As a pediatrician, I overhear myself say quite often when I hear a crying baby "That baby should be with their mother!" .  My practice covers a small community hospital where in general I find that most mothers send their babies at night to be watched over by the nurses and bottle fed (or cup fed formula if they are "breastfed"). The night nurses are mostly older nurses who grew up in the time when every baby was supposed to be in the nursery for most of their hospital stay. 

Really, the only way to make a change in these kind of situations is to completely get rid of any availability for healthy moms and babies to send their babies away for the night. IMO, it makes it more difficult for all moms, ff or bf, to spend the first few nights away from their babies, and then come home and be with them all the time. I hear a lot of complaints at that first newborn visit "The baby isnt' sleeping at night, The baby has days and nights mixed up, ect"  Well, what do we expect when we give unrealistic expectations for mom at the hospital and she doesn't see her child from 9 pm till 7 am? 

In my personal life, I have a lot of friends who are VERY defensive about sending their babies to the nursery. The general feeling is that moms who keep baby in the room 24/7 are pretty much martyrs and just not very smart. 
 In fact, I find it difficult to even have any kind of discussion about this because of the "heat" that develops, moms get upset and it turns into a big mess. Same situation with the "ban the bags" discussion, but that's for another post :) 

I am delivering my 2nd child at the larger teaching hospital in a little over a month. and I'm actually sort of looking forward to see if they truly have made any baby friendly changes since I was a resident there. At that time, the nursery was filled with crying babies at night (literally 30 infants crying in basinettes on some  nights I was in there), but supposedly they are trying to limit babies coming to the nursery now, and they call it the  "respite" area. 

Mary Martin, MD, CLC
Greenville, SC 

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