Read all of GQ’s Father’s Day 2025 stories, including our series of counterintuitive advice for dads, here.
Between the ages of four and six, I went through a terrible nightmare phase. I was convinced there were monsters in the closets, ghosts in the walls, dead people on top of me. I would bawl for my mother, and she would come in and rescue me. She even let me keep the light on until morning.
Things only got worse when I turned nine—I would have panic attacks before bed and periodic meltdowns throughout the night. I’d gently knock at my parents’ door and ask to sleep with them, but I was too big by then. My mother sometimes let me keep a mattress on the floor next to their bed, but my parents became frustrated and began to resent me.
My dad eventually intervened and forbade my mother from helping me. I had to grow up. It turns out some source, maybe a book they would’ve barely read, had convinced them that I suffered from separation anxiety, which, in my father’s mind, was the wimpiest, most pathetic form of anxiety. They took me to a child psychiatrist, and he encouraged them to let me fight through it. My parents set an early bedtime, pumped me full of warm milk, and gave me a bunch of self-soothing mantras I was to recite whenever I felt anxious. None of it worked.
I would still try to climb into their bed, but they began to lock their door. Sometimes I’d sleep in the hallway with my head against their bedroom door. One time, my father stormed out, screamed, “GO TO SLEEP!” and slammed the door in my face, locking it again.
We have three children, ages seven, six, and five. We didn’t really sleep-train our oldest. He was our first, he was adorable, and listening to him bawl was too much for me, so I’d pull him out of his crib and plop him between us before he could cry it out. Sometimes I’d be disappointed if he actually slept through the night.
Our second was tough, and we let her cry it out in her room. This was equally painful, but after 45 minutes, she’d slow down to sniffling, then into a graceful snore. And wouldn’t you know it, she now sleeps through the night with no problem. When tired, she climbs into the top bunk, and she is usually the first to wake up, get dressed, and eat breakfast.
Our third child, a boy, was born in February 2020 and hospitalized with RSV a month later, a week or two after the pandemic lockdown. It was a terrifying and disorienting time for a one-month-old to get an upper respiratory infection. A couple of years later, he had a terrible seizure in our family room. It scared my wife and me so much that we no longer care if he sleeps in our bed until he’s 37.
Now five, he is our tiniest child, still frog-legged like a newborn. The three of us share a bed almost every night, and my wife and I are in no rush to get him back into his own, mainly because the type of seizures he has mostly occur at night, while he’s asleep. It’s been a little crowded, but I don’t mind.
But in the past year, our seven-year-old has begun to have sleep problems too, waking up at 2 a.m., shuffling in from his room, and shoving me over to climb into my side of the bed. He is large for his age, heavy, all legs and feet. Several nights a week, there are now four of us on top of one another. What is technically a king-sized bed feels like a twin. We are constantly kicked in the stomach, smacked in the throat, or awakened by sleep-talking or sneezes or farting. Sometimes, I complain to my wife that our comfort should also be a priority, that we must be more vigilant about guarding our bed. But I rarely ever give my kids much of a hard time, because I don’t ever want them to feel like my father made me feel when I had my own sleep problems as a kid.
I was terrified of my father until college. I hated the sound of his footsteps, the sound of him turning on the faucet, the sound of his keys in the door when he got home from work. My bad dreams weren’t the problem; he became the nightmare.
When I later talked to my dad about how he handled my sleep issues as a kid, he rationalized his behavior, saying it was necessary to prevent me from growing into a codependent adult unable to sleep in his own bed: “I wanted you to be able to fend for yourself!”
But this approach backfired, spectacularly. I could not sleep in a bed alone for most of my adult life. I would be restless all night; I could only fall asleep on the couch with the TV on, or after taking enough pills to knock myself out. I became more anxious, distrustful, and scared—of abandonment and connection. I was unable to express my needs; I was paralyzed by fear of, well, most things. I don’t take the pills anymore, but I still have plenty of nights where I’m dead tired yet unable to fall asleep, and wind up watching an old Jason Statham movie on my laptop to “relax.”
Therapy has helped with this through the concept of re-parenting, through which I figure out my adult needs by first considering what the nine-year-old version of me would need. Most of the time, it’s love and kindness. And safety—I want to feel safe.
When my boys come into the bed, sometimes I want to shove them out, yell at them for being wimps, and tell them that they’ll grow up codependent and weak. And then I try to remember the sound of the door slamming and my father yelling at me. I want them to feel safe and loved. I would most likely let them sleep with us forever, but I know they won’t. Someday they’ll get comfortable in their own beds. What’s the rush?
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