Families
CDC’s data also makes clear that bed-sharing isn’t distributed evenly. Among the 14 states surveyed, bed-sharing with an infant ranged from 49% in West Virginia to nearly 79% in Alaska. By race and ethnicity, the rate was highest among American Indian and Alaska Native families at 83.9% and lowest among non-Hispanic white families at 52.7%, with Asian/Pacific Islander (76.8%), non-Hispanic Black (76.5%), and Hispanic (66.7%) families all falling in between. Younger mothers reported far higher rates than older ones: 76.8% among mothers under 20, compared with 57.1% among mothers 35 and older. Education level and WIC participation followed a similar pattern in the CDC data, with families reporting less than a high school education and those enrolled in WIC bed-sharing more often than families with more education or income. Those gaps track closely with housing, cultural sleep norms, and access to a crib or bassinet in the first place, which is part of why public health researchers increasingly frame bed-sharing as a resource and equity issue as much as a behavioral one, rather than simply a matter of parents ignoring advice they’ve already heard.
Where That Leaves Parents
The dissonance here isn’t subtle. Nearly half of parents report co-sleeping with kids well beyond the newborn stage, according to AASM’s own survey data, while the AAP’s own guidance is unambiguous that solo sleep in a dedicated space is the safer default, especially in the first year. Neither side of that gap is closing. Parents keep bed-sharing for reasons ranging from comfort and breastfeeding logistics to simple lack of space, and pediatric groups keep repeating the same warning because the mortality data behind it, for infants specifically, hasn’t changed. What has changed is how openly the survey data now admits just how common the practice really is, at every age, not just in the crib years the guidelines were written for.