Parent-child co-sleeping is common in Asia [East and West]

Mike Ives, Sharing a Bed With Your Kid? It’s Totally Normal in Asia. NYTimes, July 22, 2025.

In the United States and some other Western countries, many parents wince at the idea of sharing a bed with their young child on a regular basis.

But in other places, long-term bed sharing through infancy, toddlerhood and beyond is seen as totally normal. For many families in Asia, in particular, the question is not whether to do it, but when to stop.

How and where young children sleep is a big deal for the whole family. It can have implications for an infant’s safety and a child’s development. It can also affect parental sleep, intimacy and mental health, and can influence how families configure their homes.

Western practice:

In the West, and especially in the United States, bed sharing tends to be unpopular and contentious. That is partly because the American Academy of Pediatrics and other experts warn that it can be unsafe for infants 6 months of age or younger.

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, according to “How Babies Sleep,” a book published this year by the anthropologist Helen Ball.

Even though there isn’t much scientific literature on bed sharing, studies generally show that the practice is far more common in Asia than in the West. [...]

One multicountry survey of parents of infants and toddlers from 2010 found that bed-sharing rates were over 60 percent in China, Japan and South Korea, and over 70 percent in India and parts of Southeast Asia. The rates in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States ranged from 5 to 15 percent.

Priorities:

In some Asian societies, many couples prioritize the mother-child bond over their own sleep health and marital relationships, said Heejung Park, a professor of psychology at Scripps College in California who has studied bed sharing in the region. [...]

In India, the cultural attachment to bed sharing is so deep that it tends to persist even among urban elites who are exposed to “Western sleep training culture,” said Himani Dalmia, a sleep specialist in New Delhi who runs a support group for parents and shares a bed with her children, 7 and 9.

Singapore is an exception:

One apparent exception in the region is Singapore, a wealthy city-state where reported bed sharing rates are lower than in other East and Southeast Asian countries. Sleep training seems to be increasingly popular there, and some Singaporean parents are reluctant to admit to bed sharing, said Elaine Chow, the president of a local breastfeeding support group.

Ah, those “intimacy” issues:

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.

There's more at the link.