We coslept with our first and are now doing it with our 2nd who is still a newborn. We're 3 weeks in and are already close to getting enough sleep each night.
It's fun to watch my 1 year old son roll around in his sleep and check to see if mom is there and then roll around around or do an arm swing and feel if I am there all without waking up too much. At first it seemed random and then I noticed the pattern. He was checking if we are still there, it's like a background task running in "low power mode", probably baked in by evolution a long long time ago.
In the morning, he remains asleep till at least one of us is in bed, as soon as we both are out of the bed, he wakes up.
Also ditto on the oddness of wanting to isolate babies in a different room when everyone is sleeping. One of the things I look forward to most is getting to sleep next to my kids every night, even if I'm busy during the day and don't get to spend as much time with them as I'd like to.
Um, where are you getting that from? It makes the toddler happier and more comforted, and in this case (and probably most cases) the parent also.
And, even though a toddler or young child won't tend to wake up as much as a baby, they still do a lot — bad dreams, loud noises, earthquakes, etc. — and having a parent right there next to them is a lot different than not. It can be the difference between them going right back to sleep or sitting up and screaming and then being wide awake for an hour.
It sounds shitty when you don't actually have kids, but once you have them and try it, it's just kind of like oh, I see. It is self-evidently great for the kids, and it also doesn't really limit your adult life much (you can just get up when they are asleep, and come back when you're sleepy).
Anyway, avoiding training babies to sleep alone certainly not "the only reason people do it", or even a reason most people do it (although it does have that benefit).
The rest of the world does it because living conditions typically dictate it, since you aren't living in a large house in the backgroundt area.
So I really doubt that most parents, even in America, would find it "very weird" that war1025 sleeps with his young children. (You don't have to "artificially pretend to sleep", by the way, you can just tell them a story or read your own stuff, or whatever... even just tell them goodnight and you'll be back later).
It's actually very normal, in a lot of the world, and also objectively less annoying than many things most parents do every day. (For instance, I certainly find driving my kids to school in the morning a hell of a lot more annoying than anything bedtime/sleep related.)
I'm not saying you personally have to do it, or enjoy it, just that it comes off pretty strange to characterize such a routine parental activity as going to bed with your baby/kids as a "very weird, shitty, huge nuisance"...
Maybe you missed it, but we also have 6 month old twins who are co-sleeping with us. We sleep on a futon-style floor bed, and the toddler moved herself to another floor bed next to ours of her own accord just a week or two ago.
Anyway, we're used to people thinking our parenting tactics are odd. Works for us.
The fact that families tend to sleep in futon instead of beds make it even more convenient, because you can just lay out a bunch of futon on the floor at night for all the kids.
Frankly my wife and I were glad of sleeping apart from our baby. Humans might be social but that doesn't mean we want to spend 24 hours a day with baby or toddler.