Presentation Information

The Return of Breastsleeping: Humankind’s Oldest and Most Successful Sleep and Feeding Arrangement

• Speaker: James J. McKenna , Ph.D
• Presentation Type:
• Duration: 75 Mins
• Credits: 1.25 CERP, 1.25 Nursing CEU, 1.25 CME, 0.1 Midwifery CEU

Abstract:

Breastsleeping refers to bedsharing-amongst breastfeeding mothers and infants occurring in the absence of all known independent risk factors.

Given that most breastfeeding mothers bedshare, there is a critical need to develop a new SIDS/SUID discourse, one that employs harm reduction strategies, family- tailored education, evidence-based medicine, and primary advice formulated by breastfeeding and lactation communities, researchers and associations. This new bottom-up, evidence-based discourse first and foremost respects what parents say they need, want, can and are willing to do.

This discourse acknowledges that, in the United States, bedsharing is common and what helps us to understand it is to reference scientific studies (heretofore dismissed by ‘authorities’) on the powerful infantile and parental biological factors that motivate bedsharing, and the realization that sleep-related risks are not co-equal but vary along a significant continuum of relative risks ranging between acceptable (especially where exclusively breastsleeping occurs i.e. where hazardous factors are eliminated) to unacceptable where a variety of well independent “risk factors’ are present.

I argue here for recommendations based on evidence-based medicine rather than the ideologically driven opinions and assumptions of those making the recommendations which are failing after 20 years of attacks on bedsharing and bedsharing families.