Oh good grief! Again, “sleep deprivation” is not an issue. Babies sleep allot when they are INFANTS! You work around their schedule! THEY are the priority.
Sound like you’re a MAN with these silly comments and never had babies! Thankfully I can speak from experience. An infant needs to be in a SEPARATE bed, ideally a crib where Mom has easy access. Human beings move around in their sleep - one wrong move and you’ve crushed them. With their DEATH as a risk, I do believe any caring Mom can survive a few months of the inconvenience of getting up every three hours to breastfeed. Set an alarm - it's really not complicated to use an alarm for this. GOOD GRIEF!
“Of course, if a woman really finds sleeping with her baby to have a negative effect on her either because she can’t get rest or because she’s been guilted by absolutists like you, then the baby is probably better off crying it out in a crib in another room.”
Your EXTREME comments above, tell me you also lack common sense and quite self centered which puts an infant at RISK. It's also HEALTHY for a marriage to let the infant have a separate bed. Most males really don't want kids sleeping with them and their wife. The baby begins to get USED to sleeping there and creates problems and MANY SLEEPLESS NIGHTS to BREAK the HABIT of sleeping with Mom. Another fact conveniently over looked. So to NOT put the infant at risk, sleeping in the same bed as mom and perhaps KILLING the infant and stopping a negative habit from happening - baby being USED TO SLEEPING with Mom at the expense of Dad ... truly it makes NO sense, common or otherwise to have an INFANT sleep with mom for breastfeeding. It's no wonder healthcare professional go nuts when dealing with STUPID people! No healthcare professional would advocate this either since they SEE the result os IRRESPONSIBLE BEHAVIOR - infnat sleeping with mom - still others inisist on putting their CONVENIENCE before the safety of the baby - totally SELF CENTERED!
Hi, nmh. :-)
This is an old thread, but I came across it searching for a different story. I don’t know what the experts say nowadays. But, I remember the “experts” telling us to take our babies to bed with us back in the mid-90’s. I remember doctors, nurses, and lactation consultants advising matter-of-factly: Lie down with your baby and nurse so you’ll get some rest, too.
In the hospital, the nurses and consultants would even show us how to position ourselves to nurse while lying next to a baby. The nurses in the last two hospitals let my babies sleep with me during the night. So, the professionals and experts saw nothing wrong with it.
Of course, what can happen when you do that is mama falling asleep with baby. But the hospitals didn’t seem to consider that a danger at all at that time. They were more concerned with baby falling off the bed, so they’d put the bed bar up. I guess they’re changing their advice now.
My husband and I kept a bassinet next to our bed, and we would pick our babies up when they wanted to nurse and put them back. But, we’d always end up falling asleep with them at some point during the night. I’ve never met a nursing mother who never fell asleep with her infant. Cosleeping with infants seems to be a product of breastfeeding.
The bottle-feeding moms I knew always had a good night’s sleep. Breastmilk is digested quickly, so infants nurse through the night. I’ve never met a mom with an exclusively-breastfed infant who slept at least 2-3 hours without crying during the night. If you were able to do it, kudos to you!
But, I have a strong suspicion there is much more to the story in these tragic cases. Notice that the article said: “an unsafe sleeping environment may have been a contributing factor.” That doesn’t sound so certain. It doesn’t mention the other factors. Just some food for thought.