Drawbacks of giving formula at night to get more sleep

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Drawbacks of giving formula at night to get more sleep

I can certainly understand why mothers might want to give their baby formula to promote more sleep because certainly most moms that have babies, regardless of whether or not they're bed sharing, are to a certain extent sleep deprived. That said, it's important to remember in whose best interest one wants to make those kinds of decisions. I can clearly state that the normal pattern that we learn it's supposed to be normal in our culture that babies are supposed to sleep it's just definitely not what the normative experience is for the human infant, nor is it in the baby's best interest. Rather than the consolidation of sleep, how babies actually sleep is that they wake, they breast feed, and they sleep. They wake, they breast feed, and they sleep. It's a very episodic pattern and babies are not in any sense of the word supposed in an uninterrupted wave through the night. You're actually contributing to the development of a lot of variety of skills by that baby awakening because don't forget not only is it more breast milk that that baby's getting which increases both future health and immediate health, but it's actually interactive and it's engagement and is contributing to cognitive, and social, and intellectual development of that baby as well.



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James McKenna, PhD

Anthropologist & Author


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