After months of silence on the subject, I decided to come clean in baby yoga. Prompted by that stock new-parent-to-new-parent question, “Is your baby sleeping well?”, I admitted it. Yes he is, because he sleeps with us. My name is Harriet Perry and I am a co-sleeper.

I braced for the inevitable gasps of horror that accompany the realisation that people have a baby crusher in their midst, but there was none. We chatted more and one by one the guilty admissions came: the other yoga mums co-slept too. One took her baby into bed every night when he woke up at 4am, another’s baby often had colds so she wanted him to sleep next to her, another fell asleep feeding her baby in bed most nights. Apart from regular co-sleeping, they had one other thing in common: they all believed that they were bad mothers for doing it. They felt terrible about it.

A study in 2004 showed that 47% of infants in Britain bed-share with their parents for at least part of the night. And since I came out of the co-sleeping closet, more and more friends have confessed. But for every positive reaction, there’s an equal and opposite one: my health visitor barely concealed her disapproval; a local nurse made clear she refused to let her own daughter-in-law co-sleep under her roof; and lots of parents who don’t co-sleep just looked appalled. Despite the 47% who’ve done it, co-sleeping seems to be as socially unacceptable as dogging, swinging and wearing a hoodie.

New parents spend a large part of life worrying about their baby and the myriad ways they could harm it. Our parenting instincts are besieged by government bodies and gurus offering advice. If we feel something is right but people with letters after their names tell us it isn’t, it’s very hard to stick to our guns. And co-sleeping is right up there on the Long List of Gruesome Ways to Kill Your Baby.

The Department of Health does not recommend bed-sharing because of an increased risk of infant death, taking its lead from the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths. Gina Ford, the bestselling but childless childcare author, described on her own book sleeves as Britain’s leading parenting expert, is even more hardcore. She recommends teaching babies to sleep in cots “away from the rest of the house...without the assistance of adults”. When my own health visitor learnt my dirty secret, she peered up over her headmistressy spectacles and said, “You should be putting some distance between you, because otherwise your son will have attachment problems later on.”

And there was a landmark documentary in 1991 presented by Anne Diamond, whose son had died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (Sids), showing the results of research done in New Zealand. The Maori community co-slept and they had a high rate of Sids. QED, the two were linked.

Only a very foolhardy parent would ignore such a tidal wave of advice. Unless, like me, they try to trust their instinct and brave the scaremongering. The conclusions in Anne Diamond’s documentary were revised two years after the programme terrified thousands of co-sleeping parents. Researchers conceded that it wasn’t the Maori tradition of co-sleeping to blame, but its combination with the far less traditional influences of tobacco and alcohol. And when you examine the NHS guidelines, they reflect this conclusion. Co-sleeping on its own is not the problem, but if combined with alcohol, drugs or cigarettes it can be.

And for all the tutters who think it’s best to let children cry themselves to sleep alone in a separate room, allow me my own spot of scaremongering. Research published this year shows that training a baby to sleep in a cot is likely to increase stress hormones such as cortisol. Margot Sunderland, of the Centre for Child Mental Health in London, found that co-sleeping makes children more likely to grow up as calm, healthy adults.

Another earlier study largely ignored by received opinion shows that the effect of a mother breathing on her infant during sleep stimulates the infant’s own breathing and heart function, thereby protecting against Sids. In countries such as China and Japan where co-sleeping is the norm, Sids is virtually unheard of.

In 2004, the Royal College of Midwives released guidelines stating that “parents should be informed of the benefits of co-sleeping, which include successful breast-feeding and better sleep”. But this recommendation does not seem to have filtered down. Compare my experience with the health visitor to that of our more enlightened European neighbours. When Bianca Köster’s first son was born in Frankfurt, she spent two nights in the “family bonding room” in one large bed with her new baby and her husband. When Bianca had her second baby in the UK 10 months ago, “the midwives told me that I wasnot allowed to have him in my bed when he was only two hours old”.

I didn’t start out a co-sleeper. Night after night, we tried to put Freddie in a cot. He cried. He kept waking up unhappy while my husband and I were snuggled under the duvet. So the solution was to take him into our bed. We haven’t crushed him yet.

Fourteen months on, we’re a happy co-sleeping family. Assuming we don’t smother him in his infancy, I expect him to be a confident, independent boy. And despite what the doubters say, he won’t still be sleeping with us when he’s doing his GCSEs.

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