us, “My baby seldom cries. She doesn’t need to.”
2. Breastfeed Your Baby
There is a special connection between breastfeeding and discipline. Promoting desirable behaviour requires that you know your child and help your child feel right. Breastfeeding helps you get to know your baby and provide the response that helps him feel right.
Discipline benefits to mother. Breastfeeding is an exercise in baby-reading. Learning about your baby’s needs and moods is an important part of discipline. Part of learning how to breastfeed is learning to read your baby’s cues rather than watching the clock. You learn to read her body language so that you can tell when she needs to feed, when she’s had enough, and when she just wants to feed for comfort. One veteran disciplinarian told us, “I can tell her moods by the way she behaves at the breast.” Baby gives a cue asking for food or comfort, and you respond by offering to feed. After hundreds of these cue-response practice sessions, your responses become completely natural. What was initially a mental exercise (“Is she hungry? Restless? Upset? I wonder what she needs”) eventually becomes an intuitive response. A flow of communication develops between the little person in need and the big person who is in a position to meet those needs. You get in harmony with your baby.
This harmony is especially helpful if you need to overcome preconceived fears of spoiling that restrain you from naturally responding to your baby. Jan, a first-time mother whom I talked with at a prenatal interview, had a lot of hang-ups from her past that threatened to interfere with her enjoyment of motherhood. She had been on a rigid schedule as a baby, and control was the big issue in her childhood. Jan was now entering motherhood feeling that her main task as a parent was to be sure that her baby did not control or manipulate her. She feared that picking up the baby whenever she cried would result in spoiling. As part of her parenting plans, she was going to train her baby to soothe herself by letting her cry it out. She also planned to put the baby on a feeding schedule, called parent-controlled feeding, and she felt this would be easier to do if she bottle-fed. She thought this would ensure that she would be in charge, and not the baby. I explained that in order to be “in charge” of her baby she had to get to know her baby and become intuitively responsive. Jan changed her mind and decided to give breastfeeding a try. I’m happy to report it not only worked very well for baby but was also therapeutic for Mummy.
The right chemistry. Breastfeeding stimulates your body to produce prolactin and oxytocin – hormones that give your mothering a boost. These magical substances send messages to a mother’s brain, telling her to relax and make milk. The levels of these substances go up during breastfeeding and during other motherly activities such as looking at and caressing the baby. They may form a biological basis for the term “mother’s intuition”. Your reward for spending time touching and enjoying your baby and breastfeeding frequently is a higher level of “feel-good” hormones. A prominent psychotherapist we interviewed revealed her observation that “breastfeeding mothers are better able to empathize with their children”.
Discipline benefits for your baby. Baby’s cues for food and comfort are met, so naturally baby learns to trust. Because he spends many hours each day at the breast, he feels valued and “in touch”. Baby feels right, and this inner feeling of well-being translates into desirable behaviour. Over my twenty-two years in paediatric practice I have observed how mellow breastfeeding babies are, especially toddlers who breastfeed through their second year. A nursing toddler seems to be at peace with himself and with his caregivers. Although in the last century of Western culture we have learned to think of breastfeeding in terms of months or even weeks, historically, in most cultures, babies have nursed for at least two or three years. The behaviour-improving effects of breastfeeding have been known for millennia. You will find breastfeeding particularly useful as a discipline tool when a toddler is going through the stage where he is easily frustrated or when his newfound independence frightens him. We knew a secure and independent two-and-a-half-year-old child who after experiencing a setback such as a toy squabble would come to his mother for consolation saying, “Nursie ’bout it.”
the body chemistry of attachment
Good things happen to the hormones of mothers and babies who are attached. Hormones regulate the body’s systems and help them react to the environment. One of these hormones is Cortisol. Produced by the adrenal glands, one of its jobs is to help a person cope with stress and make sudden adjustments in threatening situations. For the body to function optimally, it must have the right balance of Cortisol – too little and it shuts down, too much and it becomes distressed. Cortisol is one of the hormones that plays a major part in a person’s emotional responses. In reviewing attachment-chemistry studies, we conclude that a secure mother-infant attachment keeps the baby in hormonal balance. Insecurely attached infants may either get used to a low hormonal level, and so they become apathetic, or they may constantly have high stress hormones, and so they become chronically anxious. The securely attached infant seems to be in a state of hormonal well-being, and because the infant is used to that feeling, he strives to maintain it. Scientists are confirming what mothers have always known: Mother’s presence is important for keeping baby’s behavioural chemistry in balance.
Besides attachment parenting helping the baby’s hormones, it also helps the mother’s body chemistry. Maternal behaviours, especially breastfeeding, result in an outpouring of the hormones prolactin and oxytocin. These “mothering hormones” act as biological helpers, giving mums motherly feelings. They may, in fact, be the biological basis of the concept of mother’s intuition. Prolactin levels increase ten- to twenty-fold within thirty minutes after mother begins breastfeeding. Most of it is gone again within an hour. Prolactin is a short-acting substance, so to get the best response a mother must breastfeed frequently – which is what babies want anyway. Hormones are biological helpers that improve the behaviour of the baby and the caregiving of the mother. Your choice in parenting style can make them work for you.
“But won’t prolonged breastfeeding spoil a toddler? He needs to become independent.” Actually the reverse is true – children who are not weaned before their time are more independent. Premature weaning breaks a connection before the child is equipped to make other connections. Extended nursing, rather than encouraging a child to stay dependent, creates conditions that encourage independence. Offering a familiar connection (breastfeeding) during tumultuous toddlerhood gives the child an anchor from which he can explore the unfamiliar.
The idea of breastfeeding past your child’s first birthday may seem strange to you, but we believe that it is important that children not be weaned before they show signs of readiness. Weaning is a part of growing up. It should take place gradually. We have noticed that children who have been weaned too early show what we call diseases of premature weaning: aggression, anger, more tantrum-like behaviour, anxious clinging to caregivers, and less ability to form deep and intimate relationships. Breastfeeding seems to mellow out the aggressive tendencies of toddlers and restores balance in their behaviour. In 1990, former surgeon general Dr Antonia Novello, after extolling the benefits of breastfeeding, added, “It’s the lucky baby, I feel, who continues to nurse until he is two.” (See “Weaning from Attachment”.)
Can a bottle-feeding mother achieve the same degree of closeness with her baby as the breastfeeding mother?
We believe she can, but she has to work at it harder since she is not part of a natural feedback loop enjoyed by the breastfeeding baby and mother. The bottle-feeding mother is more likely to schedule her baby’s feedings, because formula-fed babies are easier to schedule (artificial baby milks take longer to digest). Bottle-feeders tend to worry more about spoiling their babies. A bottle-feeding mother does not have the benefit of the hormonal boost that happens with breastfeeding or the intimate skin-to-skin connection. Holding her baby lovingly in the breastfeeding
