Breast milk pumping may affect the quality of sleep babies get.
As a first time mum, I can testify to how my baby had good sleep from the moment we left the clinic till now.
There are two things that’s involved:
- The time you breastfeed your baby
- Exposure to sunlight.
So babies do not produce melatonin at the early stage of their life, they make use of the melatonin from breast milk.
Cortisol and melatonin rise and fall in the breast milk at specific times during the day.
Cortisol acts an active hormone for play while melatonin is act as sleep hormones for babies. So the timing of breastfeeding affect the quality of sleep a baby can get.
So if you keep expressing milk down in the morning and feeding it to the baby in the evening, this will have an alternate effect on their sleep routine.
By feeding the baby with breast milk expressed in the morning, that’s like giving them a cup of sweetened milk, they are not going to sleep.
So, basically the milk to be fed to babies in the evening should be expressed in the evening to ensure it contains the required hormone which aids sleep.
Exposure to sunlight also help babies to understand the difference between day and night.
