Admittedly, I got moved to the spare room many nights and our partnership crashed and burned when our daughter was just seven months old, so I won't speculate as to the effect co-sleeping has on the parents' relationship. For our bubba, however? She thrived. Even after our separation, we individually lay with her until she drifted off, then snuggled in when it was our own bedtime.

Like most aspects of child-rearing, you can find a fistful of studies that support either side of the co-sleeping argument, yet the experience of sharing a bed with my daughter has produced an intimate, intuitive, deeply affectionate relationship. I don't need to guess if she's sick, has slept well, feels anxious or had a nightmare, because I was there. More importantly, she knows I'm there.

She's never had to cry alone in a dark room, flooding her little brain with anxiety, with the terrors that nights and solitude have wired us to imagine are out there watching. While some would argue this produces a clingy, needy child who depends on constant reassurance, my little one is just the opposite – fierce and independent, kind and empathic.

Homo sapiens and our sibling, homo erectus, have survived more than two million years sleeping with their children, and when I draw my daughter into my chest, smell her hair and mumble love to her in the quiet hours of the night, I feel more a father, more human, than at any other time in my day. Best of all, my daughter wakes calm and happy ... before she sits on my head.