GOLD Learning Speakers

Many health care workers advocate a no-bedsharing policy, no exceptions. Others recognize that most breastfeeding mothers will share sleep with their babies at times, safely or unsafely; may even have bedshared themselves; and feel they lack the tools to help prevent unsafe shared sleep. Still others recommend safe bedsharing as the normal and easiest way to meet a baby’s needs and facilitate breastfeeding. The Safe Sleep Seven offers a middle ground: Seven research-supported criteria which, if met, offer a level of bedsharing safety equivalent to crib safety. For those mothers who don’t meet the criteria, it provides a simple way for them to make educated decisions about their family’s nighttime parenting. And it helps every non-bedsharing breastfeeding mother “child-proof” her bed so that it is as safe as possible if there’s a night when she just can’t stay awake to nurse.

Breeders, veterinarians, zoo curators, and field researchers with an interest in mammalian infant survival don’t focus on lactation. They focus on birth. If a birth is unimpeded, postbirth feeding almost always ensues; if there are too many birth interventions, non-human mammal mothers may reject the baby, and there is no feeding. Interventions can include a change of location during labor, an unfamiliar setting, a laborless birth, removal of normal birth smells, stress, and more. In other mammals, a good birth isn’t a bonus, it’s a basic. This talk ranges from infant survival strategies to the importance of maternal cleaning of her newborn, to the biology behind a mother drowning her toddlers in order to keep a boyfriend. The solemn and strong message: "It's the birth, silly!"

Babies haven’t changed, but our understanding of how they attach to the breast certainly has. A journey through more than 50 years of “skilled help” with breastfeeding, what we thought we knew, what we think we know, and how we’re circling back to our beginnings and some surprisingly simple conclusions.