<<My experience, both personal and professional, is
that once parents accept their infants' sleeping
patterns as normal, they stop fighting them and become
more relaxed and less fatigued.>>

Gonneke, I'm sure many of us agree with your
hypothesis!   Many problems, in and out of the
breastfeeding relationship, are problems of
perception!

Sleep (or the more euphemistic "nighttime parenting")
is a common topic of LLL meetings.  It's unfortunate
that some mothers and fathers do not have the
necessary luxury of a village to help them journey
through parenting.

A personal and local observation:
More mothers are breastfeeding but fewer are sleeping
with their babies.  While I continue to hear employed
mothers talk about sleeping with their babies as
helping "to make up for lost time" a smaller
percentage appear to be co-sleeping.  More mothers are
breastfeeding until 12 months but report fewer
"breastfeedings" than I'm used to hearing in 24 hours
as they approach the one year mark.  More mothers
begin a first call with a monologue about following
the rules ("I never let him fall asleep at the breast,
we don't let him sleep with us, I take him right off
the breast after x minutes, I don't let him breastfeed
more than every x hours, etc).  Marketing of and by
the well-known sleep gurus is taking its toll.  The
mothers are quite earnest in letting me know they are
doing everything right & want more rules to follow!
It challenges my tact, my patience, and my tolerance
of views-other-than-my-own.  We have a brief
conversation about biology and culture and the
challenge of parents in making personal choices.  Just
yesterday a mother called listing every book she's
read so far & asking for a referral to an organization
for more info.  I suggested a variety of parenting
discussion groups in our area but she redirected me
saying she did not wish to explore or discuss
anything.  She just wanted a parenting class that
would tell her what to do next now that her child had
passed the one year mark and should be weaned.  (She
called me through our local LLL referral line.)

So, Gonneke, I agree with you.  And I am concerned for
women mothering in isolation, surrounded by the stands
of faddish sleep programs littering the bookstores in
my area.







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