Breastfed babies’ sleep, breastfeeding parents’ sleep

Date / Heure
Date(s) - 15/10/2021 - 18/10/2021
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Entre le 15 et le 18 octobre, pendant le Congrès virtuel pour les 65 ans de La Leche League, je parlerai sommeil des bébés allaités et de leurs parents, en anglais avec l’accent français !

When a breastfeeding mother complains of being tired, of poor sleep, of being woken up by her baby… she often receives advice like: « Bottle feed, he will sleep better », « Give him a bottle in the evening, he will not wake up anymore ”,“ let him cry a little, he must learn to sleep through the night ”, and so on. People believe that breastfed babies (and their parents) sleep less and less well than bottle-fed babies.
Yet many studies show that this is not the case, and that breastfeeding mothers actually benefit from better sleep, either in duration or in quality (more deep sleep, more restorative).
A very recent study sheds interesting light on the subject.
In this study, mothers not only had to keep a diary, but their sleep and the sleep of their babies were also recorded by an actigraph. Result: the actigraphic data showed that the total duration of sleep and that of the sleep ranges increased over time, without a significant difference being observed between 4 and 18 weeks between children exclusively breastfed and children exclusively fed on industrial milk. The frequency of nocturnal awakenings was also similar in the two groups of children. At 18 weeks, infants who were exclusively breastfed even slept longer than those who were fed industrial milk.
But, from 8 weeks and up to 18 weeks, mothers giving exclusively industrial milk overestimated the quality and duration of their child’s sleep at night and underestimated the frequency of his nocturnal awakenings!
It is this study and many others that we are going to talk about here.