Dear all:

Between Kathleen Bruce's post about the ridiculous violation of what the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends which IS cosleeping by the proper definition of the term -- meaning baby sleeping in close proximity to the mother and the waft of responses about the drop down in milk supply at four months -- I just am having a moment here of wanting to rip my hair out.  

It is NOT normal in any culture where i have worked or any culture where I have seen data on how infants breastfeed for babies to sleep 10 hours at night.  This is a cultural MALADAPTATION to the stresses of a society that values the IMAGE of the perfect baby PRODUCT but not the REALITY of that baby's needs. 

When I looked at the data on the thousands of infants who were followed in Guatemala from a supplementation trial where pregnant and lactating mothers and their infants were provided with supplemental food -- the norm was STILL to feed the baby at night well into the 2nd year of life.  The FREQUENCY of breastfeeding was so consistent throughout the entire time that those infants were followed that you couldn't even use frequency of feeding as a variable.  It simply was unheard of to feed a baby four or five times in a 24 hour period.  If a baby is sleeping 10 hours at night at four months, this means that the baby must squeeze in 8 feeds in 14 hours.  AND this means that the milk supply might very well drop because the mothers breasts are not being drained for 10 hours -- causing feedback inhibition of lactation -- AND this means that the mother may have premature ovulation and menstruation -- before the 18 months or so that is NORMAL for human females.  In some cultures such as the pygmies -- it was NORMAL to have child spacing for up to five years because they continued to breastfeed frequently and women probably had a lower maternal mortality rate because of it

And, I am now seeing in my clinical work a consistent drop in supply at four months almost always due to sleep training or some low frequency of feeds throughout the 24 hour period.  I currently have the most beautiful growth charts of babies where you can literally see the severe drop in growth starting exactly when the pediatrician suggested sleep training -- and this has happened so many times.  Sometimes the mother supply can recover and sometimes not.  So, while I would agree with Heather that a BABY who resorts to feeding frequently during the day to compensate for inadequate feeding at night is acting normally, I would not say that this is a normal situation at all.  The baby is COMPENSATING for deprivation.

Now, I have many questions that I have no true answer for.  Why is it that the Kung tribe is reported to feed their babies some 20 times per day -- and their babies reportedly never cry?  Yet this is in direct contradiction to all of our obsession with "oversupply" and "foremilk/hindmilk" imbalance.  Could it be that the longer stretches we make our infants wait for feeds then sometimes creates an "apparent" oversupply because the poor baby has been trained to wait longer and then has to cope with that very fast flow that overwhelms that baby -- to then be trained into waiting a longer stretch for another surge?  Or is it merely the being carried on the back continually?   Who truly has done anything other than speculate about these issues?  Why isn't someone actually FUNDING research on what all this sleep training does to the feeding relationship, obesity, night terrors, etc?  I always think of the orphanage studies that show that the most insecure adults are those that had the least contact as infants and learned to not cry when they needed to.

Best, Susan Burger

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