You may remember a post a while ago where I linked to a sleep survey for mothers of new babies. Kathleen Kendall-Tackett and Thomas Hale (authors of The Hidden Feelings of Motherhood and Medications and Mothers’ Milk respectively) have been collecting data about how new mothers sleep, where new babies sleep, how the babies are fed, and how tired mothers feel. Their preliminary results were published in the February 2009 Medications and More newsletter.

Since many people encourage mothers to give their babies formula to “get a break” or “get some rest”, I was interested to see this result

When asked to rate their energy on most days, 28.7% of breastfeeding mothers rated their energy as excellent or very good, compared to 19.4% of formula feeding mothers and 19.1% of women who combined methods.

Maybe breastfeeding is the way for new mothers to give themselves a break? Of course, one thing to notice is that even among the breastfeeding mothers only about 1 out of 4 reported having excellent or very good energy levels. Being a new mother is a tiring business…