Go read the Disclaimer again. I am not a doctor. This is not medical advice. Seriously.
I have a lot of close friends who had their babies years before I had my first baby. I'm a big believer in learning from other people's experiences, at least when those other people are people I like and respect. And these are some brilliant, wonderful human beings.
All of my close friends who were able to successfully breastfeed their babies slept with or near their babies. They did not all plan to do so; they did not all start out doing so, especially with their first baby. Convenience was one factor, but the difficulty of transitioning a baby who had fallen asleep breastfeeding to sleeping alone was at least as important a factor.
A lot of "baby experts" advise never letting a baby fall asleep at the breast. I'm unsure how one could prevent this, without also engaging in child abuse. A full baby, ready to sleep can nevertheless kick up a significant protest if separated from the breast before finishing; keeping a baby awake as that baby is finishing does not lead to a calm baby ready to fall asleep, either. As long as physical contact is maintained, a baby who has fallen asleep full, at the breast, is not likely to awaken completely. You can often even pass that sleeping baby around between various people and the baby may or may not wake up. I had seen this in action more than once around friends. But if you put that baby down and physical contact ends, the next time that baby's sleep pattern lightens, that baby will wake the rest of the way up and be quite agitated. This is partly why the advice; if you can get a baby to fall asleep alone, in theory they won't be freaked out to wake up alone. This theory is not particularly effective in practice, which is partly why there are so many books out there to help parents get their babies to sleep. (Foolish ideas about how babies sleep is a lot of the rest of why all those books sell so well.)
During the first few weeks, some babies just conk out wherever they are and stay asleep no matter what happens, and some babies don't seem to stay asleep for more than a few minutes in a row, not matter what you do. It's a mistake to generalize from these early weeks. The pattern your baby adopts after three or four months have gone by might continue as long as you continue to exclusively breastfeed. Breastmilk is highly digestible; full to empty takes about an hour and a half. The inevitable conclusion is that a baby that awakens when hungry will be waking up about an hour and a half after a feeding is over, if there is food nearby. If the food (mama) is a little ways away, the baby might sleep for three hours in a row. This is what the 2-4 hours rule means.
I hope you are reading this before you have your baby, so you can plan around this. Otherwise, I hope you read this before you wean your baby, mistakenly believing you do not have an adequate milk supply. This is normal. The only reason people think this is not normal, is because they're really used to sickly, formula fed babies. But given that your sleep will be broken up into hour and a half long blocks of deeper sleep, with half hour or so long lighter sleep while you nurse your baby, you need make the most of those hour and a half long blocks of sleep, or you're going to have to sleep in a separate room and hope you can get three hour blocks of sleep, and make efficient use of them. In practice, you'll play musical beds with other family members and adopt different solutions at different times.
Lying next to your baby, and nursing while lying next to your baby, is a very efficient solution to this problem. Having the baby next to your bed in a basket, bassinet, co-sleeper or baby hammock, is also an efficient solution to this problem. The less the baby has to wake up to communicate a need to you to nurse, the more efficiently that baby will feed and then fall back asleep. A fully awake, screaming baby will be slow to attach, may tend to unlatch repeatedly to continue crying, and will be difficult to calm back down to sleep when full.
Sometimes, sleeping with or near your baby does not work, either at all, or for a time. Musical Beds are the next choice.
A General Discussion of Getting Everyone in the Family Enough Sleep
Copyright 2006 by Rebecca Allen.
Created February 4, 2006 Updated February 4, 2006