La Leche League International

I have been exclusively breastfeeding my baby and started bedsharing with her when she was about a month old. It was the only way I was able to stay sane having her in our room (which the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends for the first year).

After about month six, my baby's sleep got crazy. Bedsharing generally worked for me, but waking up for the day between 4 and 5 a.m.? Yeah, no.

I became desperate and scoured the internet for solutions. There was such disparate information out there, though, that I came away even more confused. Keep doing what I was doing (and eventually stab myself in the face out of sheer sleep deprivation)? Put my baby on a schedule (yeah, right)? Stop nursing at night (except that my baby sleeps over ten hours in a row a lot of the time anyway, so… why?)? Stop nursing to sleep so that I could transition her to her own bed (except that I wasn't ready to do that and didn't really want to)?

The pressure was on in other ways as well. I already knew from reading reputable non-American websites about co-sleeping (as in bedsharing), such as UNICEF's, that the way I was sleeping with my baby was safe--I don't smoke, drink, or do drugs; I have a firm mattress with a very light blanket; and I'm sleeping with her on a bed, not a couch or chair. However, even though I didn't get flack from other people about safety, I did start to find that friends from my parents' generation had begun to make comments about letting the baby "get her way" too much, that she would never leave my bed, that bedsharing wasn't good for her "psychological development," yadda yadda.

Well, to deal with the timing problem, I ended up using a sleep tracker app to figure out exactly how much she was sleeping at night now, then count backwards based on when I wanted her to wake up and nudge her to the desired bedtime. This didn't mean putting her on any strict schedule during the day, though--just making sure she got enough naps and didn't get overtired from staying awake too long between sleeps.

Reading this book didn't help me do that, but it did help me with the mental stress of reading too many websites and listening to too many people who thought they knew what was best for me and my baby.

The book is a research-based huge affirmation for mothers who are breastfeeding and bedsharing. It explains in detail why (and *how*) bedsharing, done safely, does not actually increase the risk of SIDS or even suffocation (which is not the same thing as SIDS at all--research studies are all over the place in conflating the two as well as the definition of "co-sleeping").

It suggests even to mothers who never want to co-sleep that making your bed safe for it is important anyway. What if you fall asleep nursing the baby? It also stresses the importance of American physicians becoming more willing to have nuanced conversations about the topic. For example, many people don't know that falling asleep on a couch or chair with a baby carries *vastly* more risk than on a bed following safe sleep guidelines, yet that is exactly what can happen when well-meaning new parents are trying to avoid bringing their babies into bed. I know that in the early days for me, there was more than one time I nodded off with my daughter on the couch. Since studies mix up couches and beds in the definitions of "co-sleeping," though, this completely confuses the issue--and American pediatricians don't usually talk about that.

The book addresses the history of advice on breastfeeding and bedsharing. It's been all over the map for the past three hundred years or so. Particularly in the early half of the twentieth century, American mothers were told, usually by male doctors, that they must put their babies on a strict schedule and let them "learn" to go to sleep alone so that they could become independent. Anything that helped them sleep, such as breastfeeding, was a harmful crutch. I saw many websites echoing this way of thinking and now I know where it comes from--know-nothing doctors from my grandparents' generation.

More recent research on leaving babies alone to cry has shown that when they stop crying, it's because they have given up hope that anyone will respond. Their bodies are still flooded with stress hormones, which can have long-term emotional and physical health consequences. Some cry-it-out methods even tell parents that letting your baby cry until they vomit is normal(!)

The authors offer some good strategies and talking points to deal with pushy people who think you should parent differently (I liked the RRID acronym--Respect Reflect Inspect Deflect).

Ultimately, the only thing this book didn't really help me with was my original problem. In fact, the authors suggest that baby sleep problems are not actually problems, but part of normal development--that historically, people didn't sleep straight through the night anyway, so what the hey, just go to bed early and stop watching the clock when your baby wakes up at ungodly hours. Um, sorry, no. Just no. Waking up at 4 a.m. and taking over an hour to go back to sleep was making me crazy and totally non-functional. And we're not talking about a newborn--we're talking about a six-month-old. Luckily, the book does acknowledge that if something is no longer working, babies at that age and older can be "nudgeable" into new habits, and mine was. Thank God.… (more)

This is a hugely valuable book if you go into it with the right expectations.

What are the right expectations? (1) La Leche League's purpose is to encourage breastfeeding for as long as baby and mom can and want to. (2) They believe the breastfeeding relationship is more important than the milk on its own, and so encourages moms to do whatever they can to keep that up during the duration of breastfeeding, including encouraging moms to not go back to work during that period. So this isn't a book to read if you're upset by either of those premises. You'll focus on those premises and the reasoning that follows and miss all the valuable content.

If you agree with those premises or if, like me, you agree with most of the underlying essence and are willing to overlook some of leaps to conclusions, then this book is jam packed with practical, detailed information.

Part one is the preliminary section. It discusses why moms should breastfeed, the importance of building a support community, birth and breastfeeding, and latching.

Part two describes how breastfeeding and the breastfeeding relationship changes as the baby grows. These sections can be a little bit repetitive on a straight read through, but the self-contained nature is valuable in a reference material.

Part three talks about specific issues: sleep, introducing solids, returning to work (a somewhat frustrating chapter, but not as much as it seems it might be because the authors recognize that for many women, it's not a choice), pumping, weaning, difficult breastfeeding situations, and a long chapter on "tech support" for specific breastfeeding issues.

Part four gives some history of La Leche League and provides a number of useful one page summaries of key points and various recording tools (e.g., a diaper log).

Overall, while this book was definitely not a neutral presentation of breastfeeding, it is still a primarily practically oriented, fact based resource -- one that is much more detailed than most other resources I have seen on breastfeeding.… (more)