Thread: Does smoking interferes with breastfeeding?

Is smoking is interfering with good mothering?

Avoiding breastfeeding is risking your baby, and may cause SIDS. Smoking mothers tend to either avoid breastfeeding or wean faster and tend to have allot more breastfeeding related problems. Smoking suppresses lactation by affecting almost all the milk-producing hormones. Also frightening is a discovery that smoking mothers have much lower prolactin levels, the hormone in charge of regulating milk production and affects mothering behavior.

A mother with less prolactin in her system may have less awareness of her baby, an especially scary situation when considering that these babies are already in danger because of their exposure to smoke and nicotine.

Lately, five reputable scientific studies determined that smoking around infants increases the risk of SIDS, and the more cigarettes the parents smoke the higher the risk.

Normally, mothers would avoid doing anything that might harm their babies, unless a smoking addiction overrules. An infant needs a pair of healthy lungs and healthy parents.