“Let’s see, Mom, how did I sleep when I was a baby? Because he’s four months old and he only sleeps on his chest … and I don’t know what to do anymore,” the daughter asks her mother. “I gave you the bottle and normally you were so relaxed that you immediately fell asleep in my arms eating, or with the pacifier,” the mother replies. “So is he using me as a pacifier?” “Yes, daughter, that seems … you have to try not to do it.”
This conversation is repeated, surely, in hundreds and hundreds of houses every year. A daughter asking her mother, pediatrician or whoever for advice, receiving the answer “if she sleeps on her breast, you’re doing it wrong.” The problem? Well, that is a lie . The fact that a baby of four months, eight or a year and a half falls asleep at the breast is not only normal, but it is also logical .
We slept with or without a pacifier, because we had no breast
Of course, one wonders why we as children slept without a breast and the answer is obvious: they did not breastfeed us . We took a bottle, we sucked the nipple until our stomachs were full to the flag and then we were ecstatic. It did not take much for us to fall asleep, and if someone needed it, they would change the bottle for the pacifier and suck , which does not calm. Loving arms, little dances, some song and surrendered.
It seems that what happened with us, in our childhood, is the normal thing, the whole of life. However, as we all know, artificial milk is an invention of nothing and the normal thing is the other, breast milk, the usual thing .
Extrapolating the situation, a baby falls asleep when he has eaten, with a little dance or song, if necessary, but sucking on something. Yes, I know that some do not need it, but most sleep better with a pacifier or a teat.
Why the tit instead of the pacifier?
Well, because the pacifier is also a recent invention, we cannot say that the normal thing is that after the breast we put a pacifier on the baby because the lifelong thing is to have the baby suckling and fall asleep while still sucking .
If a mother wants to change one thing for another, she can do it, the only thing missing is for the baby to accept the change, which many do not even want to hear about the “dry rubber breast” if next to it she has a mother’s breast, which is made of meat for real and get milk.
The chest, much more than food
And the thing is that many people, and here I include many professionals (especially child sleep experts who love behaviorism), believe that breastfeeding is the same as giving a bottle: you give it the milk it needs and out, it’s over. to eat, it makes no sense to keep sucking. That is why they say such nonsense as that babies have to nurse awake, then they have to be awake for a while and finally they must fall asleep separate from the mother’s breast, so that they separate eating from sleeping.
Nonsense because a mother’s breast is not a bottle, nor does it look too much like it . It is true that they both express milk, but once it is finished, the function of the bottle is zero and yet the function of the breast is not. Breastfeeding is feeding, but it is also offering non-nutritive sucking, it is allowing skin-to-skin contact, it is avoiding having to put the child to burp, it is the smell of mom and it is, look at you, mom . Baby bottle vs mom: too many differences.
But there is still more
But this is not the end of everything. Suckling makes you sleepy. Sucking, as we have said, relaxes them. Doing it on Mom’s lap relaxes them. Filling your stomach makes you sleepy. Warm milk makes you sleepy. Breast milk makes you sleepy, among other things, because it contains an amino acid called L-tryptophan that helps babies fall asleep. If the normal thing was that the baby did not fall asleep on the breast, the milk would contain caffeine.
And I say more, breast milk also contains melatonin , the hormone that helps us establish the rhythms within the day and the cycles of wakefulness and sleep. The surprising thing about it? That the flow of melatonin is variable, depending on the time of day, to help the baby focus on what time of day it is.
It is said that the most advisable thing to help them follow the circadian rhythm is to ensure that there is darkness at night and promoting that during the day, although they sleep, there is light. This way they learn earlier when it is day and when it is night. Well, in addition to doing this, it is achieved through breast milk, which sends different concentrations of melatonin to the baby’s body depending on the time of day.
In summary
Do you still think that it is not normal for a baby to sleep on the breast? Because if so, you will have to explain your arguments to me. I don’t see them anywhere. In fact, it seems so normal and logical to me that babies take advantage of mother’s sucking and touch to fall asleep peacefully, until the day they feel safe and are able to fall asleep on their own, that I can’t understand why anyone is trying to explain that the normal thing is that they sleep alone.
In Babies and more | Lactation, an ally of sleep, Myths about breastfeeding: “Babies should not sleep on the breast, because the breast is not a pacifier”, Criticism of the first 40 pages of “Pediatrics with common sense” (I) and (II )
