Sleeping on a futon mattress

When I first became a mother many moons ago, I quickly discovered that the fastest way to get my baby boy back to sleep at night was bringing him into bed and breastfeeding him in the side-lying position.

Luckily for me, nobody warned me off bedsharing, but for the past few decades, there has been a pervasive belief in the developed world, that bedsharing is not a safe practice. Thanks to research done by scientists like Prof Helen Ball, Professor of Anthropology at Durham University, Director of the world-renowned Durham Infancy and Sleep Centre and founder of @basis_babysleepinfosource, we now know that when mothers follow the safety guidelines, bedsharing is no riskier for breasted babies than sleeping in a cot.

Importantly, when mothers bedshare, their chances of reaching their breastfeeding goals are much higher. This makes complete sense when you think of how exhausting and unsustainable it is to have to get out of bed several times each night and then try to resettle your baby in their cot afterwards before you yourself can attempt going back to sleep. The piece I wrote on the side-lying position and bedsharing - https://www.cordeliauys.co.uk/in-praise-of-the-sidelying-position - which includes all the safety guidance, is the most shared article on my website.

The facts are:

• Babies settle much faster when they sleep next to their mother because they feel safe.

• Babies need to feed multiple times at night all the way through the first year of their life and often beyond.

• Frequent feeding at night helps to establish and maintain a mother’s milk supply.

• Breastfeeding provides many health protections for both babies and mothers.

• Waking at night is protective against SIDS.

If a mother thinks that it’s not safe to bedshare, she will sooner or later be extremely tempted to sleep train her baby and/or stop breastfeeding. But evidence shows that sleep training doesn’t prevent a baby from waking, it just teaches them to stop signalling their distress, and – contrary to popular belief - most formula fed babies also wake multiple times at night.

There is so much misinformation about infant sleep, and there are so many misconceptions, that I cheered out loud when I heard that Prof Helen Ball has written a book on the topic called ‘How Babies Sleep’ :  https://amzn.eu/d/dH9EPkT Unlike many people who call themselves sleep expects, all the information Helen shares and all the recommendations she makes, are evidence-based.

At the ‘How Babies Work’ conference which took place at Durham University on 10th May 2025, to celebrate the launch of Helen’s book, I was particularly interested in the talk by Dr Michiko Yoshida, a Visting Research Scholar at Hokkaido University Faculty of Health Sciences and a midwife specialising in Breastfeeding Care. Dr Yoshida talked about co-sleeping as a Japanese cultural practice. She said that co-sleeping is a childcare method practiced around the world that has many benefits, including promoting parenting behaviours, facilitating comfortable breastfeeding and helping to create a strong bond between mother and child. In Japan, there is a long history of families co-sleeping. Japanese mothers begin co-sleeping with their babies after childbirth, so they can quickly and easily observe, care for and breastfeed their infants. Many mothers continue to co-sleep at least until their child starts elementary school.

The practice of co-sleeping is so natural for Japanese people that it is an unconscious part of raising babies. Interestingly, when babies are very young, Japanese mothers tend to co-sleep, that’s to say sleep next to their baby, but on a separate mattress. Once babies are past the newborn stage, from around 4 months, they then tend to bedshare, i.e. sleep on the same mattress.

The crucial piece of information here is the kind of mattress Japanese mothers and babies are sleeping on: the majority still sleep on futon mattresses - stuffed with cotton - placed on a traditional tatami floor. The futons are hard and thin (only around 5-10cm thick).

Since the Back to Sleep campaign of the early 1990s, the incidence of SIDS/SUDI in the UK has massively reduced. But it is even lower in Japan, despite the practice of co-sleeping. Dr Yoshida believes this is because of using futons which are made from a natural material and are very firm. A firm mattress is critical for safe bedsharing. Also being in close proximity to their babies allows mothers to respond quickly to their baby during the night.

I was amazed by Dr Yoshida’s talk, because using a futon mattress was something that I did with my babies. In fact, I had really wanted a co-sleeping cot, but there wasn’t room next to our bed. I worried about the baby falling between our mattress and the wall, so I decided to buy a futon which fit nicely on the floor at the foot of our bed. I would sleep there with my baby, breastfeed him in the side-lying position whenever he needed, and most of the time we would both fall back to sleep very easily. Because the futon was low to the ground, I didn’t have to worry about my baby falling out of bed, which meant I slept much better. My husband slept in our bed so was still in the room with us. In the morning, I would roll up the futon and place it in a corner.

It turns out that what I did out of necessity was actually one of the best options I could have chosen: a firm mattress is crucial for safe bedsharing, being close to my baby helped me relax, allowed me to breastfeed responsively and crucially, get more sleep.

There’s something quietly reassuring about discovering so many years later that my practical choice was also the right one for so many reasons.

Links:

How Babies Sleep by Prof Helen L. Ball: https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Babies-Sleep-Factful-Nights/dp/1529918936#:~:text=In%20How%20Babies%20Sleep%2C%20pioneering,times%20with%20a%20new%20baby

Podcast interview with Prof Helen Ball: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/spoil-your-baby/id1792508293?i=1000711163847