Erin and Tommy Kim with their sons, Jiyong and Jihun, in the parents’ bedroom in Seoul, South Korea on July 6, 2025. Photo / Woohae Cho, The New York Times
Co-sleeping tends to be unpopular and contentious in the West. But in many Asian countries, the question is often not whether to do it, but when to stop.
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.
In South Korea, many parents bed share because they want to savour 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.
“They want to enjoy the moment,” Kim, 40, said over an iced latte in her high-rise apartment complex. Though her girls slept in cribs until they were 6 months old, they’ve grown up bed sharing with their parents.
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 US, 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. (Other regions where bed sharing is popular, including Latin America, aren’t as well studied, experts say.)
One multicountry survey of parents of infants and toddlers from 2010 found that bed-sharing rates were over 60% in China, Japan and South Korea, and over 70% in India and parts of Southeast Asia. The rates in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US ranged from 5 to 15%.
Country-level studies since then have broadly reinforced some of those findings, although a 2015 survey in the United States found that 37% of mothers “rarely or sometimes” bed shared and 24% of them “often or always” did.
Bed-sharing rates in the West may be higher than such figures suggest because stigma around the practice linked to safety concerns in infancy leads some parents to underreport it, said Professor Ball, the director of an infancy and sleep centre at Durham University in Britain.
“I think bed sharing is a much more normal strategy than Westerners recognise,” she said.
In parts of Asia, motivations for bed sharing vary by place and family. Some are extremely practical.
Some parents in Seoul, a city where many families live in high-rises, share beds with infants because they worry that sleep training them would lead to crying and wake the neighbours, Kim said.
In Hong Kong, where apartments are notoriously small, many families don’t have extra rooms to put their children in, said Vicky Tsang, who runs breastfeeding support groups in the Chinese territory. She said it is common for bed sharing to last through primary school.
“The space problem is the big factor,” she said.
But practical considerations don’t always fully explain why bed sharing is popular.
In some Asian societies, many couples prioritise 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 other cases, parents who grew up in bed-sharing households can’t imagine a different sleeping arrangement.
“It’s so common that no one thinks, ‘Is it uncommon?’” said Erin Lim, 39, an entrepreneur in Seoul who grew up in a three-generation household where she slept in the same room as her parents.
Lim said that she stopped sharing a bed with her older son when he was 4, and with her younger son when he was 2. Now the boys are 9 and 5, and they have their own room. But she still keeps a small bed in her bedroom for if — and when — they wander back in.
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.
She said she sometimes gets calls from Indian parents abroad who can’t find the sleep advice they’re looking for.
“Look,” they tell her. “We want to bed share, and we can’t talk to anyone here about that.”
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.
“Sometimes, if they do mention it, they will mention it kind of guiltily,” she said.
Ho Kin Ing, who shares a bed in Singapore with her three girls — 2, 3 and 6 — said that she and her husband once felt significant social pressure to sleep train as they browsed online parenting forums.
“I had a lot of influence and information, and not a lot of intuition,” Ho, 33, said during an interview in her high-rise apartment. “But I guess that, over the years, that intuition part started to strengthen a little bit.”
Her husband, Tan Peng Yong, 37, said they didn’t regret choosing to bed share.
“To be woken up by your kids is one of the best feelings ever,” he said, sitting next to a toy bus and a Mrs. Potato Head doll. “Even when they hit you in the face.”
Social pressure around sleeping arrangements can cut the other way, too.
In some East Asian societies, choosing not to bed share can be seen as “harsh parenting”, Dr Park said. In her study on sleeping habits in Japan, some mothers said they felt compelled to do it in order to conform to social norms around maternal responsibility.
Kim, the mother of two in Seoul, knows the feeling. She 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 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, Kim said with a laugh, but neither girl wants to sleep on top.
“It’s kind of scary to think about falling off,” she said.
Written by: Mike Ives
Photographs by: Woohae Cho, Ore Huiying and Saumya Khandelwal
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