SOME couples start taking their children into bed when they're small babies because it's easier to get them back to sleep that way and anyway, they're cuddly. If you're breastfeeding, it's way more convenient.

Some start later on, when children are restless, or sick, and soon it has become a habit for children to get into bed with you every night.

In some houses, every night is a game of musical beds, with everyone waking up in a different place from where he or she started out, not sure how he got there. In another variation on the theme, a child won't go to sleep without someone lying down with him or her, which ends up with the parent sleeping in the child's bed.

Despite the naturally contraceptive effect of this kind of carry on, you go on to have more children and they join the family pyjama party. Before you know it, you're clinging to the duvet as offspring, some now nearly as tall as you sprawl across the sheets.

And then you're listening to Morning Ireland one morning and you hear Dr Moosajee Bhamjee, psychiatrist and Clare Labour TD, warn (in the course of a discussion on Brendan O'Donnell) that some children are still sleeping with their parents when they're 20.

Will a practice that seemed innocuous, nice, if frequently wearing harm your children? Could it really go on forever? Did he really mean to say that cosseting children by staying with them in school as O'Donnell's mother did, or welcoming them into your bed can be psychologically damaging?

The answer is, he did. He believes that babies should be out of their parents' bedrooms between the ages of three and six months, and that to allow children free and continued access to your bed is discouraging their independence and taking the easy way out of sleep problems.

It's something a lot of us who believe in the family bed don't really want to hear. Bringing the kids into your bed is one of those hot topics that divides parents although the practice of letting small children into the parental bed in the early morning is pretty universal, there are plenty of us who, for whatever reason, end up with our children, even children aged up to 12, semi permanently in the bed.

The parents who don't allow this tut tut disapprovingly they think we're plain mad. And although we might be ambivalent ourselves balancing closeness and intimacy against disturbed and overcrowded sleep we have to defend it.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that, parents who both work outside the home are even more inclined to let children into their beds, perhaps to assuage guilt for not being with them in the daytime.

Sean and Anne are one such couple with three children aged from three upwards, they always brought their newborns to bed with them.

"It's nice, and it made sense when Anne was breastfeeding," says Sean. (They weighed up the danger of overlying" and decided it wasn't a problem). The older two children, now aged five and 12, did eventually go off to their own beds, although the five year old gets Anne to lie down with her at night to put her to sleep. But the baby of the family, now three, is still firmly in their bed.

"We bought him a bed last year, but he doesn't want to know about it," says Sean. He agrees that his family's pretty unstructured sleeping arrangements can be wearing for both himself and Anne. Anne will admit that guilt plays a part in her attitude if the children went to bed at 7 p.m. she'd never see them. But experience tells them that children don't want to sleep with their parents forever.

Anne O'Connor, a Dublin psychologist who runs a sleep clinic which advises parents on child sleep problems, agrees. She believes that if parents are happy to let their children sleep with them, then there is no problem she believes that the situation usually resolves itself as children get older and want to sleep in their own beds. But she warns that some couples with problems in their relationship use the situation to keep their distance and says subconsciously, this could affect a child.

Dr Bhamjee says he has definitely encountered a situation where a 20 year old was sleeping with his parents, but this is clearly pretty unusual. But one mother remembers how her 11 year old son used to crawl into bed with her if something frightened him in the night.

Children can be fussy too. One mother tells how her seven year old daughter arrives at the family bed, crowded with parents and siblings, and demands. "Now, before I get in, has everybody got their knickers on?"

Marie, a working mother of two who reckons she's getting a bad back from sleeping on the edge of her bed, is coming around to the Dr Bhamjee view of the matter. Her three year old son started coming in and out of his parents' bed at six months, after an illness. But she remembers "My own parents always welcomed us into their bed. And I would hate to think that my kids didn't feel welcome too."

Dr Bhamjee says most parents are guilty of taking shortcuts to solve, child sleep problems in his own case, rocking a child to sleep in the living room, in front of the TV. But he believes that not only are you creating future problems by doing so, you are also doing no favours to your child.

In our culture, where the norm is for children to sleep in their own rooms, "even children as young as six or seven can be shy to admit they sleep with their parents." The physical contact might be nice, he agrees, but "you have to let your child develop independence and self reliance."

Most parents will be familiar with the various methods of training their children to go to sleep by themselves, but many of us just won't bite the bullet when it comes to trying the only one that (at least with babies) apparently really works. But in the end, says Dr Bhamjee, you just might have to let the child cry himself to sleep for a week or two.

It's either that, or in my experience, outright bribery that's "positive reinforcement" says Anne O'Connor. If you're trying to get an older child into a better sleep routine, the promise of a Barbie, or a Barney, or a Power Ranger toy might do the trick.

And remember by the time they're 20, it will cost a whole lot more.