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 *********************************************** 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