Bedtime or Breast Time

Falling Asleep While Nursing

By Lyn Mettler

At its most basic, breastfeeding provides your baby with food, but many mothers find that it also provides their babies with a sense of comfort and calm. Many babies relax so much that they drift off to sleep.

Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a 39-year-old mother from Jacksonville, Fla., found breastfeeding did just that for her son Aaron. "I find breast milk to be 'knockout juice,'" she says. "Breastfeeding calms Aaron down. When he's a little disorganized or fussy, five minutes at the breast will return him to his usual happy self, ready to play." She looks at breastfeeding as Aaron's little Zen meditation time.

"It's a very soothing experience for the baby to feel the warmth of his or her Mom, to hear Mom's heartbeat, to be nourished, etc. This is the perfect environment to fall asleep in," says Sandra Samberg, of New York City, mother of two, pediatric nurse practitioner and author of BABY -C Book: For the ABC's of Keeping Your Baby Healthy and Happy.

But many experts caution that allowing your baby to fall asleep while breastfeeding might not be a good idea. In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics in their book Guide to Your Child's Sleep says that it is a bad habit to develop and can keep parents and baby from getting a good night's sleep.

"If a baby routinely falls asleep while breastfeeding, he or she begins to associate falling asleep with nursing," Samberg says. "Therefore, if the baby wakes up in the middle of the night and is in that half-awake or half-asleep state, it's likely that he or she will need to breastfeed in order to fall back to sleep." As the baby gets older, she says, the feedings are less needed for nutrition and are more out of habit. "Unfortunately, this habit becomes more difficult to break as the baby gets older and more used to falling asleep while nursing," she explains.

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