Along the lines of what Jan is saying, I also have seen a lot of overdiagnosis of GERD when the baby was actually having some other issue. Crying, arching, frustration at the breast where I live are often diagnosed as GERD (with very little investigation of other possibilities) and a handout of a presciption for Zantac or Prevacid. I do get several babies a year, for example, whose supposed GERD symptoms disappear once we increase intake. Hunger and GERD can present very similarly. I do think it is often misdiagnosed. And I doagree that lying on your tummy after a nice big meal seems a lot more comfortable than being placed on your back. I remember from my childhood all these sweet little babies hunched up in a fetal position with their butts in the air, sleeping very happily. I too am not advocating this as a preferred method for sleeping but I do think it must feel good!

But it does seem like there could be a direct correllation between GERD and not having your needs met. I remember the first edtion of Ferber's sleep book discussing what to do if your child got so agitated from sleep training that they threw up...as I recall it was something along the lines of let them sit in their vomit or quickly clean them up and then disappear again...I wish there was much more emphasis on how to read a child's signals and cues and less on trying to fit kids into a cookie cutter approach to parenting. I think we would have calmer babies. "Babies cry" has never been a good enough answer for me. They are trying to tell us something but don't have the words to do so and trying over a period of months to communicate something and not be able to do so, must have a physiological impact.

I was just having a discussion with my daughter last night about the expectations for reading at her mdddle school. They are expected to read 40 independent reading books a year, with no attention paid to what those books are. So if you read  Moby Dick you are still expected to read 39 other books. That makes just as much sense to me as telling parents how much to pick up their baby or how often to feed or how much time their baby should be sleeping. And the end result is enormous anxiety for both baby and parents...Like the anxiety my daughter feels when it takes her an hour to read 5 pages in her adult biography of Led Zeppelin's members. Why should she read 10 Nancy Drews in the time it would take her to read this book if this is what she loves reading???? Trying to impose a rigid structure on any child whether they are a newborn or 12 year old without accounting for who they are as a person is going to lead to mental and physiological agitation. We don't need a study to tell us this, though it would be nice to have one, because parents often seem so eager to impse an external set of guidelines on their baby to prevent them from developing bad habits, rather than trying to discover who their little person really is and what they need to thrive.

Kathy Lilleskov RN IBCLC

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