Doesn't the Breast Work Anymore?

By Kittie Frantz
Issue 132, September/October 2005

When I became a grandmother, I considered myself lucky. I was a practicing pediatric nurse-practitioner and teaching in a university; as new studies came along that suggested making changes in the way people parented, I could understand and accept them from a medical point of view without feeling invalidated as a mother. The trend that most disturbs me is the notion that it is unnecessary, almost wrong, to soothe your baby by breastfeeding. I am puzzled when I hear the advice to never breastfeed your baby to sleep. Mothers are advised to breastfeed 
babies only for nourishment, and to put babies down in the bassinet awake so that they learn to go to sleep by themselves. The rationale—the fear—is that if you don't, you will condition your baby that only mother can put him to bed.

Funny—on PTA night, my husband had no trouble putting our baby to sleep. My friends who breastfed their babies until they fell asleep didn't complain of problems. Have you ever fallen blissfully asleep in someone's arms? As a baby, wouldn't you love to fall asleep in your mother's arms? True, some babies fall asleep with ease in anyone's arms, and some seem to sleep only when mother nurses them. But to make your baby conform to another's opinion of what a baby should or shouldn't be doing seems to punish the baby for not being like all the other babies you may be currently reading about. Advocates might tell you to "train your baby to put himself to sleep." However, the "training" part means you are changing or "correcting" a healthy natural behavior.

Then there are the advocates of "the self-calmed baby." Somehow, your baby must learn to calm himself. Why? Is he doing something wrong? Is vocally expressing his needs such a bad thing? Erik Erikson, a classic researcher of child development, labels the first year of an infant's life "Trust vs. Mistrust" and describes it as the development of the ego. If the infant's needs are met, the infant feels worthy and develops into a confident, independent person. Roberta Winter, RN, a mentor of mine at William Carey International University, felt that trusting your parent to meet your needs in the first year is the basis of how we learn to trust God. Ah, but Roberta was my age.

One advocate of the "scheduled babies" ideal feels that the marriage is more important than the baby, and that the baby needs to learn his "place" in the family. When the infant is left to cry at night, to calm herself to sleep without the breast, what message does she receive? Are you telling your baby that vocalizing her needs will not get her any peace, relief, help, love? Crying signals need and is the beginning of language.

Some people describe "sleep-training" the baby and proudly state that their infant sleeps all night. But how do you know the baby is asleep all night? My opinion, shared by University of Notre Dame infant sleep researcher James McKenna, PhD, is that babies wake many times during the night. The "sleep-
trainers" should call it "training the child to know you're not there" instead of fooling parents into thinking the baby has learned to happily sleep all night. The baby is indeed waking; she just knows you're not coming. What if she is teething? Books with titles that include such phrases as "Help Your Baby Sleep Longer" lead parents to believe that there is something wrong with a baby who does not sleep for a specified amount of time. Even Dr. Richard Ferber recanted his stand on this in The New Yorker.

Advocates of scheduling a baby's feedings have been around for the last three generations, and come and go with the tides. My opinion is that some people can't help but be controlling. They try a technique that seems to work for them, think that everyone should learn this technique, then write a book about it. Often, the best thing about babies is how they teach us things such as patience, flexibility, and unconditional love. When you're a tired new parent, it is very seductive to think that you can "manage" your erratically and often frequently feeding infant by putting her on a schedule—especially if you're a first-time parent and had time before the birth to read, imagine, and, unfortunately, plan how things would be once the baby was born. It's not surprising that books on infant sleep are top moneymakers for publishers—in early infancy, every baby wakes in the night, so every parent will want such books. But the one thing such books and the erroneous advice they give do not seem to take into account is the baby. What works for one baby may not work for another. What works for a toddler won't work for an infant. Here are the facts. Because babies grow in spurts, their needs will change throughout the day, the week, and the months to come. And because of this, their schedules change. A lot. The composition of breastmilk also changes throughout the day, week by week and month by month, to match the baby's needs. This process of making different kinds of milk at different times may be initiated by changes in the way the infant suckles. Why mess up this symbiotic process by putting the baby on a schedule? Can you imagine being hungry because your body is signaling a change, and someone says you can't eat now because she, not you, has decided it isn't the "right time" to eat? The baby's job is to double her birth weight in the first four to six months after birth. Restricting breastfeedings may make this task seriously difficult.