I hope no one has mistaken my recent interest in thumb and pacifier sucking
to be a suggestion that infants should be put down to sleep alone plugged up
with a pacifier.  I firmly believe babies were designed for co-sleeping.
However, clearly, there are babies who experience apnea during sleep who
maintain better respiratory function while sucking, and it would behoove us
to understand this mechanism. I suspect these are babies who (if
co-sleeping) nurse all night.  I've had two of those myself.  The older was
weaned at 2.5 yrs and immed. began to suck her thumb -- esp. when sleeping.
I was made to feel guilty about that as if I had caused that by weaning her
during the later stages of a preg.  My second breastfed for 4.5 yrs and
never thumb sucked, but breastfed all night long for years.

Let's not get too romantic in our thinking about What did babies in the past
do?  Lots of babies in the past simply died.  Infant mortality during the
days of old was horrific.  It is good to understand the mechanisms which
contribute to things like SIDS.  To understand that non-nutritive sucking
may improve respiratory function is a wonderful new insight.  It is not a
recommendation that infants have pacifiers crammed in their mouths for no
good reason.  Hopefully we can extrapolate from the info that some babies
need to suck to breathe to reassure those mothers whose babies nurse all
night that they NEED to (ie are not just the tyrants the Ezzos describe them
to be.)  And we also need to keep our minds open and free from the blinders
of dogma so that we can accept new information and process it usefully.  I
think the key message of our work is watch the baby.  Some babies want to
suck all the time.  The new research suggests that is a survival mechanism,
not some bizarre habit or a sign that the mother is somehow not adequately
meeting the infant's needs.  If we honestly believe ourselves when we say
the baby's wants are its needs, then depriving them of their need for NNS is
just us taking control again.


Barbara Wilson-Clay, BSEd, IBCLC
Austin Lactation Associates, Austin, Texas
http://www.jump.net/~bwc/lactnews.html

             ***********************************************
The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM)
mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html