Last Thursday Dr Harvey Karp wrote:

>I certainly agree with you that a swaddled baby can't locate the breast
>without assistance...however, that can easily be accomplished by a mother
>bringing her baby to the breast when he cries (there is always the option
of
>removing the wraps during the nursing to help the baby wake fully and take
a
>vigorous feeding).

>However, I would suggest that babies may well need enclosing in something
>else.  Young infants who die in bedsharing situations often do so because
>they DO move around and their heads get wedged into the headboard or pillow
>(we all know how babies migrate to the top of a bassinette or crib until
>they feel a reassuring pressure against their heads).
>
>CHeers,
>
>harvey

I would make 2 points in response:

a) bed-sharing breastfed babies simply don't cry. They don't have to reach
that level of arousal in order to alert their mother that they are hungry.
As other posters have stated, crying is a very late hunger cue. The
principal reason for bed-sharing is to facilitate night-time breastfeeding
(see Ball, 2002, Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology, Vol 20 (4)
207-221). Swaddling a breastfed bed-sharing baby serves to undermine the
very benefits of bed-sharing (e.g skin-to-skin contact, unrestricted and
unlimited access to the breast, infant-initiated feeding).

b) a responsive breastfeeding bed-sharing mother sleeps with her infant in a
way that encloses him/her with her body (see lactnet archives for Jan 1 2002
for a description of this, or see my article on the Mothering Magazine
website at:
http://www.mothering.com/9-0-0/html/9-4-0/bedsharing-britian.shtml (yes,
'britain' is mis-spelled in the URL))
consequently bed-sharing babies of breastfeeding mothers are unable to move
up the bed into the headboard or pillows. The pressure against their heads
is provided by their mother's upper arm. Unless you have observed dozens and
dozens of breastfeeding moms and babies bedsharing it might be difficult to
imagine that breastfeeding mothers do this automatically  -- but they do,
and it has been observed in at least 3 different bed-sharing studies in
different parts of the 'western' world (US, UK, NZ).

For an infant bed-sharing with a breastfeeding mother swaddling is a
hindrance to normal behaviour. For an infant bed-sharing with a
non-breastfeeding mother a different set of dynamics comes into play -- as
these mothers are bed-sharing for different reasons and in different ways to
those described above -- however as this list is devoted to breastfeeding I
will resist the urge to discuss them!

Regards, Helen
---------------
Dr Helen Ball, Director, Parent-Infant Sleep Lab, University of Durham, UK

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