The wisdom of allowing children to share the parental bed has been debated for as long as there have been child-rearing manuals, writes Frank McNally.
Too often, however, the needs of the baby and its mother dominate consideration to the exclusion of another well-known member of the family unit. The male parent is squeezed out of the argument and, frequently, out of the bed. Relegated to the spare room, he may feel unloved and neglected.
It is not always like this, of course. There is a golden period in the early days of fatherhood, when the parental bed is a place of unbounded joy and profound peace, wherein you can only exult in your luck at being blessed with such a wonderful partner and a beautiful child.
Then they both come home from the maternity hospital, and that period is over. You didn't fully appreciate it at the time. But don't worry: you'll appreciate it the next time you have an uninterrupted night's sleep, five or six years from now.
Even then, the future can still look rosy for a while, thanks to breastfeeding. Breastfeeding seems like a win-win situation, for father and baby alike. Indeed, in terms of the support it attracts from male parents in these parts, the La Lèche League probably ranks second only to the English Premiership.
Much as the typical man would love to get up at 4am and warm a bottle while his partner sleeps on, most experts insist that breast is best, and the typical man is far too humble to disagree with the experts. He can still feel like a hero by getting up just long enough to lift the hungry baby from the cot to the bed. Then, as the little alien docks with its mothership, the father - his work done - can drift blissfully back to sleep.
In theory. In practice, it can be surprisingly difficult to get back to sleep when there's a child breastfeeding in your immediate vicinity.
Some babies are very noisy eaters. Also, even at an early age, male children often need to combine feeding with vigorous aerobic exercise, involving the thrashing of arms and legs. The combined effect can be disturbing for a father. Sometimes it's as if there's a small pig in the bed beside you, digging for truffles.
The feeding noise subsides, eventually. But you may be just drifting back into unconsciousness when, suddenly, the baby will belch. The noise produced can be out of all proportion to the size of the child. Even before he realised it was a talent and started practising, my eldest son used to belch so loudly it registered on the Richter scale. Not only would it wake you up, you'd be afraid to go back to sleep in case of aftershocks.
Once winded, the baby will usually fall asleep again, but not always. Sometimes, feeding reinvigorates a child. In fact, many babies react to food the way adults react to alcohol: making them feel the need to sing, and shout, and tell long but completely incoherent stories about what they did today.
Another issue in the parental bed debate is that many babies have their own personal time-zones, often bearing no relation to where they were born.
They may sometimes appear to be operating on Australian time, for example, even if they have never been anywhere near Australia.
When it's 3am in Europe, where their parents live, such babies will be wide awake and making those happy gurgling noises that can be so charming during European daylight hours. They will adjust to life in the northern hemisphere, eventually. But the culture clash can be very trying while it lasts.
Then there's the alignment problem. Most adults sleep in a roughly north-south direction, where north represents the top of the bed and south the bottom. For reasons science has yet to explain, however, many children find this arrangement completely beyond them.
Instead, they appear to be drawn towards some kind of magnetic poles, which shift constantly during the night: perhaps because of solar flares, or the movement of planets, or some other unseen force. Again, feeding can exacerbate the effect.
The magnetic-pole-alignment phenomenon may be related to that other well-known but mysterious condition: the one that affects children in restaurants. This starts when, half-way through a meal, they begin to sag visibly. Soon they become draped over their chairs, like those droopy clocks in a Salvador Dali painting. Then they slide inexorably under the table, sucked in by some powerful vortex. And only when they hit the floor do they regain their full strength.
Anyway, getting back to the parental bed, your child will eventually find a position comfortable to him and settle down for the night.
But since this may involve resting his head on his mother's bosom, while placing his legs in such a way as to engage his father's neck in a half-nelson, it will not always be comfortable for you.
At such times, it occurs to the male parent that it would be better for everyone if he just switched places with the baby and spent the night in the cot. Instead, he retreats wearily to the spare room, where he crawls into a cold bed, feeling unloved and neglected.
Or at least he would feel that way, if he wasn't already asleep.