Just wanted to add my cultural (and late) two cents to the conversation
ensuing since Jeanette's post regarding: <<The statement I was told was:  A
4 month old baby starts waking up in the night after sleeping "through the
night" - you should try to meet the baby's needs in other ways, but not
feed it at this time or they'll establish a habit of waking again.>>

Concepts of what constitutes a good night's sleep are absolutely culturally
based. When it comes to sleep, breastfeeding, and other aspects of
nurturing, our babies benefit when we look to biology/anthropology for some
perspective. The benefits of on-cue nursing are well documented: the
quality and quantity of breastmilk is enhanced (see Breastfeeding:
Biocultural Perspectives for a well-referenced look at the role culture and
biology play in breastfeeding.)

Mainstream Western cultural beliefs include a mechanistic approach to
understanding how things work, such as the compartmentalization of complex
phenomena. When processes are broken down to the smallest components, we
are less likely to see that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Furthermore, trust of nature (including the natural wisdom of on-cue
breastfeeding throughout the day and night regardless of the age of the
nursling) is not part of mainstream Western worldview.

When babies breastfeed, they are simultaneously receiving comfort,
quenching thirst, satisfying hunger, obtaining a complex array of compounds
from growth hormones to immune cells, enhancing their motor development,
engaging in a social relationship, etc., etc., etc. Only the baby knows
which of these aspects (if any) is a dominant need at any given moment in
time. In my opinion, Western tendencies to arbitrarily define individual
nursings as nutritional or non-nutritional, devalue any supposedly
non-nutritional time at the breast, and value "sleeping through the night"
are not biologically/psychology sound and are harmful to the nursing pair.

Cynthia Good Mojab
(Breastfeeding mother, advocate, independent [cross-cultural] researcher
and author; LLL Leader and researcher in the LLLI Publications Department;
and former psychotherapist currently busy nurturing her own little one.)
Ammawell
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web site: http://ammawell.homepage.com

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