Dad’s Beautiful Facebook Post Turns Into Ugly Co-Sleeping Debate

David Brinkley of Yukon, Okla. overheard his wife, Alora, having a conversation with a friend about co-sleeping. Alora’s friend expressed surprise that Brinkley is OK with Alora co-sleeping with their children because apparently the friend’s husband would not be OK with it.

That snippet of conversation is what led Brinkley to post an ode to his wife and pretty much mothers everywhere wherein he plainly states that he supports the choices his wife makes as a mother, co-sleeping included. He goes on to implore husbands everywhere to respect their “wives as mothers.” The post included a sweet picture of Alora fast asleep with both their toddler and their baby.

The “likes” started flooding in and the post went viral, then it gets deleted by Brinkley. Why? Because co-sleeping is controversial.

Brinkley was bombarded with comments about how it’s not safe and that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) does not endorse co-sleeping and a plethora of “oh-my-GOD-how-could-you-and-I’m-totally-judging-your-parenting-skills” kind of messages.

Can we put it all into perspective? 

Yes, there are risks associated with co-sleeping. No one is dismissing the dangers and yet it does seem that the anti-co-sleeping brigade is dismissing uh, nature, biology and history. Co-sleeping is NOT new. If anything, babies sleeping by their lonesome is new.

DISCLAIMER: I co-slept with both of my children because otherwise I would have gotten no sleep. OK, now that we got that out of the way, let’s move on. 

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“Babies have always slept and always will sleep next to their mothers,” Dr. James J. McKenna, professor of anthropology and director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame, told CBS News.

Co-sleeping poses some risks, which can be mitigated by safety measures recommended by the AAP such as sleeping on a firm mattress and keeping pillows and blankets away from baby. Risks acknowledged, now can we talk about the a bevy of benefits it provides? 

“It’s biology. When [a baby’s] touching, hearing and smelling the mother that’s making an enormous difference in body temperature, heart rate, hormonal levels… they’re all being regulated by that direct contact,” explains Mckenna. “Human infants are contact seekers on which their survival depends being as close to that mother as they possibly can.”

The whole point of the post was missed by keyboard warriors. 

But back to Brinkley’s post and how he deleted it because he got so much grief about the co-sleeping. Sigh. The co-sleeping wasn’t even the point of the post. The point of the post is that Brinkley respects and supports his wife’s choices as a mother. Read the post for yourself:

My wife is a best friend kind of woman. She has hours upon hours of long conversations with her friends ALL the time and occasionally I get to hear little pieces. Recently she was talking to a friend and they were talking about this thing called ‘co-sleeping’ and I heard the other person ask ‘doesn’t your husband hate that? My husband would never let me do that.’ This blew my mind and has bothered me for days. So I just decided to come out as a man and set a few things straight. I do NOT hate any part of what makes my wife the mother that she is. I would NEVER degrade or disregard anything that she feels like doing for my children. Do I have to squeeze into a small corner of the bed sometimes? Yeah? But my God how beautiful does she look holding my children? Making them feel loved and safe? The thing is that our wives only experience these little seasons in motherhood for a short time. They carry our babies, they birth them, they nurture them and maybe while they are little they let them crawl into our beds and snuggle. But eventually our babies get bigger they grow up they get “too cool” for snuggles so why would we as men want to steal a single second of this time from them? Being mothers is part of their identity and what’s a year or 3 out of decades of life spent together? I just want to say that I am proud of the decisions my wife makes as a mom and I support every single one of them. I would never want to rob her of this time she has or these seasons that are in reality too short to not enjoy. Please respect your wives as mothers.

Also, can everyone please understand that one post on Facebook is not the entire story? The man was just loving on his wife and baby mama thank you very much and he gets blasted on for endangering his beloved children. *Sighs again.*

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And there’s more. 

Thankfully, just like Brinkley has his wife’s back, she’s got his back. He may have deleted his original post with photo, but Alora shared the photo again and tried to give it context. She wrote:

This photo is one second in millions of passing seconds- it’s hardly a full story. This picture was taken when I was having one of the hardest days as a mom. I was tired, I was unshowered, I had a million things still to do and all I wanted to do was sit and cry and I was so emotional. This was a special nap time experience- I laid down to nurse my daughter- my 2 year old son came in to snuggle with his baby sister. My husband supervised this entire experience and made it possible for me to comfortably lay with them both like this as he very lovingly and carefully watched over us. We would never put our children in a dangerous situation and our night time sleeping looks completely different than this.