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The Science Behind The Secret Life of Babies- Interview on CITR
Conversations on Perinatal Imprinting - Fussy Baby
www.fussybaby.ca/perinatalimprinting.html
Breach Babies-Childbearing Newsletter
http://www.childbearing.org/newsletters/Autumn_2006_newsletter.pdf
The Conception Field-Childbearing Spring 2010 Newsletter
http://www.childbearing.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Spring-2010-newsletter.pdf
An opinion about sleep by my colleague & friend, Stepanie Ondrack, of The Childbearing Society. Taken from one of our email exchanges about University of Notre Dame Mother-Baby Sleep Researcher, Dr. James McKenna:http://cosleeping.nd.edu/
Stephanie writes, "As well, my understanding (mostly from Dr McKenna) is that our western baseline for 'normal' infant sleep is simply wrong, because all the stats are recorded while the infant is in a state of solitary sleep, which Dr McKenna proposes is not physiologically natural. He suggests that human babies have evolved to sleep in direct contact with their mothers (like all other mammals), which keeps them in a lighter state of sleep, with more frequent semi-wakings, and more frequent nursing sessions. He proposes that this is actually the normal, healthy, and appropriate baseline. When we use a baby as the model that has been forced to sleep in an unnatural way--alone, in a much deeper state of sleep, with fewer arousals, and insufficient feedings--we skew the results of all the research.
Dr McKenna, and others, show in their research that babies sleeping in mothers' arms also have higher immune functions, more stable heart rate and blood pressure, more consistent breathing, NO incidents of sleep
apnea, and a hormonal exchange that happens all night long, that promotes oxytocin and suppresses cortisol. A baby sleeping alone is full of cortisol. So while babies sleeping in mothers' arms may indeed wake every hour to quietly nurse and then go right back to sleep, he
suggests that this is not a pathology, but rather the model upon whichwe should be judging all healthy human sleep."
~ thank you, Stephanie.
