Breastsleeping
Normalising Breastsleeping
Dr. James J. McKenna is a professor of anthropology and the director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame. He is a world-renowned expert on infant sleep -- particularly the practice of bed sharing in relation to breastfeeding.
He explains in his new book "Safe Infant Sleep: Expert answers to your cosleeping questions ":
"Breastsleeping is a term recently coined by myself and my colleague, Dr. Lee T. Gettler. It refers to a specific kind of bedsharing between a breastfeeding mother and infant, occurring in an environment free from proven risk factors. It is the safest form of bedsharing, practiced worldwide for all of human history."
Separating infant feeding and infant sleep is quite possibly the root cause of so many modern problems surrounding the two. The expectation that night feeding is an inconvenience to be tolerated in the very early days of infancy, but needs to be eliminated as soon as possible has no evidence to support it - and a great deal to debunk it.
It makes no sense that babies who are growing 24 hours a day would suspend refuelling for half of those hours. And while physical growth slows down in the second six months, brain development goes through the roof! Then the second year brings the mobility and verbal development which sets humans apart. Why would they reduce breastfeeding at night, when they are so busy during the day?
Infants feed around the clock.
This is the reality. It is time we stood up to those who deny it, and claim it is a behavioural habit which children can be trained out of.
Night time breastfeeding is optimal for milk production and infant growth. Breastsleeping allows mothers to attend to their child with minimal interruption to their own sleep.
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Informed decisions, safer choices
When we separate mother and baby, the result is sleep problems. Breastsleeping is nature's solution to a problem which developed in relatively recent times.
It is normal and natural for babies and children to sleep alongside their mother in the breastfeeding season and graduate to sleep with siblings or other family members when a new baby comes along. Everyone shares sleep surfaces with someone they love. Nobody is ostracised or expected to sleep alone.
From hunter-gatherer families to subsistence farmers, factory workers and merchants - only the most wealthy would substitute the mother with a paid nanny. And nanny would sleep close to those in her care.
Religious beliefs about the sanctity of the marriage bed pushed babies out into cradles and truckle beds in a corner near the hearth, while multiple older children would share a bed in the large families of poor people in crowded slum conditions. Cosleeping became tainted by its correlation with poverty. The elite did not share beds with their children but the poor did so. And due to illness, lack of ventilation and coal fires, sedation with alcohol and opioids and desperate acts by women who had no control over the steady stream of new mouths to feed ....bed-sharing became associated with infant mortality.
But the evidence is strong: fully breastfed children whose parents intentionally cosleep in a family bed where drugs and alcohol are not a factor, have a very low rate of Sudden Unexpected Death in Infancy (SUDI) from SIDS or fatal sleep accidents.
Adults struggling to stay awake as they sit upright feeding a baby on a sofa or armchair, adults who smoke or are affected by drugs or alcohol ... these are the conditions where cosleeping babies are most at risk.
Teaching parents how to safely share a sleep surface or share a room with their baby in the first year is an investment in reducing deaths. Blanket admonishment not to cosleep increases risk as parents make uninformed choices in the heat of the moment without planning or preparation.
