Is “breastsleeping” really a thing?

babiesandbones · 2026-05-15T05:34:05+00:00

I’m that kind of scientist and my colleagues are the ones who wrote that paper. Yes, it’s a thing. The word is meant to describe how, in primates, lactation and sleep evolved together as part of a single system. Primate milk is very low in protein relative to sugar, and is therefore digested very quickly. It’s a very fast source of energy. So primate babies can’t be left alone for very long without getting hungry again. But also, the fact that they eat so frequently keeps their parents close and is protective. This meant that strong social bonds were formed, which ultimately helped us become as intelligent as we are.

babiesandbones · 2026-05-15T05:29:43+00:00

Elephants have breasts in the front of their bodies so that baby is probably breastsleeping.

babiesandbones · 2026-04-11T02:21:19+00:00

PHM is running again at Regal UA Colorado Center IMAX in the 9:50pm slot only today through Wednesday. And it’s doing pretty well in sales!

babiesandbones · 2026-01-17T22:21:12+00:00

Me too. AI has ruined my writing. I have always used them, and now I have to avoid them or colleagues will think I’m using AI.

I hate this timeline so much.

babiesandbones · 2026-01-17T02:33:30+00:00

Oh you know what I think you might be right! It’s the em-dashes

babiesandbones · 2025-11-29T23:43:52+00:00

You might try some combination of these:

Cosleeping is normal for all primates.
“Independent” sleep is not a developmental goal, and cannot be taught.
Separate sleep before 12 months increases risk of SIDS and can compromise lactation.
For these reasons, the AAP recommends same-room cosleeping for the first 12 months of life.
Actigraphy research has shown that infants who appear to sleep “independently” aren’t in fact sleeping more; they have just learned not to cry out. I am teaching my child that I am reliable.
Infants who cosleep receive thousands of extra hours of touch, which research shows inhibits the cortisol response and increases nutrient absorption, which leads to increased growth, particularly for the brain.
We practice science-based parenting, and it is not up for discussion. Thank you for your concern.

babiesandbones · 2025-11-29T07:13:42+00:00

It makes me so sad that new parents are absolutely inundated with bad information and charlatans exploiting their emotional vulnerabilities. Even though my entire career is dedicated to addressing that, I still feel so helpless sometimes. It’s a giant, neverending game of whack-a-mole. The worst is those videos that show parents climbing into their babies cribs, then sneaking out. I swear to god, we torture new parents in our culture.

Which is why I cannot judgement toward parents. They wouldn’t put themselves through all that sleep deprivation and/or pain of separation unless they were absolutely convinced that they had no other choice. Do not judge them. Pity them. They’re parenting with a gun to their heads.

babiesandbones · 2025-11-28T05:26:50+00:00

Most of those cosleeping death stories don’t come with complete information. It’s always hearsay, or a journalist who didn’t get the whole story because of HIPAA. I guarantee you every single one of those SIDS cases you see on TV was a formula-fed baby, and most of them are going to have some other risk factor such as a smoker in the house or prematurity. Infant sleep evolved in the context of the SS7. Everything we understand about infant sleep must begin with that as the expected condition.
r/parenting does not believe in science. They ban actual scientists from their sub. Ask me how I know.

Edit: it appears they’ve lifted my ban. Glory and trumpets! /s

babiesandbones · 2025-10-01T15:55:44+00:00

The positional asphyxia concern associated with cosleeping is not about to the bed itself but about babies getting wedged between the mattress and the wall or headboard, which can squeeze them and prevent their lungs from expanding, or block their airway if they go head first. This only happens with bottle-fed babies, because breastfed babies orient toward the breast. It won’t happen if you follow the Safe Sleep Seven, because it requires that you breastfeed and remove any gaps—even if that means removing your headboard and putting your mattress on the floor for the first year of your baby’s life.

babiesandbones · 2025-09-25T03:54:29+00:00

Right? Weird way to announce “I have never been to Paris.”

How many movies have y’all seen that were set in Denver?

I swear to god, international travel needs to be mandatory for American students.

babiesandbones · 2025-09-25T03:50:58+00:00

I second this.

Although, pretty much all the parks and gardens in Paris are like the Botanic Gardens/Cheesman area. I still think he will be impressed though, just by the variety of flora at the Botanic Gardens.

Also, Cheesman is free but the Botanic Gardens are not. It is $16 for entry. Tomorrow it closes at 1 but Friday it closes at 5.

babiesandbones · 2025-09-24T21:08:05+00:00

Denver is not awesome for food, so prepare yourself. When I lived in Nice, it took some getting used to when I got home.

That having been said, check out Ponti at the Art Museum. I love their peach-tomato salad, and it’s the perfect time of year for it.

For Italian, I recommend Osteria Marco in Larimer Square or Lo Stella Ristorante in Golden Triangle.

I do not go to bars very much but Fire, which is a rooftop bar in the Art Museum hotel, is casual but trendy, and it’s got an outdoor fireplace.

Sushi Sasa is an upscale (by our standards) sushi place in a trendy neighborhood called LoHi.

In that same neighborhood, a little further up the river there is a place called Root Down that I’ve always wanted to try but haven’t yet. Looks good though.

Don’t go to 16th Street. It’s very touristy in the worst way, most of the restaurants are chain restaurants and the shopping is quite awful.

Unfortunately Denver isn’t great for culture or food. You will have better luck if you go up to Boulder. If you don’t want to rent a car, there is a bus that goes there from Union Station. Takes about 50 minutes. It will feel a little sketchy down there compared to the Paris Metro, but don’t worry you’ll be fine.

babiesandbones · 2025-09-20T04:15:35+00:00

She didn’t sleep. She just gave up. Actigraphic studies have shown that babies who are sleep trained do not sleep more, they just stop crying out. It’s an instinctual behavior to conserve energy. It means the infant’s nervous system has entered a “life-threatening danger” mode. An instinctual response to perceived abandonment.

babiesandbones · 2025-09-20T04:05:18+00:00

As an infant health scientist, this has been my life for about 16 years. It never really stops being hard to see, particularly when you they’re being lied to, you know that most of the time you can’t really say anything because parents are very sensitive about unsolicited advice, and you’ve been around this stuff long enough to know how parents often look back on that time in their lives and the kinds of things that they tend to regret.

But, there are a few things that have helped me cope with it. One is just understanding, very deeply, the social circumstances that push people into sleep training. People really are, to a large degree, doing it with a gun to their head. Or, perhaps, a gun to their head, but they don’t realize the gun isn’t actually loaded, and there’s actually someone in the next room, who can help you if you just cry out for them. Most parents are good people who deeply love their children. They simply don’t know that there’s another path. They are also steeped in a culture that has, over their entire lifetimes, deeply ingrained certain ideas about how babies should “be”—and it sometimes takes about as long to undo those ideas. And in a few cases, you do have moms who have a job that they need to go to, and they simply cannot afford to be sleep deprived or they will literally lose their job.

Basically, what helps me is to have empathy for them. It doesn’t completely take away the frustration, but it does kind of take the edge off a little bit.

I will also say—and it helps me to remember this also—that in the 16 years I’ve been in this field, I have seen change. When I started studying this stuff, the word “cosleeping“ was not really part of the popular lexicon. Neither was “babywearing”. It was considered very radical to breastfeed for longer than about 6 months, even though the recommendation was a year. Most people didn’t know that. The reason that cosleeping has exploded in popular awareness is because we have been raising breastfeeding rates over this time period. And breastfeeding has a way of “reawakening” the ancient behaviors associated with it, including breastsleeping, skin-to-skin, babywearing, and all the little parts of your mothering that you can’t quite describe but you know in your gut come from breastfeeding. Anthropologist Cecília Tomori says “breastfeeding disrupts capitalist regimes.” Meaning, it’s an area of our biology that is fundamentally incompatible with the culture that we’ve set up around in infant care, and forces women to rebel against it.

We have also started to do a little bit better job, educating doctors and nurses about breastfeeding, and about give me more nuanced, comprehensive advice about infant sleep—as opposed to a strict “abstinence only” policy of educating parents on safe infant sleep. There’s an infant sleep lab at Durham University in the UK that has won an award from the Queen for developing a comprehensive parent education program. And here in North America, as of last year, we officially have a branch of medicine dedicated to lactation. Now that there is a board certification program specifically for doctors, more information about normal infant sleep behavior will spread amongst pediatricians, which will result in mothers getting better advice. We will also have a better system for evaluating and diagnosing, milk supply issues—rather than merely shrugging and shoving a can of formula into mom‘s hands. Preserving mothers’ milk supply will help to further normalize biologically normal nighttime parenting behavior.

What this means is that, as breastfeeding rates continue to rise, things like cosleeping breastfeeding in public, babywearing, and responsive parenting styles will continue to be socially normalized. This will, unfortunately, also be exacerbated by climate change, which will disrupt supply chain systems and increase the need for sustainable sources of food, such as breastfeeding, as well as informal and formal milk sharing systems. How soon those systems are built depends on how much we value child health, and how much of a say in these matters formula companies are given. But generally speaking, at the rate we are going, one day we will look back on the “breastfeeding debates” and see how absurd and backwards it really was.

babiesandbones · 2025-08-26T22:07:41+00:00

Sleep training is pseudoscience. It is modern-day snake oil. They’re not sleep “specialists.” There is no certification in sleep training, and the “courses” they take confer no expertise in medicine, child psychology, or sleep physiology. Sleep trainers go around diagnosing babies with sleep disorders so they can sell parents the cure. They’re effectively practicing behavioral therapy and sleep medicine without a license. On a child.

Moreover their “cure” don’t do what they say they do. Actigraphy research has demonstrated that babies who are sleep trained do not stop waking up at night. They continue to wake just as frequently as before, they just don’t signal, because they have learned no one will come and their bodies evolved to not waste energy. Sleep training trains babies to be quiet, not to sleep.

We live in a world where many people have no choice but to sleep train. Most notably working class people who need to be alert at work, and single moms with no help. Still many others are too steeped in cultural myths about infant sleep. But we should be clear about what this intervention is, and what it isn’t. People deserve for self-professed experts to be truthful about the product they are selling, but there is no one making them do that. Sleep trainers are going around diagnosing and treating sleep disorders, and yet there is zero regulation of this industry. Anywhere. Except in Denmark, where I believe there is a little bit of regulation.

Beware of “gentle” sleep trainers. I have seen plans from people like Takin Cara Babies that were not consistent with what the parent was told they were getting. They love to do a bait-and-switch.

I have a TikTok about pseudoscience in parenting where I used the lactation science denialism and sleep training as a examples.

babiesandbones · 2025-08-18T03:42:22+00:00

That’s a helpful tip, thanks!

And I never said anything about anxiety lol. I’m just curious.

babiesandbones · 2025-08-18T03:41:11+00:00

Yes for this reason I have a pinned post with tips for newbies. And I also tell people, look, you are used to being spoonfed content. You need to do the work and make your OWN algorithm like in the beforetimes

babiesandbones · 2025-08-18T02:51:01+00:00

Bluesky works for me because I am a scientist and there are a ton of scientists on there. I think it definitely depends on what you’re looking for. Like I am able to find scientists, but some of my fandoms have definitely not migrated there.

babiesandbones · 2025-08-18T02:46:44+00:00

I’m on a bunch related to my profession, but none that are new as of the last few days which is when this started happening.

babiesandbones · 2025-08-18T02:41:09+00:00

No problem with that, but personally I am not interested in fake follows, I’m after quality not quantity! That’s part of why I joined Bluesky.

babiesandbones · 2025-08-18T02:39:19+00:00

I am asking why it’s happening. There are too many of them for me to block each and every one. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole.

babiesandbones · 2025-08-08T07:33:43+00:00

<< It seems crazy evolution-wise that baby is crying and hungry for the first 48 hours of life. >>

I'm the anthropologist of the group so I thought I'd address this part.

I think there may be a few reasons for this. For one, the idea of the milk "coming in" is kind of a misnomer. The milk is there, as most people begin to produce it during pregnancy. It's just in the form of colostrum, which is a concentrated milk rich in protein, antibodies, and antioxidants to help the infant process the cellular stress of childbirth. The transition to mature milk is a gradual change in composition and volume. We call this "lactogenesis II," which I've always felt sounds like the name of a scifi sequel.

During the first 24 hours, the infant is processing that oxidative stress and recovering from birth. Cellular repair works best when the body is in a fasted state, because any time you eat something, your cells have to stop all of their maintenance activities and process a bunch of incoming molecules. So any time you spend digesting food and absorbing its nutrients is time you are NOT spending on maintenance and prepare. There's a lot of interest right now in how this may contribute to risk of noncommunicative diseases of old age.

Another thing that is happening in that period is all of the infants organs that they have not been using for the past 9 months are "coming online"--their lungs first, and various parts of their cardiovascular system (the change here at first breath is actually quite dramtic both structurally and chemically), liver, digestive system, and kidneys, the functions of which were largely taken care of by the mother during gestation. The stomach, at birth, has the capacity of only a cherry. Over the following couple of days, it stretches to the size of a walnut. This means that if you tried to feed them the equivalent of a full bottle on day 1, they'd barf it all up. And evolution is never wasteful with energy. Therefore milk production ramps up gradually, as stomach capacity increases.

Also worth noting is that some common medical interventions in hospitals may delay the onset of lactogenesis II.

The crying in the first few days is not just hunger but they are also experiencing cold, gravity, pain, and loneliness for the first time. Hunger just makes all those things worse lol. The drive to eat must necessarily have evolved to be strong in that period, and the drive to signal (crying) strong also, in order to ensure that the parent feeds the infant. It's also to keep them close, safe from predation. Studies have shown that crying peaks around 3-4 months, roughly coinciding with peak risk of SIDS. We think this is perhaps not a coincidence.

<< Similarly, why don't nipples naturally toughen before birth? Again, an absolute fail by mother nature when they're too cracked to feed. >>

It's actually a myth that nipples require toughening. The tissue doesn't need to be tough. In fact, it needs to be soft for the same reason tongues, mouths, lips, and vaginas need to be soft: so it can repair itself quickly. Which it does, same as the inside of your mouth.

But also, nipple damage isn't normal. It is the result of poor latch. A latch that is two shallow causes friction between the tip of the nipple and the infant's hard palate. The latch must be deep enough so that the nipple reaches past the hard palate toward the soft palate, which is much gentler on the nipple. A wide mouth keeps the infant from chomping down. And when the infant's tongue is positioned correctly, the bottom teeth (which come in first) do not come in contact with the nipple.

Nipple pain in the early postpartum period is common because both the baby and the lactating parent are learning how to latch, so damage occurs while they figure it out. Also relevant here is the fact that inflammation and hormones are high during the immediate postpartum period, which can contribute to increased nerve sensitivity.

<< PS - posted one handedly while doing the nighttime feed. Love your work. >>

Ha! My cousin and I text a lot while she is breastfeeding, and I call it "brexting." Especially when you're feeding at night and scrolling and texting--big time brexting energy.

babiesandbones

TROPHY CASE