Interesting to read all your experiences and to see what a common problem this is…I’m in a tough situation so your advice would be helpful.

I’ve co-slept with my son since he was 3 months old, and it has worked great for us. He wakes up to nurse, then falls right back asleep. Neither of us wake up fully, so I’ve been able to have great sleep from from about 12 mos until now (24 mos.)

But over the last 2 weeks his sleep has been terrible. He won’t go to bed until 10:30 (used to sleep easily at 8:30) and wakes up 3 times a night nursing voraciously (like, 30-40 minutes!). I’m pregnant (2 mos) and get so irritated with this! I take him off the breast but then he cries and cries. My husband then comes and tries to comfort him but he won’t go to him at all during the night, and gets really agitated.

I’m so worn out and am thinking of night weaning, but hate the thought of having him cry for long periods of time. Partly cuz I don’t want to cause him upset, but also cuz it is horrible to listen to during the night.

Any suggestions?

Rosemary, congratulations on your pregnancy! Breastfeeding while pregnant can be a challenge emotionally and physically. My guess is that your milk supply has started to diminish a bit (which is normal during pregnancy) and/or your milk has started to taste a little salty (also a normal change). Some nurslings (like my first daughter) continue on nursing as if nothing had changed, but others are affected by the changes.

Photo by Jessicafm

I highly recommend that you check out a copy of the book Adventures in Tandem Nursing: Breastfeeding During Pregnancy and Beyond by Hilary Flower. It describes the experience of breastfeeding while pregnant and the various emotions it triggers in both mother and nursling. You are not alone! Two other books that might be helpful are Mothering Your Nursing Toddler and How Weaning Happens.

As for more immediate, practical advice, try offering your son a bedtime snack and some extra fluids (my suggestions would be water, milk or a cow’s milk alternative like almond milk). Does he drink from a cup, a sippy cup, or a cup and straw? Offer him his alternative drink in that cup. Have the same cup — this time filled with water only — available for drinking during the night. You can still nurse him for as long as you are willing, then offer the cup. I found that it helped to give my nursling some warning, either by offering to nurse for the length of the ABC song, or by counting down at the end of a nursing session (10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-done!). Be sure to talk to him about the plan ahead of time, during the day and not just as you’re going to bed. “Mommy is extra tired and would like to get a good night’s sleep. We will nurse while I sing the ABC song, and then you can have your special cup! If you wake up in the night, your cup will be right there and I can sing you back to sleep.” Keep repeating your plan, whatever it might be, throughout the day and then remind him at night. “Remember how we talked about nursing to the ABC song?” He might still be upset, and you might have to keep working on a plan that suits you both. If he is verbal enough, you might even try asking him to help come up with a solution. “Mama’s mum-mums aren’t making as much milk, are they? What would you like to drink instead? Would you like your sippy cup or this special straw?” You never know, your son might surprise you! Different children have different temperaments, and you know what will work best with your son.

Does anyone else have advice for Rosemary? If you breastfed while pregnant, what was your experience like?

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My sleeping 15-month-old

So what bits of sleep advice can be gleaned from my experience? I have come to these five conclusions:

1. Do what works for you. If co-sleeping and nursing your baby back to sleep help you both get a better night’s rest, then do it!

2. If something stops working for you, then take the initiative and change it! Sounds a little obvious but in a sleep-deprived haze it can be all too easy to continue on with the way things are.

3. It’s okay to try new ways to settle your child to sleep. Whether it’s rocking to sleep instead of nursing, wearing your baby in a sling, or having your partner sing the baby to sleep, it’s okay to experiment. If your nursling is unhappy with that, she will make it quite clear and you can shelve the experiment for another few months and then try again. Or try a different method.

4. There will be back-sliding. You can count on teething, illness, or growth spurts to set back the process. It’s normal and inevitable and it helps simply to recognize that and to put any sleep changes on hold.

5. Eventually, your child will sleep better at night. At some point, you will find yourself waking up for no reason. Your nursling didn’t wake you, you just woke up as part of your own sleep rhythm. Soon, your nursling will sleep so well you will wonder if everything is alright!

For those of you with toddlers, what has your sleep experience been like? Have you come to any conclusions of your own?

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My toddler at almost 14 months

Anyone else notice a sleep regression right around this time? How often does your baby wake at night on a “good” night and on a “bad” one?

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Photo by Abdulaziz Almansour

Post from: Breastfeeding 1-2-3

Photo by Hector Landaeta

When the baby suckles, the mother releases CCK. The hormone infusion relaxes her and readies her to drift off to sleep again. If mother and baby are co-sleeping, the mother might even drift off before the baby finishes the feed! What a peaceful experience compared to getting up to prepare a bottle, sitting up to feed, placing the baby back in a crib, and finally climbing back in bed to attempt to fall back asleep after that wide-awake period, without the benefit of sleep-inducing CCK! Even better news: the baby produces CCK as well, both from suckling and from the fatty hindmilk reaching the baby’s stomach at the end of a feed. The Australian Breastfeeding Association explains:

There are actually two CCK peaks, one at the end of a feed, and the other higher peak between 30 and 60 minutes after the feed. The baby sucks, gets sleepy, dozes off for a while then wakes again for a top-up feed. That higher-fat feed causes the second peak and the baby goes into deeper sleep. Top-up feeds are also great for the mother’s milk supply.

Some parents mistakenly believe that feeding a baby formula will help the baby sleep longer at night and that will translate into more sleep for the parents. Two things parents should know: (1) the reason formula-fed babies’ tummies feel full for longer stretches is that formula is harder for babies immature systems to digest, and (2) formula-feeding results in less overall sleep for parents! A 2007 study published in the Journal of Perinatal and Neonatal Nursing concluded that parents of breastfed babies enjoy an average of 40 more minutes of sleep per night!

So, in honor of World Sleep Day today, celebrate how breastfeeding actually helps mothers and babies get more rest through the wonderful sleep hormone CCK, through the side-lying sleep position, and through co-sleeping!

It’s 9:49 p.m. here, I just nursed the baby back to sleep *yawn* and I’m off to bed….

Post from: Breastfeeding 1-2-3

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1. Everything You Wanted to Know about Breastfeeding, Sex and Breast Milk Fetishes but Were Afraid to Ask — talk about tackling a difficult, taboo subject!

2. How to Get Good Medical Advice on Breastfeeding — it’s not as easy as it sounds, or as one would hope, to get accurate and current information on breastfeeding. This post contains information I would love to pass on to every prospective and new mother!

3. Reviews of Breastfeeding Products, Books, and Clothing — looking for a breast pump, bra, sling, or breastfeeding book? This post links to dozens of reviews of a whole range of breastfeeding-related items.

4. Why Sleep Training Makes Me Want to Cry — This post generated a lot of controversy. People either strongly oppose or staunchly defend “crying-it-out.”

5. Gentle Discipline — I hope this essay validates the use of attachment parenting and gentle discipline.

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[Edited to add: My nursling was 2 years and 11 months old when I wrote this.]

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One other disclaimer: I do not purport to be any sort of expert on sleep (which is why I quote a lot of actual experts in this discussion!) I have struggled with the sleep issue myself and if you are interested you can crawl through all I have written on the sleep category. However, while I may not have the magic solution to a good night’s sleep, I do know that CIO is not the solution. Fortunately, lots of experts in child care, psychiatry, and pediatrics feel the same way. Here are my opinions along with some science to back them up.

I do not believe: “Night-waking to nurse is a habit, not a need.”
I believe: For the first several months of a baby’s life, night-waking to nurse certainly is a physical need. Babies’ tummies are small and breast milk is digested quickly. Forcing an infant to go too long without nursing can lead to failure to thrive (inadequate weight gain, poor physical and mental development). CIO can be downright dangerous!

Advocates of CIO argue that after a certain age, night-nursing is no longer physically necessary and there’s no “need” for it. While I question that (who among us hasn’t gotten thirsty or hungry in the night, and we’re not still growing!), there are also all kinds of needs: physical, emotional, psychological, developmental, and situational. In an article entitled “8 Infant Sleep Facts Every Parent Should Know,” Dr. Sears describes a baby’s need to be parented to sleep and parented back to sleep. Also, the Australian Association for Infant Mental Health notes in its position paper:

AAIMHI is concerned that the widely practiced technique of ‘controlled crying’ is not consistent with what infants need for their optimal emotional and psychological health and may have unintended negative consequences.

I do not believe: “Babies need to learn to self-soothe.”
I do believe: Why do babies need to learn to self-soothe, exactly? It seems more that the parents need the babies to learn to self-soothe. Babies who night-nurse barely cry, if at all, and often settle back to sleep quickly and peacefully.

Besides, when a baby is made to CIO and the baby falls back asleep, it’s not accurate to say the baby “self-soothed.” Dr. Ben Kim’s site describes a study of children ages one to two who were separated from their mothers and left to cry it out:

Results showed a predictable sequence of behaviours: The first phase, labeled “protest”, consists of loud crying and extreme restlessness. The second phase, labeled “despair”, consists of monotonous crying, inactivity, and steady withdrawal. The third phase, labeled “detachment”, consists of a renewed interest in surroundings, albeit a remote, distant kind of interest. Thus, it appears that while leaving babies to cry it out can lead to the eventual dissipation of those cries, it also appears that this occurs due to the gradual development of apathy in the child. The child stops crying because she learns that she can no longer hope for the caregiver to provide comfort, not because her distress has been alleviated.

I do not believe: “It’s short-term pain for long-term gain.”
I do believe: First of all, I’m not interested in any short-term pain for me or my child. Nor do I believe the pain is short term. Parents who implement CIO often find that they have to do so repeatedly as a child starts to night-wake again during developmental spurts, teething, and illness.

Furthermore, there’s plenty of evidence of long-term harm rather than long-term gain. Psychiatrists at Harvard University researched the long-term effects of CIO and found:

[T]he widespread American practice of putting babies in separate beds — even separate rooms — and not responding quickly to their cries may lead to incidents of post-traumatic stress and panic disorders when these children reach adulthood.

The early stress resulting from separation causes changes in infant brains that makes future adults more susceptible to stress in their lives, say Commons and Miller.

“Parents should recognize that having their babies cry unnecessarily harms the baby permanently,” Commons said. “It changes the nervous system so they’re overly sensitive to future trauma.”

Some scientific researchers believe that leaving a baby to CIO can cause brain damage (that the extreme distress of CIO blocks full development of certain areas of the brain and causes production of cortisol in other areas of the brain).

Contrast such findings with those cited by Dr. James McKenna on the long-term effects of co-sleeping. Studies show that co-sleeping promotes confidence, self-esteem, and intimacy, while children who do not bed-share are harder to control, less happy, throw more tantrums, are more fearful, and here’s the kicker — more dependent on their parents.

Please feel free to share your views on breastfeeding and sleep in the comments. Read on for other views (not necessarily consistent with mine!) on Breastfeeding and Sleep:

~ BreastfeedingMums talks about the sleep advantages of breastfeeding over formula-feeding.
~ Mama’s Magic writes about being “So Tired” and considering the end of co-sleeping.
~ The Motherwear Breastfeeding Blog sings the praises of the side-lying position for breastfeeding.
~ Hathor the Cowgoddess shares a comic on the family bed. (Note that while it’s safe for a toddler to sleep next to a sibling, an infant should not sleep next to an older child, only next to his parents.)
~ Leche, Baby! writes about the process of night-weaning.
~ Veggie Way writes about co-sleeping and letting her baby sleep where she wants.
~ Crunchy Domestic Goddess needs co-sleeping for sanity.
~ Life with Twins writes about her use of crying-it-out.
~ The Lactivist laments how each child has different needs.
~ Mama Knows Breast tells the truth about the reality of sleep deprivation.

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