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Attachment Parenting
coffeeandbooks
member
FF and Bedsharing
coffeeandbooks
member
Hi, just wondering if anyone bedshares and formula feeds. If yes, how often does your baby wake to feed? Are they learning to self settle?
Any thing you would want to share about your experience would be helpful. Thanks so much!!
Any thing you would want to share about your experience would be helpful. Thanks so much!!
This discussion has been closed.
Re: FF and Bedsharing
Started fertility treatments 11/2010
Ovarian dysfunction, LPD, male factor
6 failed medicated IUI's
Pregnant 5/2011 - Miscarriage at 6 weeks due to triploidy
Decided to adopt - 6/2012
SURPRISE! Pregnant without intervention - 7/2012
Sweet Baby James Born 3/2013
Decided to be "One and Done"
....OR NOT.
Pregnant 12/2018 despite birth control pills
Here we go again...
Due 8/26/19!
FWIW, this is what Dr. James McKenna, the foremost expert on infant sleep from the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory, has to say about bedsharing with a bottle fed baby:
"Breastfeeding changes where and how the baby is placed next to the mother, to begin with, and the infant’s arousal patterns, how sensitive the baby and the mother are to each other’s movements and sounds and proximities, as well as the infant’s and the mother’s sleep architecture (how much time each spends in various sleep stages and how and when they move out of one sleep stage into another) are very different between bottle feeding and breastfeeding mother-infant pairs. Not only is the physiology or sensitivity of the mother to the baby, and the baby to the mother completely enhanced if breastfeeding and if routinely bedsharing, i.e. each reacting to each others sounds and movements and touches compared to the bottle or formula fed, bedsharing mothers and infant, but breastfeeding mothers and infants arouse more frequently with respect to each others arousals, and breastfeeding mothers and infants compared with bottle feeding mother-infant pairs spend significantly more time in lighter rather than deeper stages of sleep. Lighter sleep makes it easier for a mother and infant to detect and respond to the presence of the other, making the bed sharing arrangement much safer.
Breastfeeding mothers typically place their infants under their triceps, mid chest level, and often sleep on their side curling up around the infant protectively with their knees often pulled up under the infant’s feet. This position may be instinctive but it does not happen when a mother bottle feeds her baby. Indeed, bottle fed infants are typically placed much higher up on the bed and near pillows (and sometimes on top of pillows, very dangerous) that can obscure the infants air flow, and expose infants to potential gaps (head board to mattress) into within infants could slip.
Also, bottle feeding-bedsharing infants move in directions away from the mother, thus, increasing the risks of some kind of asphyxial event, compared with breastfeeding infants, according to the research by Dr. Helen Ball. (Please check out her website at the University of Durham). That is why Dr. Ball and myself agree that bottle fed infants are safer if they sleep alongside their mothers on a different surface but not in the same bed."
At the end of the day, you need to do what's right for you and your family. And you know yourself and your baby best.
I personally would not quote a few articles and expect others to accept it as fact. Of course I would argue with a study...when common sense tells me it wrong.
I know plenty of breast feeding mothers who are not in sync with their kids, and formula feeding moms who are very in tune with their babies...and vice versa.
I'm sorry my comment turned this into a mommy wars thread. I didn't mean for that at all.
And, of course there will be exceptions but no matter what you feed LO or where baby is sleeping you need to take steps to ensure safety and the reasons why it's especially true for FFing moms who bedshare, generally speaking. This has nothing to do with "bashing" FFing moms.
There isn't anyone here who doesn't agree you don't have to be careful co-sleeping but I will not accept that breast feeding mothers are more aware of their children in bed. There are so many other dependencies - the psychological state of the mother, her state of physical health, whether she has addictions, how much time she spends with her child, if she is feeding on demand or on a schedule, which would affect her ability to be in sync besides breastfeeding.
I have my ds in his crib next to the bed after he falls asleep until early morning. If he wakes up between 12 and 4am, I will bring him into bed with me to nurse and fall back to sleep and then I'll move him back to his crib. After 4am I will let him stay in bed with me until we get up around 5:30-6. I do it this way because I know me. I need to be able to fall into a deeper sleep than I am able to with ds in bed with me. If I don't, I have a harder time functioning the next day. When I get into that deep sleep, dh jokes around that WWIII could happen outside of our bedroom windows and I'd have to read about it in the news the next day. So for us, I know that bedsharing the full night is not safe so we don't do it.
FWIW, ds is a mix of bf and ff. One of the things I have noticed is that it is the feeling of ds tugging on my nipples/breast while nursing and his fussing/squirming around looking for the nipple when he's lost it that keeps me from falling into the deep sleep. With the exception of when he was a new newborn and having issues staying warm, I didn't bedshare while he was exclusively bottle fed because even though I was feeding pumped bm, just his presence wasn't enough to keep me from falling into the deep sleep.
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