Why Is Breast-Feeding Important?

Throughout human history, breast-feeding mothers sleeping alongside their infants constituted a marvelously adaptive system in which both the mothers' and infants' sleep physiology and health were connected in beneficial ways. By sleeping next to its mother, the infant receives protection, warmth, emotional reassurance, and breast milk - in just the forms and quantities that nature intended.
This sleeping arrangement helps the parents to have better access to respond quickly if they cry, chokes or need nasal passages to be cleared. It helps to regulate the infants breathing, sleep state, heart rates, and body temperature. The increased nipple contact also causes changes in the mother's hormone levels that help to prevent a new pregnancy before the infant is ready to feed on something other than the babies milk. In this way, the infant helps the mother too; such as increased breast-feeding blocks ovulation, which helps to ensure that pregnancies will not ordinarily occur until the mother's body can restore the fat and iron reserves needed for optimal maternal health.
Human milk is composed of low amounts of protein and fat, and high amounts of quickly absorbed and metabolized sugars.
Therefore, the infant's hunger cycle is short, as is the time spent in deep sleep. These factors seem to indicate that separating infants from their parents during sleep time is more the result of cultural history than of fundamental physiological or psychological needs. Sleep laboratory studies have shown that bed-sharing, instead of sleeping in separate rooms, almost doubled the number of breast-feeding episodes and tripled the total nightly duration of breast-feeding. Infants cried much less frequently when sleeping next to their mothers, and spent less time awake. We think that the more frequently infants are breast-fed, the less likely they are to die from cot
death.
But in Western societies the practice of parents and infants sleeping together is thought as strange, unhealthy, and dangerous. Western parents are taught that "co-sleeping" will make the infant too dependent on them, or risk accidental suffocation. At some point in recent history, infant separateness with low parental contact during the night came to be advocated by child care specialists, while infant-parent interdependence with high parental contact came to be discouraged. In fact, the few psychological studies which are available suggest that children who have "co-slept" in a loving and safe environment become better adjusted adults than those who were encouraged to sleep without parental contact or reassurance.