Ball: Parent-Infant Sleep Lab (Durham University, UK)
3x more likely to still be breastfeeding at 16 weeks if bed-sharing
Helen Ball's lab documents how bed-sharing supports breastfeeding. Mothers who bed-share are 3x more likely to still be breastfeeding at 16 weeks. The Durham data has shifted UK public health guidance toward acknowledging safe bed-sharing.
Helen Ball runs the Parent-Infant Sleep Lab at Durham University in the UK. Her research focuses specifically on how cosleeping interacts with breastfeeding outcomes.
The headline findings: bed-sharing mothers breastfeed for significantly longer and breastfeed more exclusively than mothers who room-share or sleep separately. In one Durham study, mothers who bed-shared in the first six months were three times more likely to still be breastfeeding at 16 weeks compared with mothers who did not. The mechanism is straightforward.
Babies who feed at night without requiring the mother to fully wake and walk to another room tend to feed more often, which maintains the milk supply and the breastfeeding relationship. The Ball lab data has been instrumental in shifting UK public health guidance toward acknowledging safe bed-sharing as a real category.
3x
Breastfeeding at 16 weeks (bed-sharing)
Durham
University research base
Replicated
Multiple Durham cohorts
Why it matters
Public health goals around breastfeeding duration and exclusivity are dramatically more achievable when bed-sharing is recognized as a normal infant care practice rather than a risk to be eliminated.
This is one finding from the research library behind How to Birth a Mother. Everything here traces back to a study, a dataset, or a systematic review.