Co-sleeping has gone from an unknown term to a common topic
When did people start taking an interest in sleeping together as a family? We have tracked the topic across four sources: books and research articles since 1970, Google searches since 2004 and Wikipedia since 2016. None of these sources shows how many families actually sleep together. They show how much attention the topic receives. You can find out how many families sleep together in the chapter Who sleeps where.
What this means
- Co-sleeping has gone from an unfamiliar term to a common topic. The English term co-sleeping barely appeared in books before the mid-1980s. It began appearing in books in the 1990s, when researchers also started writing about it in earnest.
- The term appeared in English first. Other languages followed after 2005: the German term “Familienbett” now appears 14 times as often in German books as it did around 2000, while the French term “cododo” barely appeared in books before 2004.
- In Germany, searches for family beds began to rise around 2012, many years before FamBed started advertising in the country in 2025.
- Interest has remained fairly steady in recent years, and Google’s two ways of measuring searches do not show the same result. That is why we do not draw any conclusions about where the curve is heading now.
- Fewer people are reading about co-sleeping on Wikipedia: the English article receives half as many views as it did in 2019. Readership across the whole of English Wikipedia has also fallen, but by only 7%.
On Google in United Kingdom, interest in »co sleeping« (co-sleeping) has 2.2 times as high in 2025 as in 2012.
Four sources on one timeline
Each row represents one source from 1970 to 2025. The higher the curve, the more prominent the topic is in that source. The rows can only be compared by shape, not height: look at when each curve begins to rise. The grey area marks the years for which the source has no data.
The English term “co-sleeping” began appearing in books in the late 1980s and became common in the 1990s, as researchers began writing about it. Books peaked around 2010, followed by Google searches, while Wikipedia peaked in 2019.
Source: Google Books Ngram Viewer (books up to and including 2022); PubMed, NCBI (research articles); Google Trends, worldwide co-sleeping topic; Wikipedia, page views (Wikimedia); calculation by FamBed.
Searches in your country
Google searches for the country’s local term for co-sleeping or family bed, year by year. 100 marks the year when the term received the most searches. The dashed line shows the worldwide trend for comparison. Select a country.
The graph shows how interest has changed in United Kingdom, not how high it is. To see how search interest in United Kingdom compares with other countries, read the chapter Google search interest: 317 searches a year per 1,000 children born, ranked 9 out of 26.
Source: Google Trends (retrieved 30 October 2026); calculation: FamBed.
How we calculated it
Books: Google Books Ngram shows how often a word appears in the books scanned by Google, year by year. We have combined different spellings, such as co-sleeping and cosleeping, and use three-year averages because individual years vary considerably. The book data ends in 2022, and the tool does not include books in Danish, Swedish or Norwegian. The English term ‘co-sleeping’ appeared fewer than once per billion words in 1980-84 and 66 times in 2018-22. The Spanish term ‘colecho’ appears 24 times as often as it did around 2000.
Research: The number of articles in PubMed, the major medical research database, that mention co-sleeping or bed-sharing in their title or abstract: 12 in total from 1970 to 1989, 15 a year in 1995-99 and 63 a year in 2021-25. Almost 4 times as much research is now published overall as in the 1990s, so research on the subject has grown at the same rate as research in general. Of the articles that state the children's ages, 24% focus exclusively on children aged 2 or older, compared with 12% in 1995-2004.
Google: Google Trends shows the proportion of all searches in a country that relate to a particular term, on a scale from 0 to 100. We use the average for each year. A year is only included if Google can measure searches for at least 7 of its 12 months. Each graph has its own scale, so it shows how interest has changed within the country, not whether the country searches more or less than other countries. See the chapter on Google search interest for that comparison. Worldwide, the topic of co-sleeping scored 20 in 2010, 23 in 2011, 75 in 2017 and 84 in 2025. In Germany, ‘Familienbett’ scored 5.3 in 2012 and 71 in 2025. In 2025, Germans searched for ‘Familienbett’ 6 times as often as they searched for co-sleeping.
Wikipedia: Views of the articles about co-sleeping in English, German, French, Spanish and Polish, including views arriving via former titles such as ‘Familienbett’ and ‘Bed sharing’. The English article received 8,302 views a month in 2019 and 4,181 in 2025. The whole of English Wikipedia saw a 7% decline over the same period. Views of the five articles combined fell by 59%.
Caveats: All four sources measure how prominent the subject is, not how many people co-sleep. The book data and Google Trends show the subject's share of everything written or searched for, not a total number. The most recent years are uncertain: Google Trends shows an increase, while Google's search figures for Europe show that searches for co-sleeping fell by 18% over three years and searches for family beds fell by 7%. The number of children born also fell by 7%. In the US, Google Trends shows a one-year increase of 32%, while Google's search figures show an increase of 2%. We therefore exclude 2026 and do not place much weight on the past few years. FamBed has advertised in several countries since 2025, but the long-term graphs began rising much earlier. Small countries and less common search terms generate few searches, so their graphs fluctuate and begin later.