Feeding to sleep

Can anyone tell me why it's bad to feed a baby to sleep?

This was a recent post on a La Leche League page yesterday. I was asking the same question myself a few months back, when (it seemed) streams of health visitors kept telling me I shouldn't feed my child to sleep and that he really should have learned to self soothe by now (this was at six months!). My response was, "Why not, when he obviously finds it comforting and it works?" It still is, with my infant almost 12 months old. I can't for the life of me understand why you wouldn't use a method that works and makes everyone happy. He falls asleep usually with ten minutes or so (though sometimes up to half an hour after feeding, now he's bigger, with a little crawling around and flopping on his belly), but he's peaceful and contented.

Anyway, someone else shared this quote, which I also wanted to share here (it is apparently from this site: http://kellymom.com/).

"Breastfeeding is obviously designed to comfort and help a child sleep. Breastfeeding calms a child and can even help your child handle stress better when not breastfeeding (Beijers et al, 2013). Sucking releases the hormone cholecystokinin (CCK) in both mother and baby, which results in a sleepy feeling (Uvnäs-Moberg et al, 1993). In addition, breastmilk also contains sleep-inducing hormones, amino acids, and nucleotides, whose concentrations are higher during the night and may actually help babies establish their own circadian rhythms (Sánchez et al, 2009, Cohen et al, 2012)."

I've recently been reading Attachment Parenting by Sears and Sears, which shows evidence that co-sleeping, babywearing (carrying baby in a sling) and on demand breastfeeding (which for us includes feeding to sleep), can help with all sorts of things, including preventing anxiety and depression (not just as children, but into adulthood), obesity, late onset diabetes...and in the short term, they all make baby happier, calmer, more confident, more secure and, possible counter intuitively, more independent...but only when baby is ready to be independent.

Another book I'm in the middle of reading is called What every parent needs to know by Margot Sunderland. This looks at the relative immaturity of the human infant (in comparison to, for example, other primates), including the immaturity of their brains. They are born immature, due to bipedalism and narrower female hips. Regardless of the hows and what you believe, human babies are born as external foetuses - they cannot survive on their own physically or emotionally. They don't have the physiological ability to self soothe, in terms of how their brains and bodies work. They need their mothers (and fathers) as an external regulator and soother of their emotions, because they can't yet do it themselves - and don't know how to either. This is exactly what I do as a counsellor (for adults who did not receive enough of this as infants, presumably) - I hold and contain their emotions for them, in a way, allowing through just to the limit of what they can handle and cope with and process, and allowing more to flow through once they are ready. A supervisor once said to me, as a counsellor, that I should empty my body of myself and become an empty vessel in which I can feel the other person. I am never fully empty of myself, but myself gets perhaps put in a little box in the corner of my mind and heart, so I can fully focus on the other. As with an infant, he cannot cope with the overwhelming feelings he experiences and so he gets into mini rages, frustrated crying, bawling with shock or fear...so I hold him and feel what he is feeling, and I help his body to calm and explain to him what he is experiencing and, by holding him and being soothing, I show him how to re-regulate his inner world. Leaving a baby to cry it out may stop him crying, but this is because he has given up - he has learned there is no point in asking for help (which is what crying is), because he won't get it. 

Anyway, I remain of the opinion that why shouldn't I feed my child to sleep if it works for us all? He's not even a year old. He still has so much to learn. He is still only very young, in the big scheme of things. 

If he were 18 and off to college, then we'd be having a different conversation! For now, I remain in full disagreement with all but one of the health visitors I have spoken with. That one being a woman from Africa who told me she carried each of her children on her back until they were at least one and helped them to sleep (by rocking or feeding) as long as they needed it.